Credit: Veer

Eyeglasses can be quite the little fashion accessory, but wouldn't you rather have clear vision than sporty specs? You can, and without resorting to LASIK scalpels, despite what your business-minded ophthalmologist may tell you.

In the early 1900s, an astute eye doctor named William Horatio Bates realized he was regularly prescribing increasingly stronger lenses to patients whose eyesight never improved but, rather, grew increasingly worse. Sound familiar?

The pioneering doctor created the Bates Method, based on the view that, in many cases, glasses cover up the symptoms of a problem rather than address its cause. Bates believed that, like any set of muscles, eye muscles can become stiff or atrophied. Stress, unconscious mental or physical strain, and the habit-forming muscle tensions of early vision problems can all contribute to poor eyesight because they slow the flexibility of the eye muscles used in focusing.

Vision, according to the Bates Method, is a dynamic, reparable process, not something locked in a particular state of inefficiency. Whether we suffer from myopia, astigmatism, or nothing at all, we can train our own eyes to see better by continuously performing relaxation and fixation exercises. Vision improvement is a process of learning to see all over again by changing poor visual habits to those that support good vision.

One of the most basic Bates tactics is called palming, which requires the patient to gently cup her palms over her closed eyes in order to exclude as much light as possible. Then, she sits for five to fifteen minutes, breathing deeply and easily. This step can help tremendously with eyestrain -- and stress in general. Another exercise involves a simple eye-stretch exercise in which one gently focuses on items both near and far while continuing gentle breathing.

Such exercises may seem facile and their initial effects insignificant, but vision improvement is a gradual process, and every natural-vision instructor emphasizes that it's always important to use appropriately crafted lenses for safety-related situations such as driving. Over time, though, natural-vision techniques can have truly startling results, as tens of thousands of devotees will attest. Treat your eye like a student you are teaching to perform a task properly and you may find that, with a little discipline and a lot of practice, you could be liberated from your lenses forever.

Sara Bernard is a former staff writer and multimedia producer for Edutopia.