Positive Health Online

"To remove the human lens because it makes far more money than treating it is a crime against humanity"

"When there are alternatives, large numbers of surgical 'successes' can not justify small numbers of surgical failures"

When it comes to medical treatment, we generally regard surgery as a ‘last resort’.  So when it comes to cataracts, why should it be the ‘first and only resort’?  Most people think that cataracts are an inevitable part of getting old, and cataract surgery - a miracle of modern technology - is something they take for granted.

While it is true that today, sophisticated lasers and equipment have made it easy to destroy a cloudy lens and replace it with a plastic implant, what if the destruction of that lens was not necessary in the first place?  What if the miracle was not needed, and the public was being deliberately misled by clever deception and hypocrisy?

But that’s exactly the way it is with cataract surgery.  Alternative methods which restored the natural lens, rather than destroying it and replacing it with an artificial lens implant, had been developed by ‘maverick’ ophthalmologists since the 1920s.  Those methods would have allowed patients to keep their natural lens indefinitely.  Yet the eye profession, in stark denial of their responsibility, deliberately chose never to scientifically investigate any of them - and by so doing, cunningly contrived a situation where cataract patients are still forced to submit to surgery today.  Or else go blind. 

If you have a progressive cataract which is interfering with your vision and you visit your eye doctor, he will tell you that surgery is your only option, and there is “nothing else we can do” to recover your eyesight. If you decline surgery, he will disclaim all further responsibility to care for your eyes.  This is tantamount to surgical blackmail.   And what if - unknown to the patient - the lack of non-surgical options was due not to failed attempts at repair, but to not even trying to repair the lens and avoid surgery?

Diagram of the human eye showing the lower part of the right eye after a central and horizontal section. 
By Rhcastilhos - Schematic_diagram_of_the_human_eye_with_English_annotations.svg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1597930

The European Commission currently has a program known as “Catacure”, whose stated objective is to cure cataract by phototherapy, without surgery.  According to their website: “Cataract surgery is not without its risks. Visual loss is not uncommon”.  Indeed, visual loss can occur for several reasons following cataract surgery.  The eye is a very delicate organ, and there is a delicate balance between its 4 main components - the retina, the cornea, the lens and the vitreous.  A major disturbance to any one of those components, such as cataract surgery, can upset this delicate balance, requiring more surgery or drug interventions down the road.  And more interventions generally lead to poorer outcomes.  Despite reassurances by the eye profession that the operation carries very little risk and the outcome is almost always perfect (98%), the author has in fact met many people who lost vision following cataract surgery. Many patients who are permanently visually disabled by the surgery send frantic pleas for help to Internet forums, such as http://patient.info/forums/discuss/browse/cataract-386.   In this forum, 11 posts were pro-surgery including 9 patients who reported a positive outcome, and 44 from people facing future surgery who were scared.  But a staggering 133 patients reported worse vision post-op than pre-op, one so bad that she said "life is not worth living" and "I can't wait to die".   9/133 x 100 = 7%, not 98%.

Development of Visible Ray Light Treatment

In the 1920s, an ophthalmologist from Berlin University named William Luftig developed a sophisticated way of treating not just cataract, but every common eye disease non-surgically - cataract, glaucoma and even the dreaded retinal detachment.  He did this using coloured light beams directed at the closed eyes of patients sitting 1 meter or so away from large crystal glass reflectors, in a darkened room. Color combinations were strictly individualized and intended to promote proper circulation within the eye, or to reabsorb exudate. So successful was this method that he continued to practise it on thousands of patients in his clinic in Brighton for over three decades until his death in 1958.

Dr Luftig repeatedly tried to publish his case results in peer-reviewed journals of the time.  But, as he states in his book The Natural Treatment of Eye Diseases, the editors of those journals refused publication on the grounds that his methods were “unorthodox” and not taught  at University.  And so the world was kept ‘in the dark’ about light treatment.

In the 1970s, color ray therapy of the eyes was taken to a new level by a British ophthalmologist, Robert Brooks-Simpkins, who even built a device to administer it on the desktop (the “Fixoscope”), as described in his book, Visible Ray Therapy of the Eyes.  He too was ignored by mainstream ophthalmology.

Here, it should be noted that although visible ray therapy can reverse cataracts, it has recently been found that not only UV, but even visible light wavelengths, especially blue light, can damage retinal rods and cones, and the underlying retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), depending on the intensity and length of exposure.   It is very unfortunate that today, there is no-one left who is experienced in safely applying light treatment such as Dr Luftig or Robert Brooks-Simpkins. Also since a retinal detachment is a medical emergency, if patients experience a retinal detachment, they should rush to an ophthalmologist so it can be repaired by laser or surgically as soon as possible after it is discovered.  Any delay will result in permanent loss of vision.  And while this author deplores the refusal of the eye profession to accept its responsibility to restore the lens, he applauds them for routinely saving sight that would otherwise be lost to retinal detachment - although he would still prefer that even this were done non-surgically, as Dr Luftig apparently did. 

In conclusion, light therapy obviously has enormous therapeutic potential, but can carry significant risks. Thus, there is obviously an urgent need to determine exactly what treatment intensities and times are safe and effective.  

Nutritional Approaches to Restore Lens Transparency

Around the same time, another British ophthalmologist, Dr Stanley Evans, devised various nutritional programs to restore lens transparency.  He practised this method successfully in Africa and the UK for no less than 50 years, saving the sight of tens of thousands without surgery.  As with Dr Luftig and Robert Brooks-Simpkins, all his results were meticulously documented by slit-lamp examination of the retina, cornea and lens. Notwithstanding which, he too was ignored.  Dr Evans wrote many books such as Help for Cataract Sufferers - The Result of 46 Years Ophthalmic Nutritional Research into Cataract Control, which is out of print, and Prevention of Blindness in Britain: Proof That Ophthalmic Nutritional Therapy Works as Well in Britain as in Africa, and the Dangers of Orthodox Eye Treatment.  He died a few years ago.

His cataract reversal supplement protocols were individualized and elaborate, but usually included high doses of vitamin A.  Vitamin A is toxic in high doses when taken for long periods of time.  Although Dr Evans did not use such doses for more than 2 weeks, today we no longer have the benefit of his personal supervision, so patients would be advised to avoid high doses of vitamin A. 

No discussion of nutritional methods would be complete without the mention of Chinese herbal treatments, of which there are several basic ones going back thousands of years.  More recently, Chinese patents were granted for new herbal formulations.  In one of these, we read:

"Surgical treatment can only be palliative; cataract surgery may lead to a series of complications, and with high blood pressure, heart disease or other diseases, it is not easy to undergo surgery.  In addition, patients are mostly elderly, and cataract surgery gives them a great psychological burden".   

This patent describes a mixture of 22 herbs, a few of which are not available outside China.  It presents 2 case studies where vision "returned to normal" after taking 3-4 courses of the mixture, each course consisting of 1 dose/day for 20 days, and 1 case where visual acuity significantly improved after 3 courses, with no relapses.

Eye Drops for Cataracts

As for eye drops to cure cataract, attempts have been made by biochemists since the 1980s.　In this area, very remarkable achievements have been made.

One such eye drop, which was highly successful experimentally, was developed at Kitasato University by Sato Pharmaceuticals in Japan, and patented in 1992, but was then mysteriously dropped. Another, developed in Egypt and internationally patented around 1996, has actually been used to reverse cataract without surgery in Egypt and Saudi Arabia for the last 20 years, and is still used there.  Yet another, developed jointly by a British and a Russian biochemist, even went on sale at UK chemists' shops around 2000, but was pulled off the shelves after complaints by a large London eye hospital that “such a simple method as eye drops couldn’t possibly work”.  In fact, it is quite effective for cortical cataract and is now widely available on the Internet. Then there's the UK cataract surgeon who, in 2003, admitted that lutein eyedrops cured his own cataracts and saved his own sight, but then went on to do thousands more surgeries without telling his patients about that alternative.  Unfortunately, lutein eyedrops are no longer available. And as usual, the eye profession - the only body authorized to test and approve any method of treatment - chose not to investigate, again in stark denial of their responsibility, preferring to continue to rely solely on surgery all the time and expose patients to unnecessary risk. 

In the natural lens, there's a protein known as alpha-crystallin, which keeps the lens crystal clear throughout life.  If this alpha-crystallin loses its activity, a cataract forms and the lens loses its transparency, but most of the crystallin remains inside the lens.  The various biochemical eye drops so far ignored by the eye profession are able to re-activate this alpha-crystallin so that the lens becomes clear again and vision is restored. True, when a cataract is very advanced, it may be too late for eye drops to reverse it.  This underscores the need for every elderly person to use eye drops for short periods occasionally to prevent a cataract getting anywhere near the point where surgery would be required.  Probably, such a strategy would enable anyone to keep their lenses clear well into old age.  However it must also be remembered that a cataract serves as a block which prevents harmful UV light from reaching the retina. Once lens clarity is restored by eye drops, the onus is then on the patient to protect the whole eye by ensuring adequate nutritional status, by consuming antioxidants which quench free radicals, and avoiding direct exposure to UV rays.

It is the duty of any doctor to care for his patients - to “do no harm”. And we would have thought it’s the responsibility of eye doctors to care for the whole eye - the retina, the cornea, AND the lens. Not to summarily discharge themselves of their obligation by loudly remonstrating (as they do) that lens restoration is "not what we do".  Not to create a situation where, devoid of other options to repair the lens, cataract patients are forced to play Russian roulette with their eyes, and submit to an operation which should have been obsolete long ago, had the eye profession done its real job of restoring lens clarity.  An analogy: if a doctor could either learn to repair a broken leg, or amputate it and replace it by a wooden leg, which option should the doctor choose?  And what would the patient want?

Vitreous Gel Complaints

This denial of responsibility doesn’t stop with the lens.  It extends also to the vitreous gel behind the lens, whose decay causes the ‘floaters’ which are so annoying to many of us.  The lack of any way of treating floaters today, bar removal of the vitreous gel or fluid, stems from an incredibly misguided belief by the eye profession that the vitreous had no useful function in the human eye. Today, we know that before it degenerates, the vitreous supports the retina on the eye wall, preventing its detachment, and blocking transmission of oxygen from the retina to the lens, thus preventing cataracts. Not wanting to treat it, they got around the problem by saying that God should never have put the vitreous in the human eye in the first place. Eventually, faced with angry complaints from floater sufferers on the Internet, the eye profession finally conceded, in the year 2000, that the vitreous does have a vital role to play, and university textbooks for students were then rewritten accordingly.  Despite which, ophthalmology still scoffs at the idea that the vitreous needs to be treated to clear floaters, and to partially restore it to provide better retinal support without forming any new retinal attachments or adhesions.

Cataract Treatment Only Surgical

But a cataract is usually worse than floaters. It eventually interferes so much with vision that something has to be done about it.  Removing the lens because you don’t want to repair it is the first and easy way out.  To people who have lost vision, who are weak and vulnerable, and who know nothing about non-surgical cures discovered long ago, surgery seems like the only chance of restoring their eyesight. The patient thinks that the eye profession in whom we place our trust - like all responsible doctors - surely must have first tried all non-surgical methods, but surely must have failed.  No patient, even in his wildest dreams, could possibly imagine that successful methods of saving the natural lens practised by a few ophthalmologists for decades were never even explored by the mainstream, let alone published in peer-reviewed journals - not even once.  So the cataract surgeon doesn’t need to justify his monopoly to them.  At the same time, with cataract surgery, there’s easy money to be made, and you can ‘show off’ your latest equipment and surgical techniques to your academic colleagues, professors and the public at large. Better not let patients know that however good the optical properties of a plastic lens may be, it can never outperform the natural lens. So although visual results after cataract surgery are often very good, vision will never again be perfectly normal, even in those who 'succeed'.  And never mind the small number of surgical failures who are visually troubled after the operation, or even the few who lose their eye. Why care about them, when the majority more or less 'succeed', and you've got a 'cash cow' making big money.

Effective Eye Drops Work Only in Dogs

Surprisingly, ophthalmologists sometimes don’t try to hide the fact that their real motivation is not the patient’s best interests.  When asked why they never sponsored or even allowed any human trials of cataract reversal eye drops that had proven safe and effective in animal models, an eminent specialist who headed a top eye institute for 25 years openly admitted: “I could have developed anti-cataract eye drops for humans based on my long experience and knowledge, but my colleagues wouldn’t have let me ‘get away with it’ - after all, surgery is their ‘bread-and-butter’. So I was 'clever' - I developed eye drops that work only in dogs. You see, they don't care about dogs!"  The same individual is on the Board of Directors of a Foundation established in the 1980s with the stated goals of "encouraging the development of non-surgical treatment for cataracts", and "encouraging cataract research by recognizing outstanding researchers and their accomplishment".  It awards a plaque and an honorarium every year to "promising lens researchers who have conducted significant scientific work", as well as a much larger sum to give a biennial lecture.  The “Welcome” page also speaks of “members who have made lifelong commitments to this goal, and are researchers renowned for their numerous contributions to the field”. Yet the author has been unable to determine whether any of the members or the recipients of these awards listed on the Foundation's website ever made any contributions at all to furthering the cause of non-surgical treatment of human cataract.   Indeed, the website itself gives no physical address or phone number, only a PO Box, and the "Research Community", “Training/Employment”, "Research Breakthroughs" and even the “Current Scientific Background of Cataracts” pages of their website are, tellingly, all completely blank without a single line of text on any of them.  Still, that didn’t stop them from helping to organize an international conference “in a beautiful setting overlooking the Pacific Ocean at a resort & spa in the island paradise of Hawaii”, complete with palm trees, gorgeous swimming pools, cocktails, hotel banquets, Hawaiian feasts, Hawaiian dancing and golf tournaments.  Judging from the pictures of the conference setting on the website, it has to be one of the most sumptuous, exotic locations on the planet that you’ll ever see – unless, of course, you happen to have cataracts. And what happened at that 5-day conference?  Approximately 12 Sessions were devoted to lens biology, around 3 Sessions to issues surrounding surgery, and only 1 Session to non-surgical treatment (2 hours). How much longer will we continue to put our trust in people like this?

To be fair, although those eye drops that work only in dogs, and will soon be on sale, are named after a Japanese cataract researcher who never intended to help only dogs, the individual recently seems to have had a change of heart, and now says he intends to make a "modified version" that could be used to prevent cataract in human diabetics.  To his great credit.

Lanosterol Re-Activates Alpha-Crystallin and Melts Away Cataracts

In the latest efforts by biochemical researchers to finally put an end to this tragic and deceptive malpractice that has gone apparently unnoticed by the world's population, it was recently discovered that a sterol compound - lanosterol - re-activates alpha-crystallin and melts away cataracts, in about 6 weeks, and experimental results that prove it conclusively were published in June 2015.  Its drawback is that although it is naturally found in the human lens, it is soluble only in alcohol, not in water, so it is difficult to re-supply it in the form of eye drops.  Although in the end it may prove best to use lanosterol in combination with other anti-cataract agents, it is still undoubtedly the most powerful one discovered so far. Other successful experiments with chemically related sterols that are slightly soluble in water were published in November 2015, although their retinal safety has not yet been confirmed.  Companies have been set up to develop these agents, but according to one source, it might take "5-10 years". Judging from what happened to all the other effective eye drops that the eye profession refused to test, some of which are still used in other countries, some now forgotten and doomed to posterity, these new compounds could also suffer the exact same fate.

As patients and human beings, we must be vigilant and make sure that this time, the fruits of these efforts are not sabotaged as they appear to have been in the past.  That this time, clinical trials will take place, and very soon - hopefully monitored by an unbiased, independent third party.  As we said before, the core responsibility of the eye profession was and still is to save the whole eye including the lens.  And in deliberately not doing so although they had various other means available to them, just to further their own ends, they should be held accountable.  It is said that in the world today, 20 million people are blind, and another 60 million are visually impaired, due to cataracts. These numbers are rising by the millions every year.  Most of these people live in areas where there are no skilled surgeons or hygienic equipment and conditions.  The selfish decision of the eye profession to remain ignorant of past and present safer, non-surgical solutions offered by innovative ophthalmologists and scientists, is effectively keeping these people blind. Until the eye profession acknowledges its responsibility and culpability, and publicly apologizes for attempting to tell the entire world that cataract surgery was, still is and always will be the only option, we cannot and shall not, in all good faith and conscience, put down the torch.  The bell is finally tolling to put an end to sole reliance on a surgery which, in the vast majority of cases, should never have been necessary.  Let it ring out loud, and proud.   And let the eye profession, by now choosing to steer a better course to proactively repair the lens and vitreous, and care for the eye in its whole integrity, earn the respect, admiration, trust and gratitude of all the world's peoples without reservation.

Call for Anti Cataract-Surgery Action Groups

• To all cataract sufferers around the world!
• Set up an Anti Cataract-Surgery Action Group in your country, state, city or neighborhood.
• Some sterols can cure cataract with no need of surgery, and in a short time frame.  But don't heed talk of "5-10 years".   
• Lobby your governments.  Contact your local eye professionals. Demand they waste no more precious time in perfecting safe and effective sterol eye drops, and other patented anticataract eye drops, for human use now.

Extracts from Internet Cataract Surgery Patient Forum

http://patient.info/forums/discuss/browse/cataract-386

From the 11 pro-surgery posts:

"Yes, all eye surgery entails some risk including blindness, but statistics show most people, 98%, do very well" (Cataract surgeon).

"Cataract surgery is generally 97% successful.  Fortunately the risk of death is extremely remote and much less than one in 1000. Surgery can never be 100% successful because of possible complications. In order to see more clearly, you should have the surgery".  (Same cataract surgeon)

"Don't worry, you often find people with the negative attitude haven't actually had to have cataracts removed. Talk to the people in the hospital, they will help to reassure you".  (Forum moderator)

"There is no medication to treat cataract.  Cataract surgery is a simple procedure. This leaflet explains everything for you. I hope it helps. Good luck".  (Forum moderator)

"I have to say there is nothing to be concerned about these operations". (Successful patient)

"A tiny minority of patients have trouble". (Successful patient)

From the 133 'negative' posts (including patients complaining of blurred vision, double vision,  ghosting, floaters, retinal detachment, loss of vision, etc.)

"There are a high percentage of cataract surgeries that have complications".  (Large London eye hospital)

"3% chance you go to Heaven". (Chinese receptionist at eye surgeon's clinic)

"My life has been ruined by the operation". (Failed patient)

"As I can't see much change happening in the medical field, we clearly have to help ourselves and help each other". (Failed patient)

"All he sees are waves of water. When I am driving he is holding on for his life, and he also sees people that are not there".

(Wife of cataract patient, describing her husband's daily terror).

"I went home and left vision is gone, while right vision is limited. Walking is not straight, crashing into and hitting shopping mall wall". (Failed patient)

"I'm the sorriest person that I had cataract (surgery)". (Failed patient)

"The doctor tells me my eyesight is perfect but I have an obstacle in the way. I asked him if he could take care of his patients with this feeling in his eye. No comment from him.  He gives no satisfaction". (Failed patient)

"Be careful about naming the doctor publicly, or you could be in legal trouble". (Advice to failed patient)

"I did ask for legal help, and was told I'd signed the consent form which clearly states that there is an ??% chance of blindness (can't remember seeing that bit!)".  (Failed patient)

" I have the feeling I have a screwed up contact lens in my eye. Like you, I was given the strong hope I could likely 'throw away my glasses'. Have been told the installation of the lens was perfect... fed up with trying to 'see' more doctors".

"The most galling thing was them telling me what I could see... they even accused me of becoming aggressive.  Luckily, I had recorded the consultation".  (Failed patient)

"More importantly, both surgeon and solicitor were members of the same lodge. Moral: Get a solicitor from a town many miles away". (Failed patient)

"Life is not worth living.  I can't wait to die". (Failed patient)