Second law of thermodynamics... energy tends toward disorder. Aging catches up with all of us. Yes, exercising does make a big difference, but your body is still going to get decrepit as you get older, no matter how much you exercise! Maybe you can keep parts of your body pretty fit, but there WILL be degenerative changes, even if you can take some steps to lessen them - regenerative abilities decreasing, reflexes not what they used to be, getting laxer skin, etc.

The reason I used the cane as an example was to illustrate that not all measures are necessarily only covering up symptoms - some are palliative, and provide a functional cure. Yes, maybe the guy with scoliosis could have prevented his back problems with whatever health regime, I don't know. What about the guy with polio in one leg. I don't know how much exercise will help. In his case, the cane is helpful. Perhaps you will say that there are herbal and exercise cures to any known disease state known to man. It seems idealistic to me. Is this your contention?

I don't know why you polarize everything to Western thinking vs. alternative. Is there an alternative cure to myasthenia gravis? Like I said before, I agree that obviously the pharmaceutical industry profits from people constantly using drugs to cure things that maybe could be treated another way, or for treating things that the drug doesn't treat. And this same industry does alienate and marginalize researchers that report problems with drugs. And alternative ways of thinking are always marginalized by definition when they are the minority. There is no need to futher elaborate on the fact that health care providers profit when you get sick. I agree that one ounce of prevention is worth one ton of treatment. I think the government does spend some money in prevention programs (e.g. kids wearing bicycle helmets, giving out fines for driving without a seatbelt, charges for driving drunk, and dare I say it? Ken Hayashi banning hard hitting- we should start a topic on this one). I think the medical education system is also supposed to be changing to advocate prevention, but how are they supposed to administer this? There are so many problems with this. First, bias from the old school system of medicine against prevention. Apathetic profs. Students and then doctors who don't care - human greed - they aren't getting paid to give advice. Greed isn't unique to doctors. And really, what patients would come to a doctor to get preventative advice. And like I said before, who listens to advice when you're not in pain and you feel healthy? Although there are elements in the whole health care complex that stand to benefit from you being sick, I don't think you can lump this together with medical knowledge and say everyone in the system just wants to see things through a filter that provides a drug cure only. Sure there are things that doctors don't accept that actually are valid. And there are things that doctors believe in that are crap. But are the only good researchers the ones that find alternative explanations? Are alternative explanations always correct? Who is the "medical community" anyways? I think the barriers of what you perceive as "western" vs "alternative" thinking are starting to be broken down and blurred. This is tedious and difficult to discuss because the whole points of arguments hinge on labels - i.e. who is the majority, what is medicine, who are doctors, what is accepted, what is not; what particular treatments are being discussed.

Getting back to Bates method. If I have a bacterial infection, personally I'm going to take antibiotics (Yes, these drugs have side effects and everyone taking antibiotics is going select hardy superbacteria, and who knows, maybe there is an alternative cure to bacterial infections, and yes the body does often have the ability to deal with infections on its own). The Bates method would be like me draining the pus out of an infected wound every day and saying that this 'exercise' is a cure.
Let's keep this discussion solely to the Bates method.
And we should define what this method is. As I understand it, it consists solely of palming your cornea through you closed lids in an attempt to reshape it. Do you concur?
It is not preventative, because it doesn't prevent a disease. You are momentarily flattening a cornea whose natural shape is otherwise, and by natural I mean the shape it will revert to within 24h. I don't think this is analogous to exercise. It is a functional cure, just like glasses. But it is identical to wearing a contact lens overnight that will do the same thing. Maybe the Bates method is cheaper, but then again, I'd want to compare the effectivity. I don't think there is anything wrong with using objective measures (e.g. reading an eye chart before palming, after palming, vs. after ortho K). Note I'm not even advocating ortho K over glasses as there is the associated risk of eye infections.

Again, I agree that exercises can be helpful in some cases, particularly the accomodative problems, and in some strabismus-related problems too. Exercise is good.
But, there are some anatomical assertions I make, and I think these particular anatomical assertions are pretty solid. The eye has been dissected and it can be studied in living humans pretty easily.
I assert that the refractive power of the eye is mostly due to the refractive power of the intraocular lens, whose power can change with the accomodation mechanism of the parasympathetic nervous system. It is also due to the cornea in a large, but lesser extent. The cornea cannot change its power in moments, like lens can. Pressure and hydration and disease states can affect the cornea's structure and composition and thus affect its refractive power. The shape of the cornea can be mapped very easily with a topographer. Do you disagree with any of these assertions?

My beef is with the Bates method alone, and not with other eye exercises or exercising or preventative and health maintenance measures in general.
Yes, the Bates method does change the way you see, in a limited number of cases. But it is momentary and does not produce a change of any permanence whatsoever.
Who benefits from the Bates method? People who are myopes (nearsighted), and specifically myopes whose myopia is due to their corneas being too steeply shaped and thus having a greater refractive power and focusing things in front of the cornea. By flattening out the cornea, it makes light focus in the right place. Astigmatics would also be helped, for the same reasons. The flattening would have to be in a precise prolate ellipse (or let's just say "spherical" shape for simplicity's sake) to claim that the Bates method did precisely what the glasses did. Many, if not most of North American and Asian individuals with a refractive problem are myopes with steep corneas. So perhaps this method will help many people. Now, on the con side... how accurate is this reshaping - that is, how close to 20/20 does it actually get you with the crude method of palming? How many hours does the effect last for? Are there any side effects of daily applying maybe significant pressure to your eyes? For example, there are some debatable assertions that keratoconus is associated with eye-rubbing.
The method will probably not work for myopes who are myopic due to long eyes, or due to too much power in their intraocular lens. It certainly will not work for hyperopes (far-sighted). Thus, the Bates method is not a universal way to throw your glasses away forever, and is arguably quite impractical.

I don't know if you are still advocating any other kinds of eye balancing exercises to get rid of astigmatism, but I've already set out the arguments of the extraocular muscles role in eye movement and balance vs. their ability to deform the eye and especially the cornea. I think these assertions are also pretty solid based on anatomical knowledge from dissection and surgery - we can see where the muscles are attached and see what actions they perform on the eyeball.