re Don & his eyes (cont.)

[nils at math.uio.no]

As all others here I am concerned and worried about our
friend Don's eyes, and am sending him my & my family's
best wishes and greetings.

I am also grateful to Dan Shane for translating & forwarding
descriptions & bulletins about what goes on. There is no
reason to turn this forum into a technical discussion group
for ophthalmology, but I do have a mild protest to make
regarding one of Dan's statements:

<<Don's vision has been suffering for many years, and the level of detail he
puts into his long stories most certainly contributed to it.  I have watched
him hovering closely over his work and was often reminded of the character
played by Donald Pleasence in THE GREAT ESCAPE.  He portrayed an excellent
forger who also lost his vision when the constant hours of highly detailed
paperwork aggravated his myopia to the point of blindness.>>

My understanding -- admittedly from an amateur point of view,
but apparently confirmed by a senior expert I contacted -- is
that "straining one's eyes", by hard work, or watching bad
television in a dark room, or composing the Art of the Fugue
and the Musical Offering in 1748 and 1749 during late nights
in a badly lit room (as Bach did, with his deteriorating eyesight),
does *not* worsen one's eyesight per se. One's eyes may experience
deteriorating quality from a variety of causes, including advancing
age for persons in some risk groups (e.g. myopics), but not from
merely using them, regardless of long hours over laborious
details. (I hope I'm translating my expert contact's professional
opinion correctly.)

I briefly saw something a couple of months ago, relating to
a story run by the New England Journal of Medicine or
some similar High-Up professional medical literature, about
*ten myths about our health*, or words to similar effect.
The jungle out there *is* a dangerous place, and we might
suffer even more than we think, from even more reasons,
etc. etc., BUT there are some things we think might be
dangerous and that are [touch wood] not dangerous
after all. I think one of the points was approximately what
I referred to: straining one's eyes, even for hours & hours,
does not affect eyesight quality per se.

Nils Lid Hjort