People all over the world are trying to get rid of eyeglasses naturally. There are many success stories about the subject on the internet. You can also buy books, where you can learn about the methods to get better eyesight naturally. Most of these books are based on the Bates method. William H Bates developed his method in early 19th century. This method is not well known in Finland and it is very hard to find any resent research about this subject. This is why we wanted to do our thesis about it.

Our purpose was to examine if it is possible to get better eyesight naturally and could these exer-cises change or heal refractive errors. We wanted to get more knowledge about the subject and hear about people’s experiences.

We used quantitative method and our research was intervention study. We had 12 volunteers who did different exercises for two weeks. They all had different kind of refractive errors and we gave them instructions to do the exercises based on their refractive error. We tested their eyesight before and after the exercises and then we compare the results. We also did a little survey about how they felt after the exercises and did they notice any difference in their eyesight.

Based on the results that we get from our study we could say that it is not possible to get rid of eyeglasses naturally. Changes in visual acuity and refractive errors are too small that they would influence eyeglass wearing. But these findings are not very reliable because our study group is too small.

The exercises seem to have most effective on presbyopia and astigmatism so it could be some-thing to study further more. There could be a bigger group and more time to do the exercises and the exercises could be more intense.