20 years ago I was injured in one eye. Without an operation it would have left me going slowly blind. The operation was invented maybe 20 years earlier.
Both my eyes had a cataract at a quite early age. Artificial lenses where invented AFAIK 50 years ago. The new lenses even correct my shortsightedness and astigmatism!
So if I had lived only 50 years earlier I would be blind on one eye and quite possibly without a lense or at least seeing really foggy on the other. Now I am sitting here with - 0.5/-1 and otherwise great eye sight.
There are no words how grateful I am for the wonders of modern eye medicine.
I’m so glad you have your vision!
The first successful organ transplant was in 1954.
Transplants weren’t often super successful until the development of Cyclosporine in 1982.
Similar thing happened to my dad. He was slowly going blind from cataracts, like he couldn’t even make out the dinner table in front of him. He just wasn’t mentioning it until it became untenable.
Then we found out there’s a free surgery to fix it, and now suddenly he’s got clear 20/20 vision at almost 80! He’s got better vision than I do lol
I think similarly whenever my airways casually close up.
Waking up when the weather changes:
You’re nostrils do that as you sleep to keep the one closest to the bed/ground closed. Since people roll from side to side over the course of a night your nostrils swap which one’s closed
Everyone’s talking blocked sinuses but I took your comment to mean asthma.
While every other cave person is running down a mammoth my asthmatic ass would be dying because of pollen or dust.
Mine is also triggered by animal dander so the mammoth could probably kill me by literally just standing next to me.
I assumed sleep apnea. CPAP users of today are the past’s “dang he died mysteriously in his sleep, oh well!”
As a CPAP user; when I don’t use it I relate to ‘dying in my sleep’ way too much.
imagine being an absolute beta and not mouthbreathing
Personally, I tend to use my mouth to inhale other things.
spoiler
It’s - it’s dick. This is a sex joke.
Just use one of your nostrils for that.
optimize: use all three
Middle-out compression
Look up how to clear / flush / drain your sinuses. I do it from time to time and it works wonder for multiple days
That won’t help with asthma sadly :(
I don’t know what you already do and what your insurance would cover but here’s a list of things that helped me tremendously:
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I have two different inhalers. One for attacks and one prophylactic. Since I use the second one daily I haven’t had an attack in 10+ years.
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Have an asthma diary. Measure your breath a few times a week and take notes. After a while you will recognize patterns days ahead when the chances for an attack might be higher. Medicate accordingly! I up the dosage for the prophylactic inhaler slightly when I see changes (e.g. during allergy season).
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Breath out! That one sounds stupid, I know. Paraxoically the major problem with asthma often is breathing out, not in. So there are breathing exercises where you learn to focus on breathing out to make way for easier breathing in. It can be as simple as counting to 5 while breathing in and counting to 8 while breathing out with a 2 seconds break before again breathing in. Adjust the numbers for you. It calms your breathing and can even help with an attack (though I would still use an inhaler then).
I also have my lungs screened every two years. Ever since I follow the above list my measurements get better over time even though I am slowly past the “it will heal by itself” age.
Where I am from all the above steps are covered by insurance. I know for example in the US inhalers can be obscenely expensive so step 1 might be a problem. But steps 2+3 are low cost and are still very beneficial. So I hope you can find something in the list that eases your burden.
Insurance isn’t something I need to worry about. I have a prophylactic that I use in preparation for if I’m gonna stay somewhere with a dog etc.
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I apparently threw my glasses across the room in my sleep last night. Spent a solid 5 minutes going full on Velma mode looking for them.
Do you wear your glasses in bed??
No, I frankly don’t have the slightest clue how I did it.
That makes this so much funnier
How else are you gonna see in your dream?
Funnily enough, taking my glasses off in a dream and still being able to see is how I’ve realized I was I a dream a couple times. Unfortunately I immediately get way too excited at the prospect and immediately wake up every time haha
Sleepwalking is correlated with stress levels. I’ve sleepwalked a few times in my life; some I half-remember, but most not at all, I only know if I find out from someone else like family/friends/partners.
When I was a teenager, I had a wall scroll that hung above the head of my bed. One morning, I found it piled on the floor next to my bed. It could have been one of my family, but they all denied it and there’s no motivation anyway. I had to conclude that I did it in my sleep, but it’s stuck with me because I’ve always found it extremely disturbing that I’m up and about while I’m completely (or nearly completely) unconscious. I’ve lived in a few skyscrapers with windows and balcony doors that opened more than enough for me to jump, and the idea that I’ll wake up halfway down scares the everfucking bejeezus out of me.
Ha, thats why I keep an old pair in the nightstand.
u can use your phone’s cam
I make use of that trick a lot, unfortunately it wasn’t a ton of help this time.
Natural selection hasn’t really applied to humans for thousands of years. We beat nature when we created civilizations. Which is partly why some of these less than ideal genetic traits go unchecked now in the population.
Evolution and natural selection never stops, we’ve only changed what the selective pressures are.
True. I was thinking of the selective pressures of nature, but there are absolutely still self imposed selective forces acting on our species.
And even those self-imposed selective forces are ever-changing and vary quite wildly from context to context across the globe and across the socioeconomic spectrum. Modern human evolution is really fascinating.
Fascinating but terrifying to think that natural selection is probably now pushing humans to be good little office drones rather than survivors
That’s only true if people that work in offices reproduce at a higher rate than the general population, and I’m not entirely sure that’s the case. If anything, societal trends have shown that in more developed countries where office work would be more common people are having fewer kids and populations are starting to decline.
I know how you mean it, but I would still consider civilisation part of nature. Like an anthill is part of nature even if it was “invented” by ants, etc
It doesn’t have to do with civilisation, but with group compassion. In fact, civilizations tend to care less if somebody starves to death on the streets because their eyes are not performing well enough to earn money…
That’s really not true at all though. Look up “Food Pantries in my area” and see how many places offer food in your area. The blind man would qualify for lifetime disability checks. Food stamps are a thing, charities and churches do this kind of work as well. My city has an emergency rent program and there are, of course, homeless shelters and soup kitchens as well. It’s really that society’s mechanism for meeting the needs of the hungry are part voluntary (charity) and part automatic with entitlements (not a bad word!) and sometimes people fall through the cracks.
This is why getting people connected to resources is such a big deal.
I can’t imagine having to live with my natural sight 24/7.
I definitely would not be driving. Probably not walking much either, might not see the bus coming.
its not like they had cars to drive before glasses were a thing
Just a lot of dangerous animals. And dangerous humans. No cars though.
Imagine being in a jungle. Just a blur of greens.
It’s that a snake or grass? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I was more imagining the current world, but corrective lenses were never invented.
on the bright side we would probably have much better public transit
On the other hand, without the invention of lenses we wouldn’t have most of our science and technology. No microscope, no telescope, no microchips, no precision engineering. So many things today are possible only because we could enhance our shitty vision with lenses
If you had lived at an earlier point, there’s a good chance your eyesight would have been better. Not just because of natural selection for genes or whatever. The modern spread of nearsightedness is primarily attributed to greater time spent indoors, looking at things close to you like books, and particularly during childhood. It is largely nurture instead of nature.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220927-can-you-prevent-short-sightedness-in-kids
Remember, your only job as far as natural selection is concerned is to have offspring and have them survive long enough to repeat the cycle. Old people with bad eyesight just have to be able to keep the kids and grandkids alive.
Bad eyesight could have a positive effect on generating offspring because you can’t tell how ugly your partner is. Or that about 30% of the time you aren’t having sex with your partner but someone else with poor eyesight instead.
You’d be having sex with a sneaky fucker
Don’t even need to be old. Don’t need to be able to see that good to know the red blotch that smells like the good berries is probably the good berries, and the antelopeish splotch might be a good thing to poke with your pointy stick of choice.
you know whats even weirder? Some dude somewhere realized that lenses were a thing, and realized that your eyes were also just a glorified lense. And that theoretically you could just put a lense over a lense to fix the bad lensing of the lense. And it fucking worked.
Natural selection my ass.
Legend has it that it started with an old drunk man that decided to hold beer bottles to his eyes.
i dont know about that one to be honest.
Would be pretty funny though.
The “traditional” story (the one that “seems most likely” because we don’t really know) is that some kids were playing with discarded warped glass at a glassmaker’s shop and ended up with a magnifying glass or rudimentary telescope. Enter the simultaneous invention of the telescope in multiple places (very likely it wasn’t any one person in particular), Galileo starts using it for scientific stuff, now they’re making lenses on purpose. Old nearsighted lensemaker looks through it, maybe some charts or a book on the table, all of a sudden they can see well. Attach to frame. Glasses.
this seems much more likely, i like this one.
Some species members care for each other. Humans obviously (some anyways), even lions I think have been known to provide food when another has broken teeth or something.
I remember maybe a decade or more ago some enterprising gent made a glasses design with some kind of resin in the lens, so the wearer could adjust the lens thickness to fit their needs. Nobody would back his invention so he created a non-profit to fund these glasses for the developing world. I’d love to know what happened to it because its still something I care about supporting.
Wow, that is a very cool concept. I, too, would like to back this.
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I like to tell my Republican father we’d both be classified legally blind and on the welfare he hates so much if optometry wasn’t around. Helps put it in perspective for him how some people just “lose” the life lotto and need help to live in the same world as able-bodied folks.
That and a bunch of reasons
but mostly the bunch of reasons
Pretty funny! But the reason so many people need glasses is because we spend all our time indoors, reading. People in the past were outside working all the time and they didn’t need glasses as a result.
I was born with bad eyes. People back then also were born with bad eyes but couldn’t do anything about it.
Obviously you can also get bad eyes (shortsighted) when always only focusing on short distances but it’s not the only way. Most people also become far sighted when they get older (the pressure inside your eye lowers and therefore your eye becomes shorter)
Focusing close regularly doesn’t make you short sighted, not getting enough tourquoise light on your retina from staying inside makes your eye keep getting longer instead of stopping when the focal point is correct. Well, that and genetics.
And losing the ability to see near as you age has nothong to do with pressure. Your lens is constantly adding new layers to itself to stay clear, and after 40 it’s become so thick the muscles that pull it to accommodate near vision can’t stretch it enough. By 58 it doesn’t stretch at all any more. That’s why everyone eventually needs bifocals/progressives.
Don’t state things as fact if your not sure of them.
Source: ABOA, NCLE, OD, I own two optical practices.
My biggest pet peeve in internet is people who state something as a fact eve though they are just really confidently wrong
My industry is full of pseudoscience and liars. I can’t fault them for not knowing, and probably came off as more harsh than i intended.
I correct patients all day, and got pretty burned in the long long ago on reddit by people who “know better” patting themselves on the back and getting my factual information downvoted to oblivion.
I feel you. The internet experts are always to confident with information they have literally never fact checked. It’s just based on something they head and assumptions.
Of course everyone falls on that sometimes because we can’t possibly filter every single piece of information we get.
But some people start arguing back when they are corrected instead of just going to read about the subject to see which one is true and that is just so dumb
Is that true? I feel like it simply wasn’t an option, so people didn’t get them.
My understanding is that being nearsighted is a relatively new phenomenon that is largely due to being indoors a lot. Farsightedness in old age has been around since humans have been humans.
I took a quick look and Wikipedia partially bears this out re: nearsightedness.
I think its a bit of both.
Personally, I apparently focus (that’s what it’s called, right? Non native speaker here) slightly behind infinity, so I’ll have to put a slight amount of effort into seeing clouds clearly. I can also focus on close objects, but if I read a book for about 5-60 minutes without my glasses I’ll suffer a splitting headache, depending on how much time I’ve used inside recently.
I’ve found that I can do office work just fine using glasses, but after a few months I’ll need to get stronger glasses as my eyes become worse. This resets if I spend a few days outside avoiding computers, books, and my glasses entirely.
I can usually watch TV just fine without glasses, but if I’ve been doing office work or just been mostly inside for about 2-3 months I’ll need my computer glasses (tuned to focus at around 50-100cm) to watch the TV (located about 3 meters away). At this point, I usually also have to use my reading glasses for the computer, and I’ve got a special pair of glasses that I can use for reading in that specific case. I even start having problems driving longer routes.
In other words, I have
reallyrather (I can still most tasks, just with a headache) bad eyesight during winter and spring, but usually have much better eyesight and barely need glasses during summer and fall.There is some truth to it, but there’s also just the fact that some people’s eyes are bad enough that they need glasses to fully function in modern society, but not so bad that they couldn’t survive in the wild without them.
Me for example. I need glasses to drive, I can’t read street signs otherwise, and I need them at work, but I otherwise usually don’t wear them. The only thing better eyesight would meaningfully help me with in the wild is navigation and spotting hidden animals quicker, and even then it’d really only help with snakes. Any other ambush predator I’d be likely to encounter in my region is big enough that spotting it a few seconds sooner wouldn’t really help.
OP is right, nearsightedness has been attributed to “not being outside enough” while your eyes still develop (aside from genetics of course), something to do with not getting bright enough sunlight for multiple hours as you are supposed to.
There are a few ways to have bad eyesight
- Short sighted, can only focus close up
- Long sighted, cannot focus close up
- Poor acuity, cannot see the detail others can see
- Colour blindness
It looks like most of the short sightedness is caused by lifestyle since it is much more prevalent in places where children spend a lot of time indoors
The others would have affected our ancestors as much as us
Yeah, I always get a warning message from zenni when I order glasses. It thinks my script is wrong cause it’s such a weird one.
I know I’m half blind! Don’t make me feel bad about it too!
God made you that way, and she doesn’t make mistakes. Think about it.
Hail Satan
He seems to have left a test foreskin on the deployment build.
That’s tamper resistant packaging. You’re supposed to remove that before use.
I’ve always found it curious that a religion that hated women so much would make a ritual out of a genital mutilation that makes men last longer.
I’m assuming that’s a side effect. Looking it up it seems to have started because the people of the time believed it reduced transmission of STDs and that it lessens the urge to masturbate.
I’ve always found it curious that a religion that hated women so much would make a ritual out of a genital mutilation that makes men
last longer.enjoy sex less.
God doesn’t exist.
Then who will I blame for all of life’s problems?
As someone with bad sight, all my other senses are tingling. So, while blind people might’ve been unable to hunt, they would have made great night guards, which is a boon for social groups wary of nocturnal predators.
