Anti Barbie; Pro You Health Blog

People who succeed with palming from the beginning are to be congratulated, for they are always relieved very quickly. A very remarkable case of this kind was that of a man nearly seventy years of age with compound hypermetropic astigmatism and presbyopia, complicated by incipient cataract, possibly brought on by cheap contact lenses. For more than forty years he had worn discount contact lenses to improve his distant vision, and for twenty years he had worn them for reading and desk work. Because of the cloudiness of the lens of his eye he had become unable to see well enough to do his work even with contact lenses, and the other physicians whom he had consulted had given him no hope of relief except by operation when the cataract was ripe. When he found palming helped him, he asked:

‘Can I do that too much?’

‘No,’ he was told. ‘Palming is simply a means of resting your eyes, and you cannot rest them too much.’

A few days later he returned and said:

‘Doctor, it was tedious, very tedious, but I did it.’

‘What was tedious?’ I asked.

‘Palming,’ he replied. ‘I did it continuously for twenty hours.’

‘But you couldn’t have kept it up for twenty hours continuously,’ I said incredulously. ‘You must have stopped to eat.’

Then he told me that from four o’clock in the morning until twelve at night he had eaten nothing, only drinking large quantities of water, and had devoted practically all of the time to palming. It must have been tedious, as he said, but it was also worth while. When he looked at the test card, without glasses, he read the bottom line at twenty feet. He also read fine print at six inches and at twenty. The cloudiness of the lens had become much better, and in the centre it had entirely disappeared. Two years later there had been no relapse.

Although the majority of persons are helped by palming, a minority are unable to see black and only increase their strain by trying to get relaxation in this way. In most cases it is possible, by using some or all of the various methods outlined in this article, to enable a person to palm successfully; but if much difficulty is experienced, it is usually better and more expeditious to drop the method until the sight has been improved by other means. The person may then become able to see black when he palms, but some never succeed in doing it until their sight has been improved.