Medicine: Eye Braces?

Changing the cornea's curve

Back in the early 1960s, two Southern California optometrists named Stuart Grant and Charles May learned of a surprising effect in patients they had fitted with contact lenses. The patients had been given the lenses to correct myopia, or nearsightedness, a condition that usually gets worse rather than better. Yet some of these people, after wearing contacts for only a few months, found their vision without lenses had mysteriously improved. Recalls Grant: "Sometimes they would get halfway to work and realize that they were not even wearing their contacts."

Out of that chance discovery 17 years ago has emerged...

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