Are Eye Exercises a Scam?

🧠 The Bottom Line

Traditional eye exercises (Bates Method, Trataka, Chinese eye exercises) can reduce eye strain, but they cannot reverse presbyopia or fix refractive errors. The lens physically hardens with age — no exercise can change that. However, perceptual learning — training the brain's visual cortex with Gabor patches — is proven in clinical trials to improve near vision by enhancing how the brain processes visual information.