The new treatment is base don logic, experience and commonsense. People who have overworked their eyesight, spontaneously close their eyes, pressing them together very firmly because they find it relieves them, and when their eyes are hot and dry, they splash them and when their eyes are hot and dry, they splash them with cold water.
The practitioner in Welbeck Street causes people to squeeze their eyes together so many times, and so many times to look up and down, right and left, rotate the eyes to the right and to the left, splash them with cold water, etc. Each exercise is to be done them with cold water, etc. Each exercise is to be done several times per day and only a few minutes are needed. I do my own exercises when taking out my dog night and morning.
To train the eye in the art of focusing, one looks at a distant object and then at something near by. One looks, alternatively, let us say, at a distant tree and at the knob of ones stick while in the open, or at the far-off knob of ones stick while in the open, or at the far-off corner of the room and at an object close at hand. The short-sighted are made to move the book away from the eye when reading and the far-sighted to move it nearer to the eye, and thus the eye is taught once more how to focus at different distances from the one permanently fixed by ones glasses.
People with stiff eye muscles and a stiff eyesight have usually also stiff necks and stiff spines. My practitioner prescribed for me suitable neck exercises and back neck and spine and high frequency treatment, with the result that back and neck got more supple and the general circulation about the head and eye was greatly improved. Possibly there exercise and manipulation act also on the nerves of vision.
There are various other exercise and a very important method of relaxation which are used and which are some what difficult to describe. Perhaps it would be a mistake to give all the details in this place because readers might be induced to try these methods on themselves. That would be very inadvisable and possibly dangerous. No two cases are alike. Individual treatment is called for and expert guidance is needed. Otherwise there may be dangerous results. Self-treatment or treatment by an incompetent practitioner might lead to the detachment of the retina and other serious consequences. I was of the retina and other serious consequences. I was warned of this my excellent oculist, Mr. Ernest Clarke.
James Ellis Barker wrote a very large number of books, both under the name James Ellis Barker and under his real German name Otto Julius Eltzbacher, The Truth about Homœopathy; Rough Notes on Remedies with William Murray; Chronic Constipation; The Story of My Eyes; Miracles Of Healing and How They are Done; Good Health and Happiness; New Lives for Old: How to Cure the Incurable; My Testament of Healing; Cancer, the Surgeon and the Researcher; Cancer, how it is Caused, how it Can be Prevented with a foreward by William Arbuthnot Lane; Cancer and the Black Man etc.