tsingle999:
... i am not really concerned with my daytime pressures right now. i beleive all the damage is happening at night and i cant measure that pressure anyway. i mean when my highest ever (with meds) pressure during the day is 21 and im sure it is a lot higher when i sleep it makes more sense that the damage wll be happeneing during sleep when my bp is also lower. so for me right now the self tonometry isnt as critical as paying for acupuncture and other therapies to help improve my health.
I feel a rant coming on ;)
My main interest is also night time intraocular pressure. I find self-tonometry to be very helpful for this. For example, about two hours before I woke up and got up, I briefly woke up and checked my eye pressure while still lying down. This time of day (early morning hours from maybe 3am to 6am for most people) is when the highest IOP of the 24 hour cycle can occur (as a very general rule). A while back my intraocular pressure at this time of day (in the horizontal position) was most frequently in the high 20's - or even the 30's. Today it was 17 and 18 mmHg.
There is no way I could have achieved the progress I have in these last 6 to 9 months without doing extensive self-tonometry.
I have a lot of opinions about medicine, alternative medicine, exercise, nutrition, acupuncture, vitamin supplements and other stuff. But my experience has proven to me that those opinions -- even though they are based on formal study of medical sciences and decades of experience -- matter very little in comparison to the power of self-tonometry for managing intraocular pressure.
People often ask me what is the #1 thing I can recommend for improving our own management of intraocular pressure. You probably see me mention stress management, exercise, good lifestyle and a bunch of other stuff. But none of those things really have much power to affect the long term management of IOP unless one performs high frequency self-tonometry. Therefore, self-tonometry is the #1 thing I can confidently recommend.
I'll give a couple examples. Acupuncture is reported (in the scientific literature) to reduce IOP. However, I have had acupuncture by several different acupuncture physicians and I have not experienced any IOP reduction. It may be that I haven't found the right physician or it may be something else. But without self-tonometry, I might continue on with something that wasn't working for me. With self-tonometry, I have the option of experimenting by changing physicians or even engaging my physician in the process and letting him adjust the meridians or systems he targets with the acupuncture.
This is probably not much different from your comment about the difference you have found when you eat high brix foods. As you say, some organic foods can be worse than conventional foods according to your measurements. If you don't measure, you are in the dark. And you tend to waste money, time and effort. The key to making progress in any field is to perform keen observations and quantitative measurements are a key part of that.
As other people have noted, intraocular pressure can change so fast that the expectations we have in our mind radically alter our IOP as we walk in to the doctor's office. That is one thing we have proven here on FitEyes.com. For at least some glaucoma patients, there is a white coat ocular hypertension syndrome. So, an infrequent intraocular pressure measurement once every few weeks or months in a doctor's office is worth very little in terms of making real progress in managing your eye pressure.
And I know from experience that using a vintage tonometer such as the old American Optical units sold on eBay (or using a ProView) is not true self-tonometry. You cannot really obtain good IOP values frequently enough with those old vintage tonometers to learn from them. Are you even able to do self-tonometry? That is, can you obtain your own measurement with a vintage tonometer? I suspect you may be doing home tonometry, where an assistant has to be available to measure your IOP. Furthermore, you have to hold your eye very still and the assistant has to has a good amount of skill in order to obtain a valid measurement. This approach is not adequate -- you will have a difficult or impossible task to make the kind of progress we would like to make in managing our IOP using an approach like that.
My second example relates to meditation. I think meditation holds some very, very powerful keys to managing intraocular pressure. However, meditation can dramatically raise IOP during and immediately after the practice. In order for me to really understand how meditation affects IOP I had to have access to very good professional tonometers that I could easily use at any moment during meditation. Our state of consciousness is something we can observe "objectively" from the inside (a "subjective" or "self-referral" research process that can be carried out with rigor and repeatability). Not even fMRI, EEG, HRV, and other physiological parameters can fully capture the internal state of consciousness in all its richness. Therefore, with current technology, we have to be able to pull the trigger on the tonometer at the precise moment we are experiencing a certain state of consciousness. Only when we can do that can we conduct accurate objective self-referral research into some of the most powerful things that affect intraocular pressure. And, in my experience, managing one's state of consciousness will do more for improving your night time IOP than all the acupuncture and other externally-applied therapies you can do in a lifetime will.
The only "external" therapies that might rival this process are energy psychology techniques or energy medicine techniques that produce a shift in one's internal emotional state and in one's state of consciousness. But if you go that route without self-tonometry, you will be pioneering your own path. There is nothing wrong with pioneering, but it does involve risk and I would certainly not want to undertake anything that could affect my IOP without being able to check my intraocular pressure frequently.
As I said, I have gotten powerful benefits from consciousness-altering mental techniques such as Serene Impulse, but I also know that very similar mental techniques such as Transcendental Meditation, Kriya Meditation and others have, at times, dramatically increased my IOP. So I come back to the importance of self-tonometry. (EDIT: as I have learned more, I now understand that Serene Impulse is not at all like these -- or any other -- techniques. We have tested several of them in the lab now, using physiological monitoring, and Serene Impulse is in a class of its own. It is called a mind-body skill by the Serene Impulse organization, so technically it is not meditation. The tests I've done sure show that it behaves almost the opposite as meditation in terms of intraocular pressure. Serene Impulse reliably reduces my IOP.)
Because, as far as I know, no one on this planet can give you exact directions for managing your IOP without drugs or surgery, all of us interested in doing this are pioneers. I do no believe there is any safe and reliable way to gain the knowledge and skills we seek without doing frequent self-tonometry (with good instruments).
Please don't take this rant personally, tsingle999. If you are doing things to improve your overall health, you are on the right track and your efforts are to be commended. Not everyone can do self-tonometry right now. However, I hope the day is not far off when many more people can do it. I really do believe self-tonometry is going to revolutionize glaucoma care the way nothing else can in the next few decades.
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