intraocular pressure

I read this comment recently on FitEyes.com:

"When I was in the ophthalmologist's office my eye pressure was 30 mmHg, and when I was in my optometrist's office (who also happens to be a good friend and strongly believes in alternative, natural eye care), my eye pressure was 20 mmHg. The intraocular pressure readings were taken one day apart, at the same time in the morning."

I know several people in our self-tonometry research group who have had experiences very, very similar to this. I have seen it myself. Typically, this is due to stress. It is typically not, as skeptics like to immediately assume, due to errors in measurement or equipment.

Often, both patient and physician are very pleased if a combination of drugs and/or surgery reduce intraocular pressure by 10 mmHg. A change of this magnitude is highly significant.

My own experience, and the experience of many other people doing self-tonometry, is that our inner state (our thoughts and emotions) are capable of producing intraocular pressure changes in excess of 10 mmHg. In some ways this is a shocking finding because, A) in general, the field of ophthalmology does not recognize or admit that this is even possible -- that stress affects IOP, and B) the magnitude of the change is often similar to the changes produced by the most powerful treatments (drugs and surgery) available in allopathic medicine.

NOTE: This post was made in late 2006. The comments following it were made in early 2007. In the time that has passed since these initial intraocular pressure observations were made (see comments below), we have come to understand this situation much, much better. This thread is interesting for background information, but please see the more recent posts on FitEyes.com if you want to really understand the relationship between stress, breathing, meditation and eye pressure. I have been in contact with a number of people who have tonometers and who have replicated some of these observations, and the patterns continue to hold. Basically, this seems to apply to all glaucoma patients. However, there are individual differences, especially among meditators and non-meditators.

This abstract simply triggers a discussion in the comments below. All the interesting info is in the comments.