Foroward

For the last several years I have traveled across China with a dedicated contingent of my colleagues. Often these trips would involve several stops in different cities at key hospitals to large enthusiastic audiences of young eye care providers’ hungry to learn all they could about Ortho-K and myopia control. China and its people are a phenomenon that is hard to explain to my colleagues back home. Whether your waiting for a bullet train from Beijing to Hangzhou or conversing with fellow eye care practitioners over a meal there is no mistaking the immediacy and import of their feelings towards progressive myopia. It haunts their thoughts and actions in a country afflicted with an epidemic. Myopia in China spells alarm. Myopia in China energizes and organizes them to do something to help their adolescent population.

It’s always been easy for me since my early days to get motivated to practice preventative care when it came to myopia. I grew up in a generation of Optometrists that was the last to experience， at least for a short while， what we describe as low incidence levels of diabetes， obesity and myopia in our population. I will never forget the period of the early nineties when I first began seeing patients of Chinese ancestry. Prior to those patients I would almost never examine children with a myopia greater then two diopters. Suddenly I was seeing twice that degree in children who were not yet teenagers. In a short ten years that degree of myopia would often be found in eight year olds.

My experience as an Orthokeratologist before then was very limited. Ortho-K itself saw amazing growth in the nineties in technologies and science that supported it and would lead it forward. Suddenly with new and more demanding degrees of myopia to correct I had to educate myself and adapt my skills. Back then education opportunities for Ortho-K were almost the exclusive province of the National Eye Research Foundation (NERF) and Newton K Wesley. My efforts were ultimately rewarded with new techniques and design approaches and leadership as the President of the group. The rest as they say is history and the fact that its being made in China is fitting.

In modern contact lens practice today the single most exciting application is corneal reshaping. While other methods and styles of lenses may take up the bulk of contact lens practice only Ortho-K delivers consistently high scores on the satisfaction scale. It is quite evident that the ability to improve a patient’s unaided vision and their quality of life is highly valued. In fact Ortho-k seems especially poised for a great future in light of its ability to control progressive myopia in children. Yet in todays practice setting most eye care providers do not utilize it fully. The reasons to often given， in todays practice environment， for this lack are practitioner’s insufficient knowledge of the intricacies of corneal reshaping practice. That’s where a textbook such as this can be very valuable.

Many of the authors in this book are fellow travelers along the road with me. I would like to single out however Professors Peiying Xie and Fan Lu who have supported Ortho-K through the good as well as bad times. Without their support early on we could never have been in this place as an international organization to support and impact conditions here in China.