Reading around your blind spot

By Sharon Siddique

MDS President

Some 25 hardy MDS members braved last Saturday afternoon’s downpour to venture out to the Alexandra Hospital Seminar Room for a talk on Eccentric Viewing by optometrist Mr Yap Tiong Peng, of the IGARD group. And it was certainly worth getting wet for!

Tiong Peng explained that eccentric viewing (reading around your blind spot) cannot “improve” your eyesight. But for MD sufferers (our membership), learning the technique means that you can read at a faster rate, in smaller font, and with greater accuracy. Not to mention more efficient mastery of other difficult tasks, like driving, reading bus numbers, cooking and so on.

He offered us lots of tips on how to identify your blind spot and how to see around it through the “steady eye strategy”. To paraphrase his message. If you were given a tennis racket and a ball, you would not assume that you could immediately play tennis. Similarly, if “given” the eccentric viewing technique, practice is necessary to “see better”.

Unfortunately there is no place in Singapore that offers MD sufferers an opportunity to learn and practice this technique. Several members were keen on exploring the possibility of meeting up with Tiong Peng at a future date to explore the possibility of providing such training for MDS members.

I think most of us who attended are convinced that this could certainly be a useful exercise. Tiong Peng has offered to provide slides of this presentation to MDS members via our website so those who did not attend can get a better idea of what his presentation was all about. So please do let us know if you are interested in participating.