Has anyone tried the study of the iris for health benefits - not sure what it is!

Has anyone tried the study of the iris for health benefits - not sure what it is called.?

I am going for my first consult and wondering if anyone has tried this type of alternative medicine - does it work - what is your experience.

Iridology, also known as iridodiagnosis, is an alternative medicine psuedoscience which purports that patterns, colors, and other characteristics of the iris are can be examined to determine information about a patient's systemic health. Practitioners match their observations to iris charts which divide the iris into zones that they believe correspond to specific parts of the human body. They believe the eye acts as a "window" into the body's state of health. Iridology is a pseudoscience that is not recognized by medicinal professionals.

Iridologists believe they can highlight systems and organs in the body that are healthy and those which are described as overactive, inflamed, or distressed. These are thought by iridologists to point to a patient's susceptibility towards certain illnesses, to reflect past medical problems, or to predict health problems which may be developing.

Since iridology is not a method of treatment, its practitioners have often studied other branches of alternative medicine, such as naturopathy, and used the study of the iris as a diagnostic first step.

Iridologists generally use equipment such as a flashlight and magnifying glass, cameras or slit-lamp microscopes to examine a patient's irises for tissue changes, as well as features such as specific pigment patterns and "irregular stromal architecture". The markings and patterns are usually compared to an iris chart that attempts to correlate specific zones of the iris with specific parts of the body. Typical charts divide the iris into approximately 80-90 zones. For example, the zone corresponding to the kidney is often in the lower part of the iris just before 6 o'clock. However, iridologists use a number of different maps that do not necessarily agree with one another.

According to iridologists, details in the iris reflect changes in the tissues of the corresponding body organs. One well-known practitioner, Dr. Bernard Jensen, puts it this way: "Nerve fibers in the iris respond to changes in body tissues by manifesting a reflex physiology that corresponds to specific tissue changes and locations."[2] This means that a bodily condition will translate to a noticeable change in the appearance of the iris. For example, acute inflammatory, chronic inflammatory and catharral signs may indicate involvement, maintenance, or healing of corresponding distant tissues, respectively. Other features that iridologists look for are contraction rings and Klumpenzellen, which may indicate various other health conditions, as interpreted in context.





History
The first explicit description of iridological principles such as homolaterality (without using the word iridology) are found in Chiromatica Medica, a famous work published in 1665 and reprinted in 1670 and 1691 by Philippus Meyeus (Philip Meyen von Coburg).


Changes in color or appearance of the iris are said to indicate changes in the health of the corresponding section of the body.

The first use of the word Augendiagnostik ("eye diagnosis," loosely translated as iridology) began with Ignatz von Péczely, a 19th-century Hungarian physician. The most common story is that he got the idea for this diagnostic tool after seeing similar streaks in the eyes of a man he was treating for a broken leg and the eyes of an owl whose leg von Péczely had broken many years before. At the First International Iridological Congress, Ignaz von Péczely's nephew, August von Péczely, dismissed this myth as apocryphal, and maintained that such claims were irreproducible.

The German contribution in the field of natural healing is due to a minister Pastor Felke, who developed a form of homeopathy for treating specific illnesses and described new iris signs in the early 1900s. However, Pastor Felke was subject to long and bitter litigation. The Felke Institute in Gerlingen, Germany was established as a leading center of iridological research and training.

Iridology became better known in the United States in the 1950s, when Bernard Jensen, an American chiropractor, began giving classes in his own method. This is in direct relationship with P. Johannes Thiel, Eduard Lahn (who became an American under the name of Edward Lane) and J Haskell Kritzer. Jensen insisted on the importance of the body's exposure to toxins, and the use of natural foods as detoxifiers.

Few medical researchers managed to secure funding to study the possible non-visual functions of the eye. In a paper published in Medical Hypotheses (Waniek[3], 1987), one group tried to explain the observed patterns of iris transparency that distribute light into the ora serrata (the edge of the optic retina) by postulating a functio ocularis systemica (systemic eye function). Based on this hypothesis, the researchers developed an experimental trans-iridal light therapy method; however, no other confirmation of the theory and method exists to date. Other results from this research include early attempts at computerized iris imaging for the purpose of iridologic diagnosis.