My ophthalmologist recommended it, so I took it. That is the whole of my reasoning and I suspect it is the whole of most people's. He said the formula was the one used in the big trial, that the evidence was for slowing progression rather than improving anything, and that I should stay on it.
For about eighteen months it was fine. Then it was nausea most mornings, then indigestion that would not settle, and then a stretch where I felt genuinely unwell for weeks at a time without connecting it to a capsule I had been swallowing since 2023.
I stopped in the February. Within ten days the stomach settled. I did not tell him for nearly a year, because I felt like someone who had failed at the one thing she had been asked to do.
Then I read the reviews properly, which I should have done first. There are thousands of people describing this. Nausea, indigestion, constipation. People who lasted eight days. One man on a patient forum who ended up in the hospital. A woman who said she stopped and the illness episodes stopped with it.
“I was not the exception. I was the pattern, and nobody had mentioned the pattern to me.”
What the reviews actually say about whether it works
This is the part that changed my mind about the whole category, and it is hiding in plain sight.
Read a hundred reviews and count how many say they can see better. Almost none. What they say, over and over, is it has not got worse. Ten years on it, no progression. My doctor recommended them so I take them, and who knows.
That is not a complaint. It is exactly what the formula was tested to do. But it means the entire category is sold on a promise of holding ground, and anyone expecting to notice something is going to conclude it does nothing and stop.
