The iris is the only living tissue always visible naturally, with open eyes.

Iridology is a controversial method attempting to diagnose conditions of an individual's health by examining the irides of the eyes. Its practitioners maintain that locations in the iris charts somehow correspond to distant locations in the body and accurately indicate their particular state of health well in advance of other signs and symptoms. They also interprete the iris stromal phenomena in context and never apply a grid over an iris image just to read some rigid tags there. Philippus Meyeus (Philip Meyen von Coburg) is currently the first European author known to have revived this ancient field in Chiromatica Medica, a work published in 1665 and reprinted in 1670 and 1691.

Iridology is considered pseudoscience, by mainstream medicine. Rayid Iris Interpretation is yet another form of iridology focusing on even more disputable views on constitutional signs and even "representational" psychology. Ophthalmology, by virtue of some recent interdisciplinary knowledgeable bridges, attempted to federate all kinds of study of the iris. Accordingly, iridology-like approaches were grouped there under the umbrella term trans-iridial studies. This was opposed to biometrical approaches which only address the cis-iridial knowledgeable field, complete with obvious disadvantages. So far several clinical studies have shown that two or more practitioners examining the same patient rarely produced the same diagnosis. Iridologists maintained on their side that theirs was only a diagnosis of health, not a diagnosis of disease. This inversion in paradigms of iridial studies is still essential, they said.

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