Flicker free LED lights

Let me try to get to stear this to a productive thing: Interesting you bring up the eco-friendly -> cancer thing. CFL and LED consumer lighting has a high content of high-energy blue visible light which is damaging to the skin and eyes. I doubt if a cancer connection could ever be proven although it is possible a correlation could be made although this is highly unlikely for a large study on this to occur. This is one of the most easy things to convince people about LED as opposed to "flicker" which people tune out when you start talking about. It's a great way to start conversation about LED and CFL lighting.

degen

So I pretty much quoted your "CFL and LED consumer lighting has a high content of high-energy blue visible light which is damaging to the skin and eyes" and made it a post on my facebook. As per usual, I was getting people to comment saying how the environment is supreme and LED is all hands down the best choice due to the energy saving qualities and the fact taht it has a long life (telling me like as if I was unaware of such an obvious fact). One of them even worked with phillips to develop LED lights to lessen the blue light. And I was also getting the same old usual "a lot of people have this problem too, try warm LED lights, glasses, etc etc" No one seems to be able to think outside the box aside from the solutions that are already present that don't work for people like us. I wish I could say they're ignorant because these environmentalists aren't looking at any further solutions like research, they think they know it all and "LED > all" is set. But do/should they really even have to care about this when we're pretty much 0.0025% of the population?

I hate LED's.

so you're saying none of those incandescent bulbs that are available now are anything close to something you guys are ok with like the way they used to be? or are they acceptable?

I am experimenting with 60W 120v chandelier incandescent bulbs with A19 adapters. I also loaded up with about 800 incandescent bulbs before they were gone.

Can you import old regular bulbs from other countries?

I have not found a way to do this.

Or just pushed by the LED lobby and such

This is very much the case. The margin on "eco friendly" bulbs is vastly higher than incandescents. Lighting manufacturers largely wrote the EISA bill and lobby'd it through Cngress under the guise of energy efficiency.

Best thing is to put pressure on your local elected representative. and let them know where you stand, showing common decency and if they are of your political ideology, you could let them know you are willing to help with their primary or something like that

I 100% agree and ask everyone effected to call their elected official and tell them how they feel about the issue. The fact there is already existing legislation, the BULB Act, that is written and on record makes it very easy for them to re-introduce.

I suppose the lightbulbs regulation is one of the things he wants to get rid of.

It is literally the single issue I agree with Trump on, and I have written the White House corespondence email address asking for the President to address the issue. I encourage everyone else to do the same.

And I'm sure accidently ingesting the mercury in CFL's would cause lots of harm and poisoning.

Not only that. Very few people dispose of CFL's properly. They just throw them in the trash, and that mercury then gets into landfills. LED manufacturer requires an array of toxic chemicals.

It could be possible to be energy efficient and eye-healthy lighting if there was more interest and money towards it.

Incandescent light bulbs are already energy efficient. We're talking 60 watts here. Thats a pittance of electricity. Going after incadecent light bulbs to save money is like hoping to lose weight by eating one less bite of a extra large pepperoni pizza. It's not going to make a difference. There is also reports that the lack of heat from CFL's and LED's drives up home heating usage in colder areas.

I don't really think people like us even have the choice of reducing interest in this kind of issue

I disagree. Read about Clair Patterson. Nearly single handedly got the Clean Air Act pased which banned lead from gasoline. Leaded gasoline caused the average citizen no immediately noticable symptoms and generated millions in profits from chemical companies. It was also poisioning the atmosphere.

As the quote goes, "Never believe that one man with one idea can't change the world. Indeed it's the only thing that has"

Just make your voice hear. Call your officials. Talk to people and educate them. Successes have been made. Read about Davis, CA. The resident successfully had the LED streetlighting the city installed removed.

LED is all hands down the best choice due to the energy saving qualities

Yeah, marketing is a bitch. People think these things matter. A single coal fired power plant more than generates enough pollution to negate the savings of every single LED bulb in the world. All you can do is point to facts, and remind people that saving a few cents in electricity is not a fair trade off for our suffering. Ask them if they are OK with LED's causing migraines for the estimated 33 million people in the US effected by this issue, and if they feel that is worth the negligible energy savings.

ctsai89

and made it a post on my facebook

People are always going to sway to whatever the popular opinion is on Facebook and pile-on is common. This is only the kind of conversation I would have with my friends or family or someone I had been easing this on to for a while.

Thinking from their perspective. After being told ceaslesly for years that they are bad for the environment for using incandescent and getting pro-LED lit slammed down their throat from everywhere from their hardware store to their power company, they spent hundreds of dollars outfitting their house with LEDs.. They are now emotionally invented in LED technology and going on Facebook and saying:

"Hey, just wanted to let you know that you made a bad choice and you are hurting your spouse and kids with dangerous light"

Is not going to win them to your side. You have to have to take a nuanced approach and work on one person at a time, easing them into your viewpoint. I didn't mean you should literally go and say those words to a big crowd. You are/were in real danger of being labelled an alarmist and quack publicly.

Social media is the worst place for this as the empathy component of your interaction is screwed when they can't see your face.

I'm sorry for my previous post and hope things work out ok on Facebook for you and people drop it. I definetely shouldn't have said it's easy. For me I've found it's a viable approach with some but not all. Whereas not a single person has been receptive to the flicker argument, even when it comes to a super intimate setting like lighting in my own home I had to look to other arguments. (The only person I ever got to acknowledge that LED flicker even exists was some guy working at a lighting shop who said that it screwed up his slow-mo videos )

I hate Facebook and only ever post the most generic things possible there to give the illusion of a semi-active account.

Edit: Optometrists and opticians are now being fed "electronic devices are bad for your eyes cause blue light" from lens manufacturers who want to sell super expensive coatings. It's very official and reputable looking stuff and so they eat it up. How they square this belief with the overhead fluorescent lighting in their offices is a mystery to me. (Also not everyone needs glasses? What are those people supposed to do?)

Another thing is don't do this in a PSA style. It makes people feel like you are lecturing to them and no one likes that.

degen

nah it's a closed facebook group. I prefer posting stuff there more

and it's a very active group. 2000 members so far

degen

and since I'm new at this, you might know more than me but I doubt my dry eye is only coming from "not bllinking enough". Ever since I was told that the reason was "you have not been blinking enough" by different doctors I've been blinking much more than I have before, whenever I'm under LED lights/screens. Are there more to it than just the whole deal with "not blinking" in terms of the contribution of dry eyes coming from LED's?

ctsai89 I don't know how the PM system works here.

Yea the not blinking enough is the most lazy explanation ever as to dry eye from LED lights/screens. As many have noted here faulty displays or lighting can cause the muscles around the eye to tense.

This causes the extraocular muscles to tense which has several consequences:
1) blinking is impaired. you have less of it and more importantly the blink is incomplete and the meibomian gland is not expressed. this leads to MGD and that doesn't need explanation to a dry eye sufferer
2) my own pet theory is that this muscle tension also compresses the ducts that connect that lacrimal gland to the eye's surface, greatly reducing output of that gland

Other theories I have seen on here is that the light is somehow caustic to the surface of the eye, either because of high-energy blue light is causing a sunburn like reaction by acting much like UV does, or because of some type of "allergy" to the light. (At least one person here reported such a fast reaciton to some displays causing red eyes he was able to demonntrate it to his opthamologist and get a letter from them for work)

And of course dry eyes always causes worse dry eyes because dry eyes is very inflammatory to the surface of the eye and inflammation causes the eye to dry out creating a very vicious cycle.

I haven't tried bile salts. Veggies don't have active vitamin A but some of the carotenoids like lutein are shown to be helpful for the age-related macular degeneration. I am taking astaxanthin now because of the (small) studies out of Japan finding it to be beneficial for accomodation, convergence, and eyestrain from extended VDT usage.

I do use warm compress as well as Theralid to help with blepharitis. (I express my meibomian glands gently while using Theralid).

In this thread (https://ledstrain.org/d/188-your-health) some others have noticed a connection between their symptoms and sinus and well as TMJ conditons.

Now I am working with my optometrist to get a steroid eye drop compounded that it not preserved with BAK for occasional use. (They are all preserved with BAK which is shown to cause red, dry, inflamed eyes even in normal people, which is completely counter to an anti-infammatory eye drop)

I'm glad you are finding relief. The only things that really helped me with my dry eyes are Lipiflow which changed my life from wanted to claw my eyes out and I could never stop thinking about how awful they felt to manageable. Also I got punctal plugs which helped a good bit.