Flicker free LED lights

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.

ctsai89 What I meant is that veggies don't have vitamin A in its active form, retinol. When you are eating veggies you are consuming vitamin A in the form of carotenoids, which your body converts to vitamin A. Although lutein is classified as a carotenoid it is not converted into vitamin A. Lutein is the most abundant carotenoid in broccoli, so if it's improving your symptoms perhaps vitamin A is not what's helping, and some other factor in veggies are what is helping (there are many). Carrots have lots of beta-carotene but unless you are very deficient in vitamin A you are not increasing your active vitamin A levels significantly when you increase your intake of carrots. Beta-carotene is a very weak carotenoid in terms of its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

ctsai89 I use a very generic Sunbeam cool mist evaporative-type humidifier. I like the cool mist, it feels more refreshing to my eyes than steam humidifiers. Also, as the moisture content of the air increases, they add less moisture to it, reducing the risk of overhumidification that can happen easily if you don't monitor a steam humidifier closely. I don't use ultrasonic humidifiers as they leave a white dust in your room.

I also use a hygrometer to monitor and keep at around 40% humidity (must be lower if it gets cold outside, sometimes down to 20-25% in the coldest days of winter to prevent condensation on windows). The hygrometers built into humidifiers are usually very innacurate.

ctsai89 I personally don't like to too quick to draw conclusions from a short time of experimentation. I've been burned there too many times and wasted a lot of money. You started eating more vegetables and taking bile salts, and your dry eyes improved. I don't doubt that diet has a big impact on dry eyes (although it usually takes a few weeks for fat-soluble vitamins to accumulate, that it beside my point), but it's hard to pin down the specific cause for changes in symptoms (especially since there may be many), and even if you could be 100% sure that the changes you made were the cause of the improvement, it is yet another leap to be able to say that that means you have a weak gallblader.

degen

well I used to drink a lot, some nights to the point where I would throw up bile the next morning up till late afternoon. There goes a good reason to suspect my gallbladder's been damaged lol.

And I've been taking bile salts for 2 months now. I noticed a small difference but the lighting and screen change I made few days ago made a much more noticeable difference on my eyes.

ctsai89 is it really 33 million people though?

All the research I have read says that photophobia of non black body radiation light sources is estimated to impact about 10% of the population. So thats about 32-33 million folks in the US. Sound like a lot, but looking at the flip side of that statistic, 90% of the population is unaffected and doesn't think about the issue at all. Which is why this is such a difficult issue to raise awareness on.

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

This is true, and not only that, remember, there is a 90% chance that they are completely unaffected by this problem. And, while the impact is insanely minimal, LED lights DO use less power and last longer which does carry a benefit. The benefit is not worth the trade off inhuman suffering we experience, but to them. LED lights are 100% upside. And, unfortunately, we still live in a world where compassions and putting yourself in other peoples shoes is a very rare thing.

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.

100% agree. I feel the same anger you all do, but it needs to be tempered. In order to be taken seriously and effect change, the work needs to be done politely, respectfully, but also relentlessly. Like water trying to break down a dam.

Is there a way you can personally message me? I would like you to help me write a letter to the congress/government regarding all the effects from monitor, car lights, to lamps from LED on our eyes and try to convince them to do something about it. I am no good at writing letters (no kidding). But if you help me, I will get send it and possibly convince some of the people that are in the "dreEyeTalk" group to send them as well.

Lets have the conversation here. I have several letters I have drafted and written and am happy to share them. I am going to start posting them to my subreddit for use as well