Dominic Yes, although the situation is evolving. Four years ago when my symptoms dramatically worsened, I visited the same eye clinic (the only one where they offered service in English) 4-5 times within two weeks, desperate as I was. I had strong photosensitivity, eyestrain and twitching only at the left eyelid. Every time I met a different doctor and no one of them had a clue. I heard the most disparate opinions and comments, ranging from "you just need to relax" to "vision therapy is folk remedy". One doctor prescribed me vitamin B12 drops - which somehow helped sooth my inflammation and photosensitivity - and another one sent me for brain MRI. The idea was to see if the left optical nerve differed to the right one, i.e., if it was pinched, but the result was negative. Now that I have this diagnosis that my left eye does most of the work at near I believe that the larger amount of stress this eye had to cope with was likely the reason for the selective eyelid twitching, which sometimes would degenerate and expand to the mouth, always to the left side.

Recently after exposure to very powerful and flickering LED lighting I have had a burning sensation in my eyes and some twitching at both eyelids. Just to contradict my theory above :-) The twitching tends to fade as soon as I leave the area.

      AGI I also have most of my symptoms on the left side. My left eye is dominant at near and right one is for distance. Given it's not the lazy eye (I was told I had no ambylopia), I wonder what's the correlation between having a different dominant eye at near and distance and heterophoria/strabismus. Logically if an eye is dominant at near, its medial muscle should be strong, because you use it often at up-close tasks when you converge. You don't use it so much for distance, so its lateral muscle is weaker. It's the other way round for the other eye. Logically speaking this situation would result in having an esophoria in one eye and exophoria in the other eye. Is it even possible to have both exo and eso? I don't think so because phoria concerns two eyes, not one. Maybe alternately?

      • AGI replied to this.

          ryans Just wondering if this is a Doctor that Dr. Debby Feinberg trained (see here for those Doctors)?

          Dr. Debby Feinberg’s practice (https://vsofm.com/) reached out to me because they found my website. I’m very impressed by them - I’ve spoken with Dr. Debby and two of her Michigan colleagues. After our conversations they thought it was unlikely I had BVD, but at their suggestion I just today saw Dr. Cheryl Israeloff who trained directly with Dr. Debby, is part of the same network, and is located not far from me in NYC- she’s on Long Island. She didn’t detect any sign of BVD for me. She was incredibly thoughtful, though, trying to think of things to try that might help in my case, and tried some specialized colored lenses, but they unfortunately didn’t help with flicker sensitivity for me. She didn’t try to sell me any products, which I appreciated. She’s curious about us as a group and how many of us have BVD and how many don’t and to what extent treating BVD might help some of us in terms of LED sensitivity. So if any of you are near Michigan or New York, I can recommended these BVD specialists as worth seeing. There are other locations in their network too. They also test carefully for both horizontal and vertical misalignment, while I think Neurolens mainly tests for just horizontal.

          And I find that patching when I use a screen lengthens the time before my symptoms start, but doesn’t eliminate my symptoms. So even if you don’t have BVD, patching could help you too, at least with screens. In my case since patching helps even though I don’t have BVD, it might be simply that one dose of flicker isn’t as bad as two doses for me.

          Also, if you didn’t happen to see my post about figuring out how to report our LED issues to the FDA, whether or not you’re a US citizen, please consider doing so - they need to hear from all of us. It could bring about funding for research and change in the long run. https://www.flickersense.org/How-to-report-LED-health-problems

              jen Very interesting update, thanks for sharing! I am guessing Dr. Israeloff used a Maddox Rod to perform the BVD tests. I'm "sorry" you don't have BVD as that could have been improved with glasses.

              jen specialized colored lenses

              Were these Avulex lenses?

              jen There are other locations in their network too.

              Here is how to find Dr. Debby's network. And here is a link to find other eye doctors who did training in binocular vision.

              • jen replied to this.
              • jen likes this.

                      ryans I am guessing Dr. Israeloff used a Maddox Rod to perform the BVD tests.

                      Yes, she used a Maddox Rod to assess BVD. There were other tests too that typical optometrists don’t do, but I can’t say exactly what roles the other tests played.

                      ryans Were these Avulex lenses?

                      I’m sorry, I don’t remember what they were called, but Avulex doesn’t sound familiar. She said it wasn’t just a lens with a tint, but had color and some kind of specialized structure embedded in the lens. She tried it on the remote chance it would help, but wasn’t surprised that it didn’t since it couldn’t block flicker. Prior to this visit I’d already tried about 20 different tinted lenses that didn’t help, including FL-41 and multiple other blue-blocking lenses, including very thick orange lab glasses that completely blocked light in the blue range. My very dark shade 5 welding glasses give me a few more seconds of time to walk across an LED-illuminated room before symptoms start, as long as the flicker isn’t really severe. They also slightly reduce the impact of flickering city lights and headlights if I’m walking at night. Typically I feel best if I don’t use any tint in order to best let in sunlight or completely flicker-free LED ambient light. Instead of wearing dark lenses to look at screens (my screens are worse with backlight dimmed), I’ve recently been trying putting darkening plastic over my screens - Dim It sheets on the iPhone and neutral density photographic gels over the monitor (a poor solution because glare on the gels is annoyingly distracting, but the glare is not triggering for me). And patching an eye while using the screen helps somewhat for me with flicker symptoms.

                      • AGI likes this.

                          Dominic phoria concerns two eyes, not one.

                          I would think so.

                          Dominic Maybe alternately?

                          I will let you know once I have met the specialist that diagnosed me with exophoria at the start.

                              2 months later

                              Hello @mike

                              When you started your exercise, do you had any strain or headache while you are looking at the phone with 1 eyes? or you strarted to feel good?

                              Another question - do you try your methods with laptop or only phone?

                              • mike replied to this.
                                10 days later

                                henno I have the same 2013 MBP but we do not get software update anymore. Could you find anything newer with no problem?

                                  I'm happy to report my patching has continued to work, and has improved my overall ability to withstand Windows 10 dramatically. It;s been around 2 years now and I intend to keep it up.

                                    ensete

                                    Do you patch both eyes alternatively or only one ? If one, is it the stronger or weaker ?

                                    Do you always use the pc while patching or can you use it without ?

                                      a month later

                                      bkdo It's been over a year, did you do vision therapy? I read that you started to wear prisms in that time and they improved symptoms for you. However I think that for CI vision therapy is the first thing that one should be doing, and only if that fails, then consider prisms. Or prisms + vt simultaneously. Because in CI they don't cure the cause, just relieve the symptoms? It's different with divergence insufficiency I think.

                                      • bkdo replied to this.

                                          @mike I'm also having symptom relief when using patching. I've tried patching once already, about month ago, but I wasn't noticing any change. I gave it one more chance yesterday and I noticed that with one eye patched (no matter which eye) I can look at the screen with 40% brightness on my laptop, whereas before it had to be almost 0% (had to use additional screen dimmer to go below default minimum). It doesn't affect my other symptom, which is "eyes being out of sync/misaligned" feeling, but it does lower the pain when looking at screen. Pretty good news and interseting finding I would say.

                                          UPDATE: after 3 days of patching, new kind of pain is occuring in eye that is looking at the screen, so this is not a solution for me, I'm stopping it for now, maybe will come back to it later…

                                          7 days later

                                          mazury

                                          Hey, I did do vision therapy for about 3-4 months. I did it myself at home for about an hour a day. I unfortunately didn't see any noticeable improvements, so I stopped, since the time investment was getting to be a bit much. My prism lenses have also stopped providing enough relief, so I'm stuck with my old prescription.

                                          I did see a Dr. Debby trained specialist and am getting new prescription glasses within 1-2 weeks. Literally putting all my hopes on them at this point.

                                              bkdo Hey, I did do vision therapy for about 3-4 months. I did it myself at home for about an hour a day.

                                              Did you do this with an optometrist or just self-guided? I think with our condition, the VT needs to be under a specialist to be successful.

                                              bkdo My prism lenses have also stopped providing enough relief,

                                              This could be "eating" the prism. Over time, sometimes the eyes/brain need stronger and stronger prism.

                                                    ryans I agree with eating the prisms, but only when the condition is CI, for DI it's actually helpful, that's what I read in "clinical management of binocular vision". And I think @martin had success with prisms, but he also had DI. It's important to get the diagnosis right at first.

                                                      ryans

                                                      I used my Kaiser optometrist/opthalmologist's exercises and did them at home, they took about an hour a day and I didn't really see any relief, unfortunately.

                                                      Yeah, from what I was told, relief with brand new prism lenses usually last about a month, then you'll need recalibration. Then, your prescription can change year-to-year. It's frustrating 😞

                                                        9 days later

                                                        arturpanteleev Sorry for late answer, been working long days (behind my screens).

                                                        When I started training I didn’t understand that this training was going to work. Less headache, but my eyes was still strained, after some weeks I could see results that the training worked.

                                                            mike thank you! I tried to do patching a few times, but every time quit halfway through. Gonna do another trying

                                                              3 months later

                                                              Eye patching changed my life. I was so happy, that I can use devices that I cannot from a long time again. But unfortunately something went wrong. I was patching one of my eyes from about a year and recently I think I overloaded my eyes/eye (or maybe my body), got a lot of stress, and lose the ability to use devices to which I got my eyes used by patching. Now I can say, that I’m starting over, somehow I reset my eyes to the stage that I cannot use almost anything at all. The worst part of the problem is that, now the patching wont work at all. I irritate my eyes very quickly, No matter if I’m patching or not. Have any of you had such a problem? Did anyone have to start from scratch? If so, do you have any advice? I'm a little heartbroken because I was able to use all these devices fairly normally and enjoy life in my own way, and now I've lost that opportunity, not knowing why 🙁

                                                                bisk89 Give it time and keep it up. There have been days where patching was less effective but it always came back.

                                                                Unfortunately for me there seems to be no improvement of the underlying condition which means I wlil likely be patching for the rest of my life.

                                                                  dev