ensete I have some worrying experiences as of late, the patching seems to be getting less effective. Or, more specifically, my ability to go from patched - unpatched is causing me symptoms. I did just have sinus surgery 3 weeks ago, so my hope is that all the healing still going on in my head is what is responsible for this increased sensitivity and in a few more weeks it will get back to normal patching behavior. Nothing I can do but wait and see.

This is interesting. First question, why did you do a sinus surgery? Second question, is this happening after the surgery?

When I look at screens my sinus swell up, i took medicine for that, and because of the medicine my eyes didn’t hurt so much. So if you have changed something with your sinus it can affect how your eyes feels.

ensete Mike, did your multi year experience through this have ups and downs as far as your sensitivities went, or was it a fairly linear progression?

It was more like a staircase, first from a low level I took a huge step. Then no progress for months. Then a smaller step, and no progress for a long time. I gave up a few times. But don’t give up if you fall down a step.

ensete I don't think they are a "scam", they jut seem to be overpriced versions of prism lenses you can already get for cheaper. They seem to be charging a lot of $$ for the brand name. But if they work for you, by all means use them. If they have a money back garauntee as ryans said, it cant hurt to try.

+1

        mike I struggle a lot with dry eye and to me the question is what comes first, dry eye which leads to eye strain or eye strain which leads to dry eye

        • mike replied to this.

            ensete

            Interesting. I'm in no way knowledgeable about the kind of physiology involved in this.

            Subjectively to me the closest thing I can describe trying to focus on an lcd monitor is like those magic eye pictures that were on the back of cereal boxes way back when. Sometimes you just try and try but the image stays "two dimensional" and you can't differentiate the lcd panel from the backlight. And then other times it seems your brain just somehow locks on and you can clearly see the three dimensionality of the transparent lcd panel and the backlight. It seems that the less flickering issues there are the easier it is for my brain to achieve this.

              My eyes is how I see the world and how I make a living

              Now why would I put them in harms way by trying to make them get used to inferior screens which manufacturers like to shove into our faces?

              This is not the way

                Fenkins As I just said another thread...

                While I'm glad you're feeling better I see dealing with this problem as two sided. One side of it involves researching and obtaining devices that don't aggravate potentially impaired eyes or nervous system (certain problems like PWM, color spectrum and blue light can be quantified and potentially investigated), and the other being that some "health" changes may improve your tolerance for visual issues. To give an analogy even if you could improve your skin, you wouldn't stick a burning cigarette on your hand for 12 hours a day

                  23 days later

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

                  I had not updated on the second part of the eye examination by the neuro-optometrist. It consisted of tests I had never taken before, such as following targets / reading a text while having my eyes tracked by a camera, testing my peripheral vision, etc. My results were within the norm. As a term of comparison, I was shown how different the test results are for patients who have undergone concussions, traumatic brain injuries, ischemia, etc., or suffer of Parkinson disease. I was diagnosed only with esophoria.

                    15 days later

                    Fenkins

                    Actually it's not the screens which are inferior, it's the way the hardware developers program the video card to output the image to the display. In order for the marketers to be able to claim that their particular phone or laptop shows billions (10 bit) of colors, the developers have programmed the video card to flip the colors of the individual pixels rapidly from one color to another, to simulate the color in between. Yes, the brain will be fooled and does not even see the flickering at all, but the eyes will strain from the flickering nevertheless.

                    Have you noticed how the rise of the dark theme craze conincided with the rise of eye straining devices? Long time I didn't undestand why people preferred dark theme so much, until I upgraded from my 2013 MBP to 2019 MBP in 2020. After 2 days of using it I felt that my eyes started to hurt every time I used it. I noticed that the pain started even after a minute of using it. That's how I found ledstrain.org. Eventually I found SwitchResX and switched from "Billions of colors" to "Millions of colors", and switched to sRGB, and used f.lux, and applied matte screen protector. After that it was a lot more usable but not so much as for example my HP Elitebook 820 G3 which gives me zero problems with eyes. Now I am back on my trusty 2013 MBP because the HP was too slow.

                    By the way, you can make the same screen which previously did not affect your eyes at all, make your eyeballs feel they are burning from behind by attaching the display to a video card which employs temporal dithering. And why it happens? It's to impress you with wider color range, because if two screens are side by side in the store and the rep says "this one is capable of showing more colors and costs the same", which one would you pick? I myself cannot distinguish between millions of colors and billions of colors, without looking the same image side by side but I can distinguish which one uses temporal dithering without any reference in just a few seconds.

                        Interesting that some report that patching "reduces" the symptoms. For me, the symptoms are completely gone if I put a black tape on my non-dominant eye glass.

                        For me it seems that temporal dithering, PWM and possible other source of flicker confuses my stereo visioin, causes my eyes to work too hard, which then causes the strain and the resulting bloodshot eyes. I have no other symptoms than bloodshot eyes.

                        And I have now only the Lenovo x280 with ditherig.exe which cause no strain even with two eyes. All other devices, like 10 year old TV which was previously fine, cause strain if I look with both eyes. This started suddenly last February. Before that I was only sensitive to PWM and most modern laptop screens with temporal dithering.

                        henno

                        So, you're the advocate that the whole problem (or most of it) is linked to modern gpus and dithering usage ?

                        I'm actually leaning more and more towards this also. Cause with my phones, I had perfectly working devices that became almost unusable after a random software update that has probably impacted gpu drivers.

                        But I still think there is also a hardware issue with some screens. Cause for example, had no problem with a laptop, a msi ge62vr 6rf apache pro from 2016. But when I used it with some monitors like a cheap viewsonic, or even the well known benq xl2411P, I had pretty bad eye strain.

                        I'm pretty certain there are multiple culprits there but I agree the main culprit is probably linked to the gpus. I've noticed I feel relief whan I uninstall intel and nvidia gpus on my laptop for example.

                        • AGI likes this.

                          If patching works, does it mean we have an underlying problem with our binocular vision ? Wouldn't it be weird that we had to wait for some new technology screens (possibly) to discover this ?

                            8 days later

                            John615 I found out something new (to me) and unexpected. Based on the test you suggested, I thought my dominant eye was the right one and maybe that diagnosis was correct, but not at near. An optometrist assessed that at near my left eye is the dominant one. He made me wear goggles with a lens orange and the other green - not sure what the test is called. He said it is not uncommon that people have one eye dominant at near and the other at distance. This is really surprising as in general any part on the left side of my body is weaker than its right counterpart.

                                Liberator005

                                It just does mean that if patching works you have a problem with your binocular vision. Or if you only patch one eye and you would have the problem again if you switch to the other eye it could also indicate that you have another issue.

                                  AGI are your symptoms more intense on the left side?

                                  • AGI replied to this.

                                      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.

                                                                  dev