I'm more of a silent reader, but this time I would like to ask you for suggestion. I'm in a pickle and I don't have any more ideas at this point. I've been battling this computer/smartphone problem for 1.5y now. Despite of time and money I spent during that time I'm still in the same place.
My symptoms occur after seconds and they are the following: blurred vision, tension headache, dizziness, burning feeling in whole body, (sometimes) eye strain.
I excluded every possible (non-vision-related) disease I could think of. I saw every possible specialist.
I tried hundreds of smartphones and laptops. I cannot use any of them.
8 years ago I had LASIK, my refractive error was around -3D on both eyes. Now it's -0,5D on left and -0,25D on right eye. Until recently I didn't know I had astigmatism error, but I found out I have -0,25 on left and -0,5 on right eye.
A year ago they found an exophoria in my left eye, so I truly believed it was the culprit. They connected the heterophoria with poor convergence skills. At that time I exchanged some messages with @martin who knows a lot on this subject. All the above reasons made me very motivated to do exercises. For the first four months I was doing brock string and accommodation flippers exercises every day (at least 15 minutes daily) together with office exercises in use of synoptophore.
I didn't feel any significant relief. What's more, right after doing brock string exercise my vision was going blurry and I was getting an instant headache.
Then I changed my orthoptist thinking she was doing something wrong. For the following three months I put it on office exercises as doing a brock string exercise seemed unhelpful to me.
I was doing various office exercises in order to make my convergence better at least 3 times a week plus doing accommodation flippers home every day.
After three months they said my convergence was okay and there was no more need to follow the exercises.
Unfortunately I still couldn't use any device without instant pain. What's worse, after the last month of doing exercises I couldn't even use my old laptop which was my only safe device before.
Then I got prismatic eyeglasses. I didn't feel comfortable in any of them (I got three pairs). One of them made me sick to the point I was up all night due to horrific headache. The weakest prisms I got were bearable, but didn't give me any significant relief. Trying to get used to I was wearing them for two weeks, then I gave up.
Then I saw another eye specialist (very reputational, expensive and hard to get a consulation with) who completely denied all the previous diagnosis and said it was an accommodation spasm. As treatment he prescribed atropine 0,5% eye drops for a daily use and bifocal glasses. Atropine made some kind of wonders at first. I could stare at bad devices and my vision kept being stable. Sadly, other symptoms like headache persisted. I realised accommodation spasm is just a symptom, not a source of my issue.
I bought a cheap pair of glasses correcting my astigmatism (-0,25 on left and -0,5 on right eye) and I must admit it made a difference. It's 50% better and looking at screens is quite a pleasant experience, but blurry vision afterwards persists and some new kind of headache occurs (in the back of my head). It seems like astigmatic glasses also cure symptoms, but not source of the problem.
@mike 's experience encouraged me to try patching. During a week of patching I didn't notice any relief.
Here I am. Really don't know what to do.
1. Should I stay with prisms for at least a month despite of pain?
2. Why correcting such a small astigmatism make a difference? What does it mean for exophoria?
3. Should I try applying atropine for a longer period of time like months?
4. Why do I feel such a burning feeling in my body among symptoms? It's such a weird feeling.
5. Why exercises for convergence made it worse?
If you can guess the anwsers I would be more than happy. Some of you probably know and care more than expensive specialists I saw in the last 1.5y.