One explanation why one-eye patching might work

martin A reference I found that reviews this and a lot of other older evidence about flicker and pattern sensitivity is from Arnold Wilkins - link below (see section 2.2.3 on p. 21). It looks like the original study of covering one eye for epilepsy is Jeavons and Harding (1975) who saw in epilepsy in EEG tests of flicker photo stimulation, that covering one eye stops the convulsive response to flicker in 164 of 244 patients (67%), reduces the convulsive response in 75 others (31%), and 5 (2%) showed no difference in response between monocular and binocular vision. I haven’t read the original reference- I couldn’t easily find it online.

So the above implies that covering one eye is helpful for most epilepsy patients encountering flicker, and may protect many. However, the above study was a lab test of limited duration, so it isn’t clear that it would be completely preventative for some patients in real-life longer-lasting situations. And I’d really like to see the data and study design in the original paper before concluding too much.

Wilkins, A.J. (1995) Visual Stress. Oxford University Press. 194 pp. http://www1.essex.ac.uk/psychology/overlays/book1.pdf Warning: This book contains multiple patterns that may bother sensitive individuals. The book warns those with epilepsy and migraine not to look at the frontispiece. Patterns in the book triggered my "LED" symptoms when I ignored the warning.

The Wilkins review also talks about reading masks that partially obscure vision that help prevent seizures in a patient with pattern sensitive epilepsy (see section 5.5 on p. 75). There’s another Wilkins 1980 paper “Visually Induced Seizures” that says glasses with one frosted lens reduced seizures for 2 patients with pattern sensitive epilepsy.

For migraine, I can’t remember reading about binocular vs monocular vision and flicker, but I’ll look out for it. I review the literature on migraine and flicker here - and all of these studies are for fairly slow flicker, not for the 100-120Hz flicker most common in LED lighting (there’s no migraine studies for that): https://www.flickersense.org/background/health-effects-of-led-lights-and-screens/flicker-below-100-hz-scientific-literature

I can say as a migraine patient who is also sensitive to flicker and repetitive patterns, that none of my neurologists ever suggested that I try patching an eye, so I’m not sure that it’s a common recommendation in practice. I figured out on my own that for screen use, patching makes my flicker symptoms start slower, but doesn’t prevent them. When I briefly walk through an area with flickering LED light, I wear a hat, Shade 5 welding glasses, keep one eye closed, and close the other eye as much as possible - and this is only OK-ish if the flicker is fairly mild and the exposure is brief. If I completely avoid flicker, I’m totally fine health-wise. I just had brief migraine headaches maybe a few times a year prior to first getting flicker symptoms in 2018.

I have no eyestrain, no eye muscle involvement, and no convergence insufficiency or other BVD (confirmed by a BVD expert). Just nearsightedness. When in flickering LED light I feel sharp vibrating spikes of pain in the tissue behind my right eye and/or spatial disorientation/motion sickness/nausea. Starting about 30-45 minutes after a flicker exposure, painful pressure will become noticeable in my right temple and increase over the course of hours to weeks, depending on the severity of the flicker. A neuroophthalmologist found right side peripheral blindness due to the flicker of the new LED office lights which triggered several days of symptoms. The peripheral blindness was absent in a later visit where I protected my eyes from the office lights. Moderately bad events trigger severe impairment of working memory, brain fog, and extreme fatigue and subtle postural issues - more brain fog if sitting up. Often I’ll also get a left-side migraine headache exacerbated by light brightness during the migraine with vomiting about 2-4 days after the flicker. The migraine may last a few hours. I also have painfully sensitive spots on the right side of my scalp following moderate flicker exposure. Somewhat worse flicker incidents also cause severe spatial disorientation, nausea, loss of appetite, inability to balance with eyes closed, and insomnia. My worst episode, 3 hours in flickering LED lighting (mostly 10% flicker, but some 100%), caused symptoms lasting many months. In this episode, when the swelling in the right side of my head was at its peak a couple weeks later, my eyelid was swollen and one day it was hard to move my eye in its socket due to what felt like swelling, but other than that, I’ve never felt eyestrain.

martin

What we know:

• It has been like a miracle for me, some year of one-eye-training and now I can use all screens with both eyes open.
• One-eye-patching helps at least 20+ people on this forum. I have contact with some of them on this forum and some outside. And I think it could help many more.
• Their is some people that have “adjust” and left LEDStrain.

What I don’t understand:

• When I visit LEDStrain It’s like all threads are about hardware, and no one about training and adjusting. Why? If we have find a way (one-eye-training) that could help and cure people, why aren’t we focusing more on that?

mike I could be wrong but I think one eye training only work with people with binocular vision dysfunction and its not for everyone, there is a lot of other conditions that can trigger led lighting discomfort like vestibular problems, migraines, eye inflammation, uveitis, brain injuries, chronic dry eye, etc etc.

JTL If we put the problems to the side, and look at a potential solution. Why aren’t people willing to try it? If we can help people isn’t that a good thing?

I don’t know what to say about your analogy example. We are discussion to patch an eye for an hour or more. Eye doctors don’t see any big problems with that.

I know you have a eye damage, maybe I also have one. And maybe one-eye-training will also work for you.

mike If we put the problems to the side, and look at a potential solution. Why aren’t people willing to try it? If we can help people isn’t that a good thing?

You're assuming that Vision Therapy will resolve these issues in most/all cases with dedication and persistence. If an individual has only a minor BVD and both eyes are in reasonably good health, I would agree, however this isn't the case for everybody.

I have had alternating strabismus since an infant and it will not go away. I may be one of the few unlucky ones here, but there are some people who simply will never attain binocular vision for very obvious physical/neurological reasons.

We also cannot ignore the fact that the video output produced by modern tech is partly to blame. As @JTL mentioned, I wouldn't want to stare into a strobe light even if I knew I would be symptom free. Flicker of any kind IMO should be seen as an antagonist and minimised as much as possible.

Web I have no BVD (confirmed by an expert), but patching helps somewhat delay, but not prevent my symptoms if the flicker is coming from a screen. I haven’t tried other eye training because I already have perfectly binocular vision. I’ve done lots of experiments that support the idea that flicker is the trigger for me and one eye viewing it is sufficient to trigger my symptoms. Flicker from ambient LED lights is too immediately dangerous for me even covering one eye as best as I can - I just have to avoid it to not quickly become very debilitated.

I haven’t found any medications that help yet. The headache neurologists have recommended trying magnesium and riboflavin supplements, which don’t help me at all and have irritating side effects for me. Recently they suggested CoQ10 supplements, which I’m not sure of yet. They don’t prevent symptoms from starting for me, but I’m not sure yet whether symptoms haven’t been super long-lasting in the past few weeks has anything to do with the supplements or is just because I’ve avoided major triggers…. CoQ10 is supposed to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

I don’t have any of what I think you’re describing in terms of depersonalization or derealization. I don’t have tunnel vision that I can notice myself. However, in a neuroophthalmologist’s visual field test, i had peripheral blindness in my right eye (the side where I feel symptoms) while flicker symptoms were starting due to the flicker of the ambient LED office lights, but not when we repeated the test at a later visit and kept the flickering LED lights off.

I hope some of this helps - I’m sorry I don’t have better answers.

jen

Weird, I just looked at the frontispiece of that book for about a minute. I didn’t feel any symptoms at first, just a small amount of discomfort since it’s a confusing pattern. I showed it to my girlfriend and asked if she felt something similar looking at it, and she said it didn’t bother her but probably would if she had to look at it for a long time

After moving on and looking at some of the other patterns I suddenly experienced an intense bout of deja vu. I then started to feel extreme brain fog. I tried to communicate this to my girlfriend and my speech was slow almost like my brain couldn’t communicate. What the hell?

Is all this just epilepsy?

To be fair I don’t feel the pain or extreme headache and confusion that comes with my usual exposure to fluorescent lights. And I have other health issues that produce similar types of brain fog (sulfur intolerance). But the deja vu is definitely weird. I wonder if epilepsy medication would help me…

Web

My first experience with a bad monitor was 2 years ago. It was a cheap viewsonic ips monitor. I remember after 20 minutes of watching, I quit the chair and just fell on the floor. Still completely conscious and with a strong need to eat something sugary, I ate like 4 bananas lol. It's like it threatened some form of hypoglycemia or a seizure, it was a bit scary.

Since then, I experienced strong eye strains with two gaming monitors said to be pwm free that led to bloodshot veins in my eyes that I still have to this day. My eyes used to be white. Now they have all these dirty red veins pointing to the center and I noticed many people nowadays have those also.

I experienced what I believe to be pwm with a seat ibiza screen/dashboard and couln't use the car anymore. A bwm also seemed to trigger symptoms but I'm not certain.

I had quite a few laptops that I couldn't use. Symptoms were either strain either a sense of reduced cognitive ability/slower brain and sleepiness or in the contrary over excitement and jittery.

With recent tvs that are pwm free, I have a hard time focusing and feel slight changes in personality or way of thinking.

I've noticed in general phones of all kind tend to produce less symptoms than other devices.

My theory is that everyone suffers from modern leds but some more than others.

I don't have problems with old devices that were fine to me. They still are. So it's the modern display technologies that fuck me up. Nowadays they add so many processing layers that you're not looking at an image anymore. You have the screen with all the layers. Then the gpu that adds tons of processing. And now even the os does ton of shit. I've had android updates that completely shattered usable phones. It makes everything so complex and that's why in 7 years, people still try to figure out what exactly is wrong in this site.

I try to stick as much as possible with old device and software.