Visual therapy progress report

martin

Hello, I have not been here in a while due to catching up with my work, finishing my PhD and generally trying to make up for all the time I lost when dealing with this issue. Id like to report on my progress so far.

In general the visual therapy helped a lot, I now exercise once a week or once every two weeks. Due to having esophoria, the condition gets and will get better as I age (muscle tension gets less as muscles loose tone with aging).

I now use still my macbook 2018 for work with nightshift and IRIS software, and my old win7 laptop for relax and work with text. I still use iphone 7 and might switch to oled display soon and try how that will go with me.

I recommend finding someone who can properly guide you through visual therapy, given that you have proper glasses made first. If you cannot, I highly recommend trying @mike approach with eye patching, as that seems to have helped him tremendously.

Visual therapy helped me to get from 10 min exposure and migraine to several hours of work with little breaks inbewteen if need be on worse days. Its not completely resolved for me and probably never will be, still hoping for a tech solution, but in the meantime visual therapy helped the most.

For anyone new here, check my blog heteroforie.webnode.cz for more info on visual therapy.

Allekss

martin I have this " digital eye strain/pain " from 2015. I checked many doctors/optometrists and they affirmed that my eye health/vision is 100%.

I did many researchers on many languages about the issue ( Romanian, English, French, Russian languages). The most useful info that i could get from it is that this issue can be to your eye muscles. If they become weak ( after prolonged screen time or other factors ) your muscles are stressing more to focus your vision and that's where we feel the eye pain. Vision therapy should improve and strengthen your eye muscles over time if properly done !!!

ryans

Thanks @martin. What symptoms do you still get?

martin

ryans I still get eyestrain, but more in sore eyes, not much of migraines anymore, that is thanks to the training. It is still unfcomfortable over longer periods of time and I prefer to relax, read text or watch movies on my old win 7 laptop.

Allekss It can really take time to find someone who can diagnose this properly. But its true, that is the purpose of eye therapy.

daniel_mate Yes, the exercises are always designed to balance out the deviation you have, which can be in quite many directions actually, but mostly either eyes pointing too much to the nose, or too much away from it.

daniel_mate

Allekss If they become weak ( after prolonged screen time or other factors )

They can go the other way too. Too much close up work, strengthening them and causing excessive convergence like in my case. Then the recommended exercises are to look to the side to relax them

AGI

Allekss If they become weak ( after prolonged screen time or other factors ) your muscles are stressing more to focus your vision and that's where we feel the eye pain. Vision therapy should improve and strengthen your eye muscles over time if properly done !!!

Thanks for the updates, guys. Unfortunately, my story is quite different. Eye therapy has strengthened my eye muscles and got me some extra "eye skills" (I can now converge and diverge better than the average person, according to the three specialists I am seeing), but has not solved my precarious visual condition. I cannot use Windows 10 version 22H2 on my laptop without terrible discomfort (whereas I can handle the same version with much milder symptoms on 2-3 PCs at work). After 10 years without a television I bought a Smart TV, purposely choosing a low resolution (FHD) one as I have normally more problems the sharper the image is. Sadly, my TV time is a torture and it typically takes a couple of days to recover from 30 minutes of use. Mystery, I can watch most TVs no problem when I am at the pub, by my parents, in the dentist waiting room. More puzzling, despite all my efforts I still cannot tolerate most LED lights. Just sitting under LED lights triggers symptoms that last days.

My specialists have been clear since the start. They told me that, in their opinion, doing eye therapy could improve my condition by only 10-20%. None of them has a clue as to the reasons of my symptoms. I keep doing eye exercises because I have no other way out, they do not harm and at least produce some form of relaxation. The most sophisticated ones can also be fun. I should also add that I took home all my eye exercise gadgets last Christmas, and test my siblings' eye ability. To my shock, they could get everything right straight away. However, my brother-in-law, who has zero visual discomfort using electronic devices as my siblings, couldn't absolutely figure out how to successfully use a loose prism or a stereogram, which reinforces my opinion that heterophoria isn't enough to justify all I have been thru in the last years.

ryans

martin do you get motion sickness / dizziness still (or ever got it)?

martin

ryans I get brainfog a bit, but not as bad as before and it fades faster when I take time away from the screens. I also get irritated/restless when exposed for loo long, which in my case now though is hours without break. However I recover fast. Sometimes I take two days off from all new screens. Not really much of motion sickness or dizziness anymore.

ryans

AGI I cannot use Windows 10 version 22H2 on my laptop without terrible discomfort (whereas I can handle the same version with much milder symptoms on 2-3 PCs at work).

That is interesting. What graphics is in the unusable laptop on Windows 10 22H2 but on the mostly usable PCs?

AGI

ryans I have replied here.

NewDwarf

As a medical doctor I can say that this is self-hypnosis. The reason we are PWM/temporal dithering sensitive is our brain sensitivity (more sensitive), inertia of the nervous system and the fact we realize the reason of discomfort is a "bad" screen.

Actually, many people are PWM sensitive but they don't realize this fact. They just claim on fatigue, poor health, etc blaming bad working environment, bad ecology and so on.

It would be very interesting to learn/study the statistic between IQ and PWM/dithering sensitivity.

ryans

NewDwarf As a medical doctor I can say that this is self-hypnosis.

I thought you were a programmer 🙂 You are a medical doctor too (or is this a typo)? The best medical neurological explanation for our problems I think is migraine or epilepsy. Binocular vision problems can also be a component.

Still, it comes back to being able to use "older" tech fine...

Lauda89

I found an interesting study:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8212737/

"Flicker refers to low VDT data refreshing rates below critical fusion frequency, the image on an OLED screen is not fixed, but refreshes at 60–90 Hz, which causes the brain to produce temporary vision and discern the screen as stable. In fact, the eyes can still feel the flicker, which easily generates visual fatigue. Conversely, the image on an eINK screen is fixed; thus, what the human eye sees is a real and stable picture without flicker. Another important reason for subjective discomfort is that because the wavelength of blue light is short, its focal point cannot fall on the retina, but instead falls a little in front of the retina, and the distance between the focal points in the eye is the main reason for the blurring of vision. In order to see the image clearly, it is necessary for the lens in the eye to adjust, which causes the eye muscles to remain in a state of tension for a long time, resulting in visual fatigue. The eINK screen does not emit light, so it does not produce blue light‐induced blurred vision and visual fatigue."

AGI

Lauda89 Sounds like an advertisement for Dasung :-) Haven't there been complaints of eyestrain while using e-ink as well, users blaming dithering from the OS? Also, I'm very skeptical about blue light being a major player. Blue light is the only natural thing in there, IMHO a problem only at night because it disturbs circadian rhythm. I have tried glasses, screen protectors and apps blocking blue light, and my eyestrain was unchanged. In fact, my eyes suffer more with very warm colors.

NewDwarf

ryans Yes, I am a medical doctor but I left medicine many years ago. Currently, I am an information security expert.

Ivan_P

@martin hello! I read some of your posts and you did mention that you found an optometrist that was able to detect your BVD while others said that your eyes are normal.

Could you share your doctor's contact? Am I right that you found the right doctor somewhere in the europ?