As far as anyone is concerned at this point, we're probably all just a bunch of hypochondriacs to them. None of us have been studied. None of us are doctors or understand the medical science behind what is happening (would anyone?) We also haven't passed any double-blind tests or any experiments of the sort.

Also, many of us seem to have different triggers (dithering vs. flicker vs. blue light). I don't think we can just start a Wikipedia page and give this unknown symptom a name just based on a vote. It would need original research and verifiable facts.

I'm afraid we may just become like peanut allergy sufferers. There's nothing inherently wrong with peanuts - the overwhelming majority enjoys them all the time without issue. To a severe allergy sufferer though, it can be fatal. I'm not sure if the medical community can honestly say they fully understand such severe overreaction of the immune system to something as innocuous as a simple peanut, however the recommendation would remain to practice total avoidance with probably an EpiPen on hand at all times. Lifelong avoidance of gluten for a Celiac sufferer is similar. "They" may not exactly know all the mechanisms behind the overreaction, but avoiding gluten seems to keep the symptoms at bay for a Celiac-sufferer.

That's why I would suggest "LED Allergy" as a potential name, because "Strain" sounds too trivial. Everybody gets strain from time to time after overuse! Some of our "solutions" are total LED Avoidance, just like an allergy sufferer.

I can say one thing though. It's really good to see all the activity on this forum as of late. New posts seemed to be few-and-far-between not that long ago, but lately there's been tons of good discussions.

    MagnuM I really like LED allergy. You are right no one even treats this like a real problem. My doctor is so useless. I saw a lot of different doctors at the start but I don't even waste time these days.

      "LED Sensitivity (syndrome?)". i think the path to 'recognition' is like with gluten. 10 years ago noone thought gluten was from the pit of hell, but now lot of people do - and most accept the need to accommodate folks with IBS, gluten allergies, etc.

      similarly most people have empathy for epilepsy and migraine sufferers & understand flashing lights can trigger them.

        ShivaWind any links on AVE? i've experimented with EMDR & electrical stim at different frequencies. entrainment is a given trigger with epilepsy...

            reaganry
            The Short answer is not really. I have a pile of web archives stored on my local machine to avoid managing login info for all the journals, but each article contains only a grain of information that is relevant. without a summary of why it was saved, its probably not much good. I would be happy to email you a tarball if you send an email to my user-name at proton mail. I will eventually tie it all together in a single document, I just haven't gotten that far yet. here are some random articles that were easy to tie back to a url in 5 minutes if you want to start your own web of investigation.

            http://www.hrpub.org/download/20160229/UJEEE3-14905726.pdf
            https://psychtoolbox.org/
            https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309096261_Flicker_Regularity_Is_Crucial_for_Entrainment_of_Alpha_Oscillations
            http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/31/10137.short
            http://www.jneurosci.org/content/24/38/8278.full
            https://thejournalofheadacheandpain.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/1129-2377-14-65
            https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026233624772
            http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0060035

              the smoking gun paper would be something like

              Prolonged rhythmic stimulation of the retina through regular subliminal flicker at specific physiological frequencies matching the alpha, theta, or gamma band of the individual result in habituation and sensitization of neural oscillations via entrainment in regions outside of the visual processing circuitry of the brain.

              but I will have to piece together evidence from the existing literature

                It would be helpful to have a wiki page summarizing what the the hundreds of posts in this forum say. For example, if I were to build a custom laptop right now, what components would I use to reduce the risk of eye strain? From what I know so far I'd:
                - Stay away from Intel Integrated Graphics and Drivers and use nvidia or AMD graphics
                - Stay away from Windows 10 and use 7, 8.1 or Linux
                - Don't use macOS since it is known to dither regardless of graphics card
                - The screen should not use PWM to decrease brightness
                - Depending on the panel or external screen use, install the correct ICC color profile

                  ryans Most laptop screens are 6+2 bit color depth (aka FRC)

                    I think LED allergy or LED sensitivity sybdrome is a good name. I need this also to take political action. In my country, Czech Republic, the pirate party has significant minority in the parliament, they are all tech people and they could understand. I need t push this through them and lightaware.org to european parliament.

                    Also, we can start whatever page we want, research is not being done bcs noone even really knows abou this yet, so it needs to start somewhere.

                    This is a very good idea. It will bring more attention to this problem that so many of us are having.

                    I suggest we dont be too specific, as there are multiple causes of the issue. But I also understand the need to have LED somewhere in the name for legal purposes. Perhaps something like:

                    "LED and display technology eye strain and headaches".

                    The LED is for LED of course. Display technology is to cover all other display related, from PWM, OLED, graphics driver, dithering etc. The eye strain is self explanatory but we need to also put headache or migraines, in order to differentiate that this is not the normal "tired eyes" type of eye strain, but this is pain in the eyes and throbbing headaches and migraines etc, which we can describe in more details in the wiki page.

                      Kray It's also important to make the distinction between usable devices and non-usable devices. For most of us on here, some devices are quite comfortable, others not so much.

                        Peter Good, I like that one too. Shall we start it on regular wikipedia? I can write up a draft and just put it there as a stub, then we can all keep adding info to it and making it more informative and better. I however never done any wikipedia editing, so if anyone has some experience maybe it would be better.

                          Sounds good, easy to spell and understand and it translates into other languages very well too.

                          ShivaWind I have issues on a flicker-free monitor, and believe in my case that it is the backlight, not any subliminal flicker causing my issues, so I still prefer the LED sensitivity name 🙂

                              MagnuM I think LED is the catalyst to our problem. Alexander Wunsch says it causes immediate damage and I think people like us are affected more quickly then normal people. Shiva I believe you can make your eyes a little stronger. Do you have a lot of exposure to flickering lights and LED and CFL everyday?

                                  jasonpicard Do you think after enough years of exposure, general everyday people are going to start having issues with macular degeneration after years of looking at LED displays? What if everyone else should be having the same pain that we do, as our eyes/brains/etc are telling us we shouldn't be looking at it!

                                      dev