I hope something comes of this. Going to an optometrist felt like going to a car dealership the last time I went. Blue light filtering was that worthless upswell they wanted to push on everyone. This situation reminds of Cheerios claiming to lower cholesterol[0] and I hope it similarly gets FDA scrutiny - although my amateurish interpretation of the law is that blue light blocking claims are vague enough to not run afoul of regulations.
Overall this situation is just sad because I heard it first from ads, then vision professional, and now folks I know. It seems like it’s infected our collective consciousness without any serious questions of it’s true.
I got this same feeling a few trips ago to the vet. It was like all they cared about was trying to upsell me to put my dog out and clean her teeth. The nice assistant whispered to me “I wouldn’t do any of that to my shepherd” *wink.
Inevitably I had to go back since then and the next it seemed like they cut that crap as it wasn’t like that before and hasn’t been my last 2 trips. Still leaves bad taste in your mouth because you want to do the right thing but not get ripped off.
There was a NPR episode about this (forgot the exact show, might have been planet money). Apparently a ton of vets are being bought out by private companies. Back then, vets would sell to one of the younger vets in their practice when they retire. These private companies are out competing in terms of price hence all these upsell.
Freakonomics Radio did a deep two part series on private equity firms buying up all of the local veterinarians. Definitely worth a listen if you are interested in this stuff.
everything is is bought corporatized and then because just like Gov's big corporations are not great at dealing with bespoke situations, their focus is just making money which leads to upsell methodologies and "capture and hold" subscription models...
I hate it, but I cant see a way out. I self host a lot of stuff at the moment to get away from as much as I can. but there is only so much you can do.
What vets are selling is not the $100 dental cleaning people get. They do the procedure under general anesthesia and all the associated procedures brings the cost well over $1000. But the worst part is the huge risk to animal: something like 1% of cats die during cleaning under general anesthesia. This is a totally unacceptable risk to your pet for a cleaning. If it's actually for a serious dental condition, then you can weigh the risks. But it's pretty sad that vets push such a risky procedure.
I'm on a Banfield membership plan for my dog that's like $50/mo after tax, so $600/yr. The plan comes with routine checkups with some basic lab work, "member rates" at their nation-wide clinics for any non-routine care, all shots included, and one dental cleaning a year. So even if the cleaning was 90% of the cost (I imagine its probably less) that's like $540/yr.
The dogs we had which we didn't do dental cleanings, their mouths were often in pretty rough shape by the end of their lives. Even with us trying to brush on regular schedules and giving good feeding, our geriatric dogs would often end up with lots of bad teeth in the final years of their lives. Meanwhile the dogs we've had which we've done yearly cleanings pretty much never had oral issues throughout their lives even well into very old age. Just my own personal anecdotes, but unless I see something reputable to change my mind I'll probably continue on yearly-ish cleanings.
I definitely do agree its probably way too much stress on a cat though. We did one dental cleaning with our cat and decided it was way too much stress on him and decided we wouldn't do another cleaning unless something got really bad. He's lived just fine without any dental issues for over a decade since that cleaning, so I imagine its probably pretty unnecessary.
Pretty similar diets, pretty much exclusively kibble. Not usually with water poured on it. Plenty of chewing toys and sticks.
By their mouths being in bad shape I mean losing a few teeth at the age of like 13 or 14. But that led to a bit of a downhill spiral, because then they also would stop eating as well, they'd develop other issues, etc. They were all extremely geriatric.
> The dogs we had which we didn't do dental cleanings, their mouths were often in pretty rough shape by the end of their lives. Even with us trying to brush on regular schedules and giving good feeding, our geriatric dogs would often end up with lots of bad teeth in the final years of their lives. Meanwhile the dogs we've had which we've done yearly cleanings pretty much never had oral issues throughout their lives even well into very old age. Just my own personal anecdotes, but unless I see something reputable to change my mind I'll probably continue on yearly-ish cleanings.
Yes, there's a chance for dental infections migrating into the bloodstream and that leads to all kinds of complications. But here's the thing, anesthesia-based dental cleaning for pets should be based on need. Dogs are individuals. Especially the active chewers with healthy mixed breed backgrounds can be just fine without dental work -- just like I'm a middle-aged man with no cavities, an individual not an average. On the other end, Chihuahuas and many stubby-nosed breeds are notorious for bad teeth and needing teeth pulled out.
I don't think anyone (informed) is saying no dog ever should get major dental work.
What greed is doing here is trying to lower the threshold, make the pets that don't necessarily need the service at the moment / as often to go through the procedure.
What they do at my vet is do an oral exam & any indicated work if/when the animal is put under anesthesia for another reason. For instance one of our dogs has been needing 1-2 surgeries a year for the last couple of years (mast cell tumors) and has wound up with a variety of tagalong dental work.
It's not perfect but seems like a happy medium. In particular it scales a bit with age as older animals are going to be more likely to need such surgeries.
> something like 1% of cats die during cleaning under general anesthesia
Pretty damning if true. Surely there are a wealth of sources that corroborate this figure?
Eta: also, it's important to know the early mortality rate of untreated animals versus those that do receive dental cleaning every year. Is it less than the claimed risk of the treatment itself?
Our cat came back unable to meow after being put under. It was a couple of years before he was able to make a high pitched squeak, and he can't do it quietly - it's just a hoarse whisper if he isn't going for it full throat.
The argument is not that it is unnecessary to clean their teeth, it is that it is unnecessary to put them under general anaesthesia in order to clean their teeth.
I struggle to imagine the process of cleaning an animals teeth while they're concious. They would be near certain they are about to die. Then imagine doing that 5 or so times a day with animals you've never met before.
Depending on a cat, cleaning their teath while they're conscious might stress the fuck out of the animal, resulting both in quite uncomfortable for the cat treatment to keep them in a place and difficulties for the vet to get to the back of the teeth. Whoever does dental work for unsadated cats 99% only reaches for front teeth, and not actually potentially problematic areas.
Sincere question: my relatively non-aggressive-at-sales vet, whose office has beocome a bit more aggressive recently, said this month that my nearly 12 year old dog has had a tooth fracture for over a year - and it needs a $X,000 removal relatively soon, for which he would have to go under anaesthesia and stay the day.
Pup has been eating fine, and continues to eat fine, including relatively hard stuff (no bones or bully sticks but softer dental chews). He does have an accumulation of plaque on said tooth which indicates he favors the other side, and despite the hard pitch, I doubt the vet is lying about a fracture.
The literature online is very equivocal about whether tooth removal is needed and says some fractured teeth are fine and don't cause pain.
Any advice / information sources you trust on how to triage this situation?
I would consult with a few additional vets, perhaps some further out in the countryside and/or older.
You need to balance the quality of life of your dog, the cost, the change of death or other complications, along with alternative options (such as switching food when it gets worse).
Thanks. While steep, I’ll happily pay for the procedure if the risks are minimal and the impact on his quality of life is likely to be meaningfully positive.
Yeah, I'd be less inquisitive about price and more asking the other vets to "level with you on the risks".
And the risks may be acceptable, especially if it comes down to "dog continues to live with ever increasing pain" vs "99% chance of pain free vs 1% chance of peacefully passes away on the operating table".
My vet told me a lot of dogs have high pain thresholds and/or will hide their injuries, so they won't necessarily stop eating from mouth pain. He wasn't trying to upsell me, I was asking why my dog was avoiding food and wondering whether it could be a tooth problem (so unlikely to be the case).
That doesn't help much I know, just make sure you get advice from people you trust have a care about dog's quality of life.
All of the reputable information I can find, in addition to the advice of literally every vet I've ever worked with over the last 20 years, says "yes." What reputable source (not something like "naturalnews.com") do you have that says that this is unnecessary and dangerous?
Anecdotally, every optometrist and ophthalmologist I met, who wasn't selling me something at the time of conversation, was pretty dismissive of the whole "blue light filtering" business.
The attempt to block blue light has been with us so long (like a decade or so), the blue-light-filtering products so well commercialized, and yet the underlying claim that blue light affects sleep remains to be inconclusive at best, which makes me doubly wary of its validity.
This. I went recently and something about my eye axis(?) or something was off a bit (which somehow most Americans have?) and mentioned how it’s causing eyestrain. There’s special lenses that correct for this that is… SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS more just for the lenses. Mind you, my glasses are usually really affordable because I have a weak prescription. I was dumbfounded when I heard the price.
That sounds, to my utterly unprofessional ass, like an astigmatism? Basically your eye is deformed slightly like a football, giving your prescription a strength, cyclical value (a cylindrical bias to the lens, as I understand it) and a rotation of that cylindrical bias for the eye.
It does require small stores to order them custom (larger stores can often grind them in-house), but $600 seems... off. Perhaps if it's a high refraction material (thinner lenses) with all the various coatings?
The nice thing is if you have your prescription, you can order glasses from anywhere (including online), your prescription is not tied to one provider.
"Axis" is a term used with respect to astigmatism, but correcting for astigmatism is a basic part of lensmaking, and even the cheapest pair of glasses can do it, so this is either something else, or an astoundingly bare-faced rip-off.
To basically +1 the sibling comment, you likely have astigmatism. $600 is pretty high but lenses are quite a bit more expensive than standard spherical lenses.
It is incredibly common, but essentially your eye is elongated in one axis meaning that your lenses need to correct differently in each axis. It also means that despite having a low prescription, you may have focus issues across the spectrum of depth.
I have astigmatism (-3.75 diopters of it in one eye), and there has never been any extra charge for making my lenses. Where are you getting this idea that astigmatism-correcting lenses are quite a bit more expensive?
I’ve seen some glasses manufacturers charge me more for astigmatic lenses specifically. Never to the magnitude the other person mentioned but also not at the same cost. It was part of the cost breakdown on the receipt, but likely they’re just fleecing people. I didn’t end up buying from them.
But in general, it’s been the same cost as non-astigmatic lenses.
What I meant to say is, lenses “may” be more but I accidentally dropped the “may ”. Too late to edit now
For that size of astigmatism I would think there was an extra price you don't get the price of a lens broken down like that (bi focals and the blue filter will show up as extras) So how do you know there is no extra.
I just had to pay more as my prescription on astigmatism went from 2 to 2.5
You likely had to pay more to get the thinner "high index" lenses. Otherwise lenses get pretty thick at that power, but they don't cost much more as long as you're willing to live with that thickness.
There are frames advertised, with prices, before they have any idea what my prescription is. I add to cart, and give my prescription. The price is the same. So, they can't be adding extra for my astigmatism.
Yep, it does sound like astigmatism. I have it. It only got detected when i was around 30 but apparently I've had it since birth. My first pair of glasses basically eliminated any eye strain / fatigue for the first few years in spite of having more cylinder than dioptries.
However, my lenses were never more expensive than my wife's who doesn't have any (astigmatism. she does have dioptries). Only difference is they're never in stock and I have to wait a couple days.
When it’s not severe it’s hard to correct and annoying. For me, I have a hard time with night driving in the rain because of it. But I found the correction annoying in normal circumstances.
Do you mean prismatic lenses? I had awful headaches at one point and the optician added prism to my prescription, I don't think the cost changed at all (UK optician).
I believe prismatic lenses are normally used to correct muscle weakness which may cause eye strain (and double vision in severe cases). My prescription was changed back to no prism after a few years.
Edit: siblings are likely correct after reading your comment again. It's likely astigmatism which I also have. But $600 is still ridiculous.
My prisms aim to make me not cross eyed all the time, but I'm pretty sure my brain just compensated to make my eyes even more cross eyed to keep the double vision
I've had the opposite experience. Despite having a pair of "computer vision" glasses included as part of my plan, the optometrists I've been to have all pretty much dismissed tinted lenses as woo-woo. They did suggest a pair of lower-power lenses for computer use, but that was it.
I say to my optometrist that I cannot have any color filters on my glass because of work. You cannot do colour grading with random filters. No pushing nonsense bluefilter since then.
I guess I have to speak up as every one made their mind and knows how the blue-blocking glasses are useless placebo gimick made up to take your precious 20$ from you.
I developed an eye pain condition around 14 years ago in university years, my eye sight was not really degrading but I get physical tension turning into pain in the eyes if I look at the screen for about 3-4 hours. I know that I still have this condition because sometimes I forget my glasses to the office and I have to take breaks much more often than otherwise. With the glasses I can work all day, then play video games, watch movies etc without feeling anything.
One thing I want to add is that there are seems to be different types of these glasses as I bought about 10 pairs and 2 of them also didn't work for me. So when I need a new pair I just take the one I know is good and ask optician if they have exactly the same type of filter.
So if the research says there isn't enough evidence it's fine, do more researches and find out exactly what happens here, but don't go around and tell how it's all made up and not helping anyone.
I worked in a big box electronics retail store in the early 2010s. Most customers were reasonably trusting which as someone not looking to screw them over made for quite a pleasant job. Perhaps the worst type of customer, was the vaguely ‘informed’ know it all ‘nerd’. Around this time, the “don’t buy the expensive gold-plated HDMI cable” movement was in full swing, but it was also about this time that different types of HDMI cables were starting to matter for (higher-end) prosumer setups.
Trying to convince some abrasive knowitall that our $15 home brand HDMI cable is going to be the bottleneck in their setup, and that it was basically orthogonal to any ‘good plated’ BS, was almost always not worth it. Eventually I learned to just let them make their own mistakes, dooming them to slink off to Amazon or whatever when they weren’t getting the resolution or frame rate they were after and eventually happened upon the CNET article that made them see the light.
The fact that there is an objective functional difference between different types of HDMI cables, whereas the jury is still out on blue blocker glasses, is pretty much irrelevant to my point. Any ‘science says…’ rhetoric is almost always parroted by people that don’t know what they’re talking about. At the end of the day, self-described ‘informed consumers’ LOVE feeling like they’ve got The Knowledge that’s going to give them a leg up on the slimy salesperson. A fair bit of the time though, the fact that the majority of these people aren’t actually all that knowledgeable means that these pearls of wisdom get corrupted over time and end up being entirely untrue. I’ve got no doubt that plenty of Hacker News regulars are the sorts of people that were incredibly hard to work with back then.
Well, engineers are kind of the archetypal model of the "but ackshually..." guy, so I'd venture to say you're right. I used to be more bold in my pronouncements when I was younger, now I think I like to repeat stuff I've heard like "interesting, I had heard that X was a factor with this, do you know if that's true or not?" In these situations. Having some intellectual humility and actively seeking opinions of people who might be more informed goes a long way.
This also works in _so many different work environments too_! I like how you term it "intellectual humility" but I wonder if "professional intellectual humility" is more suited.
Yeah it's considerably more harmful in professional environments, imo. I forgot to mention in my initial comment that I feel like people underestimate how effective it is to drop the pretense that you already know enough about what's being discussed to learn more, and how 'disarming' it is to people to be asked instead of told.
Disarming in a sense that they will usually be inclined to react in a magnanimous way, instead of possibly adopting some other frictional communication pattern. It really just makes everything easier if you actively try to leave your ego at the door.
yes, there are so many frustrating communication archetypes I feel like there should be a compendium/dictionary of them. Unfortunately, most of them seem ego-driven, so it takes a lot typically for people to grow out of them.
I didn't realize there was anyone that thought the box store $15 cables were actually good-enough?
My understanding of them was (and assume still is) they sold two classes of cable: high-spec, brand-name "gold-plated", and dogshit-quality maybe just meets minimum-spec garbage. Both were way overpriced (aka: high-margin), and this is the entire business model: sell the TV at razor-thin margin, then make all the profit on over-priced cables.
Their $15 cable should really be $2, if that. Their $150 alternative should actually be maybe $30. Elsewhere you could pay $15-20 to get a high-end cable that was somewhere between 90 and 110% the quality. This is what I told to my friends/family.
I've definitely had people try to sell me cables but I've just politely declined and can't recall anyone being pushy about it.
And you must admit the "gold plated" thing was insane for a while. At the time when toslink was the rage, you could buy gold-plated fiber-optic cables. I also remember seeing an in-store display comparing cables their high-end HDMI cable to an alternative.. which of course was maybe-24awg dogshit composite cable. It's just so sleazy.
Less about home vs gold plated more of there are different hdmi spec. HDMI 1.0 doesn’t support 4k@60Hz, HDMI 2 does, while hdmi 2.1 is 4k@240 Hz. The port looks the same. I’m sure a home store branded hdmi 2.1 is ok, just have to make sure the standard is the one you want.
It depends. HDMI did a USB, and depending on the exact source and sink devices the capabilities may range between what you think of as HDMI 2.1 and “literally the same as 2.0”.
The 2.1 standard supersedes the 2.0 standard, hdmi is not issuing any more 2.0 certs, so any device with that capability level is now 2.1 automatically even with no hardware changes. And every feature is optional, from VRR and 10b to hdr brightness and color profiles.
Notably M1 macs are only 4K60 HDMI 2.1, but there are many others, not just an apple thing at all. Always check the specific features you care about on your devices!
HDMI has several versions with compatible connectors. Later versions of the spec use some previously-unused pins, if you buy a cable without those wires connected (pre-1.4) you won't get Ethernet over HDMI or the audio return channel. Also, just like Cat 3 phone cable, Cat 5/5e/6 optionally-shielded Ethernet cables, the data lines can be designed for different clock rates.
An ancient cable wired into the walls of your early-2000s home theater may legitimately not support your new 4k HDR gear.
And frankly - the know-it-all customers are still right...
In the large majority of use-cases, the cheap cable is going to do fine.
In the small minority of cases it won't... choosing to buy the newer spec cable from a company that's promoting obvious bullshit (like gold contacts) just screams "I'm getting scammed". If the only version of the new spec HDMI cable you carry is a needlessly upmarket and expensive version of the cable... assume they're slinking off to amazon for good reason... to go buy the cheap version of the right spec cable online.
“It works for me” does not imply “it can’t possibly be a placebo”. Both could be true.
I’m not saying the blue light thing is or isn’t real, but I see this kind of argument made all the time, and I can’t tell if people just don’t understand what the placebo effect is or if everyone just thinks they’re special and the placebo effect doesn’t apply to them or what.
Sure but how do you account for two of them not working vs other ones working? It's likely doing some effect, but it seems to be just nuanced enough.
I feel like after I got the filter on my glasses that when I lay in bed, I'm not laying there feeling unable to sleep like I would many nights before. Is it placebo? Maybe, but I totally forgot I got the filter on my glasses and realized sometime later.
Simple. When the original poster tries a new pair, they assume it may not work. If they happen to feel pain they mentally mark the glasses as “one of the bad ones”. From then on the placebo effect won't apply to that pair because they don’t believe it will help.
Humans are great at finding patterns in randomness like this; this is exactly why superstitions are so prevalent.
When something is identified as a placebo, that is not the same as saying it can't or won't help anyone. The placebo effect is a real, measurable phenomenon. As a non-scientist I'm probably going to grossly oversimplify this, but when testing the efficacy of a drug or medical device the whole reason you need to have a control group taking a placebo (sugar pills, for example) is because the placebo will actually cause some people in that group to have a real, measurable improvement in whatever it is being measured. The only way to know if the real drug or device you're testing actually works is if the improvements experienced by the test group is better than the improvements experienced by the control group.
Additionally, I think this research/review was focused only on whether blue light filters help reduce eyestrain in the general population. So saying it had no effect here doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility that they could help in individuals with specific medical conditions that weren't controlled for or factored in here, just that in the general case they seem to have no effect.
I'm totally with you. I always had eye strain when on the PC but since wearing cheap orange glasses (with no dioptrine) I don't have it anymore. I can take of my glasses and within 5 minutes on the PC I notice the eye strain. It definitely works (for me, with certain glasses). I only use these glasses when at a screen, so basically it would make no sense at all to use it if it weren't helping (though I do like the orange effect ;)).
btw. just because some people don't have this particular eye strain problem, doesn't mean it's all a giant hoax. Come on, people.
Actually, yes. It was a journey starting from regulating all kinds of monitor settings (brightness, contrast etc. The "warm" setting helps too.) and then just trying out my sunglasses which actually helped but were a little too dark. So I just splurged on 20 euro blue light filter glasses (this was about 4 years ago and even back then there were reports that some glasses weren't working for people. Which is why I "trust" my orange ones more than I would uncolorized. Though I would notice in a day if they wouldn't work..)
I use nightmode + my glasses actually... nightmode alone is not sufficient for me (nightmode without glasses is ok for my smartphone use actually). I think it's important to recognize that we all have different sets of eyes and requirements.
btw. I can't put nightmode in Windows too close to 100 percent (i put it between 50-65) because then the contrast is just too bad. That's why I use nightmode+glasses. btw2: QR codes (banking) don't work in nightmode^^
> I can't put nightmode in Windows too close to 100 percent (i put it between 50-65) because then the contrast is just too bad.
I hate windows night mode. As soon as you go above "slight" (can't remember the numbers, I'm not a frequent windows user and don't have one handy to check) it gets a sickly yellow taint. Last I checked (2-3 years ago) macos's wasn't great either, although somewhat serviceable.
>If the eyestrain persists, see an eye-care health professional who can perform a thorough examination of your eye health, Downie said. “Sometimes eyestrain can be actually caused by an underlying eye health or vision problem,” she said.
Idk if you have already, but could be a good idea to visit a professional for an evaluation.
My friend was having eye sight issues and a bit of strain, turns out it was a brain injury.
But if researchers say there isn't enough evidence, where will the average consumer turn to to "do more research"? That's where the shady pseudoscience advertising articles come in, who will gladly make unfounded claims with absolute confidence.
I meant that specialists should do more research on the topic. For the average consumer there is not much choice, either wait for more conclusive results or try it out themselves and see if it makes a noticeable difference in their specific condition.
Fair enough, but we should be aware that the placebo effect is real and it could easily explain what you feel.
> So if the research says there isn't enough evidence it's fine, do more researches and find out exactly what happens here, but don't go around and tell how it's all made up and not helping anyone.
people aren't doing this though... Equating "not enough evidence" with "it's false" is a straw man argument. And starting with accepting the need for more research but then chastising them for expressing skepticism is bad. The emotional appeal is also bad, we aren't causing harm by voicing our skepticism.
I'll start by saying I work in the industry and I have actually worked on making blue blocking coatings.
There are two ways these filters work.
The first and older method is to tint the lenses so that they absorb blue light. This will make the the lenses look yellow or orange. The wavelength that is normally targeted is 455nm. The more yellow or orange the lenses look the more blue light they are blocking. This tinting process works the same as it does in a normal sunglass lens (by dipping the lens in a hot water bath that has dyes dissolved in it; the dyes migrate to the porous lens material).
The second method is to put a blue reflective coating on the lenses using vacuum deposition. You can recognize these lenses because they have a strong blue reflection (not to be confused with a subtle blue reflection which can be seen in a normal anti-reflective layer). These lenses won't block as much blue light as the tinted lenses but they look nearly like normal glasses.
I suppose some manufactureres may try a hybrid approach although (both absorption and reflection). Anyway the general thing to think about is that the more "normal" the lenses appear the less blue light they will block.
I never understood their use as computer glasses because all computers and phones have low blue light modes now and these do what they say they do, and I've measured the output of screens with a spectrophotometer.
>So if the research says there isn't enough evidence it's fine, do more researches and find out exactly what happens here, but don't go around and tell how it's all made up and not helping anyone.
I think most of the backlash is against the the claims that blue light is damaging and that these filters will protect your eyes. I think in these cases the evidence has to come first.
Obviously if someone suffers from eyestrain it's great that there are products out there that you can try (on a personal scale it doesn't matter if the solution is placebo or a not yet clearly understood therapy) but this is different from saying that everyone should have these to protect their eyes from the danger of blue light. Personally I use the night mode feature on my devices but I wouldn't bother with the glasses because to me they seem redundant.
Another thing I would like to add is that I've never met anyone technical working in the industry that actually believes these filters work and everyone considers them a marketing led exercise.
> I never understood their use as computer glasses because all computers and phones have low blue light modes now and these do what they say they do, and I've measured the output of screens with a spectrophotometer.
Anecdotally, when I first had "anti-blue-light computer glasses" many years ago, nor windows nor mac os had the "night mode" feature. Run-of-the-mill monitors didn't have it, either, instead sporting an extremely blueish image. I don't know that my glasses helped with sleep, but they sure as hell made the screens more pleasant to look at.
And no, fiddling with the monitor settings didn't really help. I'm talking about your standard crappy enterprise monitors, with abysmal contrast, so that if you lowered the brightness or some such you couldn't make out anything anymore on them.
Exactly, I have some of the kind that actually have a visible yellow tint and blue reflect -- I get eyestrain after a long time, but without them on the crappy monitors at my old job I got eyestrain within one hour, and my phone was unusable at the end of the day.
> With the glasses I can work all day, then play video games, watch movies etc without feeling anything.
So it's not just working. It's working, then playing video games and watching movies. They also say they have to take breaks much more often when they don't wear them, which implies they don't take a break as many breaks when they are wearing them.
I have quite bad wrist pain when I use a PC, and I'm a developer. I feel like it's like me taking ibuprofen to dampen the pain rather than taking regular breaks from my PC.
Sometimes your body is trying to tell you something and IMO it's good to listen.
I don't say that at all, that's pretty bad faith. My point was that taking regular breaks as they say they do when they forget their glasses is a better solution than just powering through with some glasses that may or may not work.
I mean definitely that would be best, but it so happened that most of my daily life, career and entertainment is related with screens. At least in my case this condition is not getting worse so for now these glasses allow me to do all this in a pretty comfortable way.
Weren't blue-light glasses originally marketed as a solution to aid sleep by blocking out the sleep-disrupting effects of blue light emitted from screens in bed?
Seems like they're debunking a claim that's not actually their selling point.
> The idea behind blue-blocking lenses is to stop the light from entering the eye and throwing the circadian rhythm off; however, this has not been established with any degree of certainty in clinical studies, Miller said. [...]
Then it goes on, mentioning some research in more detail. However, the article doesn't interpret anything, or talk about why the research about lens effect provided inconsistent results, or even link to the actual research where this may be explained.
It is interesting how decisive the comments are given the ambiguity here.
Personally, I find that light reduction in general and blue light reduction in particular help me to fall asleep and she'll better. It could be placebo, but I don't care. I like to feel rested.
Honestly even if that doesn't do much for most those things are great for me, I have a migraine-adjacent visual issue which gives me photophobia and lowering the colour temperature of light in general helps with that.
That didn't sell well enough (to people who use a computer 8am-5pm), so now the sales pitch also includes eye fatigue and "improved visual performance", whatever that means.
If you've ever tried a pair of Gunnar ambers you'd know what real blue light filtering is. With them on, it's not a subtle effect. You see with an amber tint. The monitor just appears less noisy. I've worked 12 hours straight in them in the past after which I'm physically and mentally tired but my eyes aren't. Without them I can't work, which is exactly how you know they're working.
If you're a programmer just looking at text all day, they are worth every penny. If you're a designer and color perception is important to you, you're out of luck.
Not affiliated to Gunnar in any way. Just a happy customer of 6 years.
I don’t have this specific brand of glasses, but mines are yellow tinted and although it makes me see the world with a different hue, I notice that when working, my eye is way less strained with them on. I have astigmatism so maybe there’s some correlation there with the dimmed brightness.
I used green CRTs (Apple II), orange CRTs, B&W CRTs, CGA, EGA, VGA, SuperVGA CRTs at least 12hr/day since the early 80s, then I started hearing people afraid of radiation and moving to LCDs in the 90s which I also used again at least 12hr daily, and I still keep using my laptop and reading my phone. From the Apple II manuals I have always remembered the technique of focusing on objects at different distances for several minutes to rest. But I also developed my own technique of closing the eye in pain and placing my fingertips around the cornea and applying little pressure until colored spots appear in the vision, there will be more pain than the one caused by eyestrain, but after a while it will go, and when releasing the fingers the eye will feel refreshed. I have good sight after all these years.
Neither staring at monitors nor print is actually expected to actually cause worsening eyesight. The idea that nerds need glasses because they stare at small print is a myth. On the other hand poking yourself in the eye and ignoring discomfort caused by the pressure could easily see you do some local damage. I would not advise anyone to actually follow your eye care regimen.
But it tends to not be about the "closeness" AFIK.
But about most "close work" being work which requires your eyes to focus on details, which in turn reduce the amount you blink, which in turn dries out your eyes which in turn can negatively affects it over a long time in various ways.
In children there is also the additional factor that part of their organs are potentially still developing and various external factors might nudge such development in bad directions. Through idk if that applies here.
Lastly some degree of sightedness is your brains ability to process the signals it gets, that part can sometimes, especially in children, make exact diagnosis surprisingly harder. You can sometimes observe this yourself if you have glasses, look with glasses at a text which without glasses you are barely not able to read. Then take of glasses and observe that while you initially are barely not able to read it after some time your brain tends to adapt and make it barely readable. So there is some chance that children brains might just have learned less to process far away signals, without their physical eye sight being change. Through I don't have time to find/read the study implicitly linked through the newspaper to check there methodology to check if it could have affected the study or if it couldn't have.
> But it tends to not be about the "closeness" AFIK.
I've seen studies explaining their findings as the muscles getting used to only focusing near, as a sort of range of motion thing. One study grouped kids based on the amount of time spent outdoors vs indoors (as a rough proxy of focusing on distant vs only on near things) and showed a statistical difference in myopia rates between the groups.
Hey, dont do that. Thats damaging your eye. It may not affect your vision, but your eyes are super soft and squishy, you can do damage if you rub or press on them to the point of color visualizations. Yes, even the amazing deep knuckle rubbing eye scrub, is bad for you. Still happens, but yeah, dont do that.
You should go see a doctor if you have that much pain or strain. Your vision likely isnt as good as you think.
Yes, there's evidence that eye rubbing is a risk factor for keratoconus.
Not sure I follow what your point is about sleeping. Some folks may indeed rub their eyes unconsciously while they sleep, but that doesn't mean it's healthy.
Thanks for sharing your facinating approach. By good eyesight do you mean 20/20?
How old were you when you started using computers?
Do you know of anyone else using your technique, if so what are their results?
For what it's worth, 20/20 is a woefully inadequate measurement to claim good eyesight in the context of reading or computer use. (It works well for "can walk around town" or "can drive a car".)
Vision works differently at different distances. I have "20/20 vision" (see distant objects at least as well as average), but I also am practically unable to read small print, need reading glasses to read for more than 15 minutes or to read a backlit Kindle in the dark, I sometimes get eye strain headaches if I don't wear my computer glasses, and I'm suffering from glaucoma which, if untreated, will make me blind in a way where I'll likely retain 20/20 vision for a very long time while losing peripheral vision, contrast, and ability to read for more than 15 minutes.
The eye, and the nervous system it feeds, is a complex system with various failure modes.
If you have eye strain, go see an optician. If they think you should also see an ophthalmologist, do that too. If any of your parents/their siblings/grandparents developed glaucoma, and you're 40+ years, go see an ophthalmologist and tell them who all was affected, it's hereditary.
Thanks, I don't feel much eyestrain and have excessively good near vision, but I'm always on the look out for far out ways to improve or prevent further near sightedness.
Good question, haven't visited the optometrist since I was a child for casual checking. Just tried and I'm able to read text with light Arial font size 11 in a 15" monitor 1.4m apart, if that provides any clue. Good eyesight at night. Started using computers when about 10yo. Started feeling eye pain (quick needle in the eye kind of pain) since about 30 years ago, and use the technique since then, the pain goes for a few months, and maybe I've had 3 eyestrain crisis in those 30 years, in which I had to apply the method once or twice per day for 1 or 2 weeks then got well for months. I don't know of anyone else using it.
there was on brand of missproduced (I think TVs) which did actually had radiation issues ;=)
through the whole bad eyesight from sitting to close to a TV things was basically nonsense
they main issue which can cause strain and long term eyesight issues is from blinking to little and in turn getting to dry eyes which could lead to microscopic damage which can accumulate over the years AFIK
This is probably why your method works => you close the eye and force production of some tears .
Through eyeballs are sensitive and anything involving "spots appear in the vision" tends to be a bad idea, so I would personally refrain from doing so. Just "strongly" closing the eyes without involving your hands tend to be good enough for facilitating some tear production.
A CRT and an xray are essentially similar internally. However a properly made TV tube had plenty of lead (or other, but normally lead) to block the xrays from getting out.
In the blue light filter setting on iOS Apple already uses wording like "some people think it reduces eye strain" or some such non-committent language that makes clear people ask for this, but Apple knows it doesn't actually work.
I have found that a monitor light bar is excellent for reducing eye-strain in a dark room where the monitor is the only light source. BenQ makes the OG [1] but there are knockoffs available on Amazon that are decent.
For daytime, facing a window while using a monitor is a major source of strain. This, of course, is a common post-pandemic arrangement as Team/Zoom calls look best with natural light on your face, but it's not doing your eyes any favours. The reason being that natural light intensity changes by multiple orders of magnitude, between sunny and overcast. Since the monitor stays at a constant brightness, your eyes have to work hard to keep the monitor at a constant perceptive brightness against a widely varying background, invariably causing strain over the course of the day.
The original monitor light doesn't make the wall brighter (the Halo edition is a relatively new offering). Rather it provides a smooth intensity gradient on the work surface directly in front of and underneath the monitor. This smooth gradient is very effective at reducing eyestrain.
Unless the room lights are specifically designed for optimal lighting of the workspace, they cannot achieve the same effect. In typical homes, the room light is either a single ceiling fixture or lamps (one or more), spread throughout.
If anyone has issues with headaches or eye strain, try lowering the brightness of your device, like to the lowest you can bear. In conjunction with that, use flux or night shift or set your monitor to a warm white. No one needs to buy glasses for this. For TVs, HDR usually requires max brightness for the best colors.
This is really bad and dated advice and I would encourage everyone to not listen to it.
The lowest brightness levels often have very poor contrast levels and will cause more eye strain as your eye will have a harder time discerning what’s on screen.
Additionally at lower brightness levels you may have higher flicker on displays due to PWM.
It makes sense to work at a brightness level that is appropriate for your environment. If your screen supports ambient light detection, enable it. Ideally you don’t want your eyes to constantly be shifting between brightness levels of your screen and the world around it.
If you do have eye strain, make sure to take regular breaks and excercise your eye by focusing on things at different depths. That has been shown to help push presbyopia to later years (but nothing really prevents it)
Also HDR colors are NOT best at maximum brightness. It’s a common misconception because humans react better to brightness. It wholly depends on your display technology , but color accuracy and depth are not linearly related to brightness and often have a falloff when you get to higher brightness unless you’re using an OLED display.
In color accurate fields, monitors aren’t set to highest brightness. Colors are calibrated against a standard Nit value which may be lower than what the monitor displays. Above and below those values, your colours are often going to be wrong compared to the intended content.
Colors are not the problem, the brightness is. When I passed coworkers' computers, their screens were always at 100%. That's like listening to music with 1000 Watt speaker right next to your ear. No wonder people keep complaining about headaches and tired eyes and whatnot. TVs are not as bad due to the distance one is watching them but still falls into the same issue.
When I tell people to halve their brightness and contrast they never do it because when you go from 100% to 50% it looks so dark you cannot see anything. If they would give it 5 minutes for their eyes to adjust, they'd have no more headaches.
> Future high-quality randomised trials are required to define more clearly the effects of blue-light filtering lenses on visual performance, macular health and sleep, in adult populations.
Interesting finding. A tangent: even if this study is correct, there still may be value in certain nonprescription lenses for long computer use.
I have glasses my optometrist suggested for long computer use, and they do block blue light, but she seemed more concerned with focal distance. She says that our eyes more naturally focus on things further away, but that lenses can adjust the focal point to be closer in, reducing eye strain.
I have adjusted to them, and now prefer using them. When I don't have them, it feels like things take more energy/focus to read on the screen, and if I leave my desk without taking them off, it feels like it's harder to focus on things at longer distances. I'm already nearsighted and wearing them in addition to contacts.
This is very interesting as I'm also nearsighted and wear contacts most of the time, and I've noticed a bit of eye strain lately as I get older. I know you're wearing them in addition to your RX contacts but are the glasses themselves prescription or OTC?
My optometrist told me that any pair of glasses can be made to adjust the focal point, and that if I regularly wear my prescription glasses instead of contacts, I should also buy a pair of prescription glasses with adjusted focal point for computer work. (I opted not to do that since I am almost always in contacts and because of the cost.)
I skipped the option the last time I bought new glasses because they had jacked the price up considerably, and have discovered experienced absolutely zero impact.
I grabbed the full 17 page review but couldn’t grep “migraine”.
I hope one of the many studies mentioned migraine. I got some benefit from wearing Axon brand who holds a patent on blue/amber blocking if it matters or not(0). The effect changed to worsening when my eyes changed and the glasses harm more than help. I may consider getting a set of lenses without a prescription.
I’ll let whoever reads their page make their own judgements but as they say, different techniques for blue blocking vary wildly so it would seem you need to identify what technology/brand and it’s effects versus others. The graphs show the differences and some don’t even block blue light very well or amber at all from screens or overhead lighting causing light sensitivity -> migraines.
Yes, we know. I had a pair, I didn't think they had any effect whatsoever, I said that when it came time to get a new pair of glasses and the optician shrugged and said yeah if they do anything it's really minor, but some people like them. And this wouldn't be the first study to support that.
Also tried the slightly yellow "drive safe" ones but they didn't help with night driving like they were meant to either. Turns out what's really helpful there is giving the inside of my windscreen a really good clean. What a shame it's the hardest bit of glass in the car to do!
Anyway I've gone back to standard ultrathin lenses with protective and anti-reflective coatings and I'm really happy with them. Which is great, because my lenses are hideously expensive as it is due to my ridiculous prescription.
I thought the point of reducing blue light was long term eye health, like less long term "degeneration" type problems down the road like cataracts and macular degeneration and such.
I'm a software manager and used to be a developer. I used to get crushing headaches pretty often when I was working, typically at least once or twice per week. They would always start around lunchtime with mild eye pain and a dull headache, progressing to migraine-like stabbing pains by 3-4PM. I'd have to take ibuprofen and lay down in a dark room for at least an hour with a washcloth over my face to make them go away. This went on for years.
Early last year I got blue-light coating added to my new prescription glasses. This wasn't deliberate; the glasses place had just upgraded their standard lenses with the coating so I figured why not? The headaches went away almost immediately and I maybe got one or two in the entire following YEAR (as opposed to at least 3-4/month before). I still wasn't convinced though so when it came time for new glasses this year I got them without the coating. In the next two weeks I got multiple severe headaches, so I went back and exchanged them for new glasses with the coating. This was in April and I haven't had a single bad headache since.
Maybe this is all placebo but since I wasn't particularly expecting them to help much initially I doubt it.
Lots angry deniers here, however there is a good deal of research that short-wave blue light <=450 nm is more harmful to retina than long wave blue light >450nm, and there is good amount of monitors nowadays which have blue light peak shifted to 460nm (without any noticeable difference in colors), without any price difference, this is a yet another point to pay attention for while buying a new screen.
Have no idea what your point is, but glasses could be in theory made from material that significantly alters the spectrum, removing shortwave part of blue light but leaving longwave, without significantly changing the percepted color. Check eyesafe.com.
Right, so I developed eye pain in my univercity years and since them I'm wearing blue light filter glasses for 14 yeas spending 6+ hours at screen every day without any problems. Is this insecure part or gimick one?
That's a pretty narrow niche. No matter how much you don't want them, there's only a few years or so when you can mostly get by without them, once the amblyopia has begun.
My reading glasses have blue light blocking, though it wasn't a feature I was looking for and I buy them in packs of six for about $25.
Or, and I will admit it, people with healthy eyes that like the look of glasses and finally found an excuse to buy them. I never used them though. Also it really did feel like a marketing gimmick, holding it in front of a pure blue picture, I couldn't see much difference between it with or without glasses.
The biggest problem is levels of brightness on screens. Most people don't change it, and by the time they've realised it's affecting their eyes, it's too late. And i think mobile adaptive brightness does not account for how we must always use lesser on-light screens.
It's not enough to block out a few random wavelengths of blue, you need to reduce them all.
One of you told about using amber glasses to protect themselves from LED streetlights. I found that amber glasses blocked out too much light. Some yellow glasses are pretty good, some yellow glasses are worthless. These are my new favorite blue-blockers: https://www.harborfreight.com/safety/vision-protection/safet...
They work great with contacts. I can also put my glasses over them. They're not as good as the Cocoons, that my local glasses store stopped selling because people were wearing them at night, but they can't be beat for the price.
My comment from 1.5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29962021 "Most of the glasses sold for blue-light blocking don't block nearly enough of the blue light to make a meaningful difference. I think the main thing is to reduce the amount of blue light that you're exposed to at night. [...]"
I use the yellow 'night-driving' clip-ons for my (Zenni) glasses. I didn't think to order them when I got my glasses, but thankfully you can order them separately, by specifying the model number of your glasses.
I haven't done a rigorous test, but I feel like I get sleepier sooner with the clip-ons, than I do with just my glasses (which block only some of the higher frequency blue light).
I've got a blue light "monitor filter" in my indoor glasses and that UV-reactive shading stuff in my outdoor ones. I can definitely tell if I've forgotten to switch when coming home, screen does look harsher.
However, it's not a miracle cure. I still get eyestrain if there's too high contrast. Like if I play a dark game, turn off lights, then forget to turn lights on after playing, I'll notice my eyes straining and I'll go "oh, lights", turn them on and feel much better within a short time.
But seriously, why we always hear people claim they feel better after wearing blue filter glasses?! I am pretty sure everyone had heard such stories, then if it is not useful, why?
Oh so we're just ignoring the fact there's tons of different types of these glasses, many of which only filter UV but some that actually do filter blue light, and ignore all the anecdotal evidence from people like myself who say yes, it does actually help, when wearing the right type... alright then! I guess we're all just gaslighting ourselves out of having our eyes hurt 24/7
the amount of blue light emitted from a screen is quite small compared to, well going outside even on a quite dark and cloudy day
The main source for eye strain (assuming a healthy eye) is not blinking enough due to focusing too much (a issue with is not new/existed pre-computer age). Most things which are commonly associated with being more straining also tend to make you focus more in ways which tend to make you blink less.
Through even if IMHO the blue light in a monitor is unlikely to cause eye strain the exact light mixture it is in might very well affect you psychologically. Combine that with e.g. the placebo effect and using blue light filters might very well help you sleep better or be more relaxed at work and in turn have more micro pauses in which you blink. Something a "properly isolated study" might not capture.
I did calculations and it is not true. My calculations show that 1 hour walk on a bright sunny day with no sunglasses on , would irradiate the retinas with the same amount of short-wave blue light as 8 hours of working on a screen at 150 nits.
Aren't such glasses supposed to prevent the harmful effect of blue light on the retina (and reduce the chances of macular degeneration) more than to “reduce eyestrain”?
What should one do if something works for them, but scientific evidence suggests otherwise? Tough to say.
However, if you experience eye strain after prolonged computer use (as I do), consider a blue light filter glass from Amazon. I recommend the ones with a strong orange tint. They're also available as clip-ons. Give them a shot and see if they alleviate your pain. If they don't help, return them. Essentially, you're making a no-risk investment. In the worst-case scenario, you lose nothing, but in the best-case scenario, it could remedy your eye strain, just as it did for me.
Overall this situation is just sad because I heard it first from ads, then vision professional, and now folks I know. It seems like it’s infected our collective consciousness without any serious questions of it’s true.
Edit: [0]: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/Cholesterol/story?id=7574156