(Disclaimer- Essilor employee)
I was speaking at a conference last week and ended up in a lengthy discussion with Dr. Debby Feinberg, OD- who operates and organization called NVM Institute (NeuroVisual Medicine). Their website is http://nvminstitute.org
To summarize NVM's concept, they suggest that at least 10% of the general population is affected by at least some degree of Binocular Vision Dysfunction (BVD), with symptoms ranging from headaches, dizziness, and neck pain the whole way up to anxiety and panic attacks. It would seem providing these patients with low amounts of prism (i.e., as little as 0.25D) to resolve small differences in vertical alignment results in a significant reduction/elimination of certain symptoms. They have a number of patient and practitioner testimonials regarding the results patients have experienced.
Honestly, I had seen some coverage on this specialty in the past and didn't give it much thought (or was skeptical at best). However, in speaking with Dr. Feingberg I found myself thinking there's a lot of common sense (optically speaking) in what she is saying. So, I thought I would see if anyone in the Optiboard community specializes in this area (or is employed in a practice that does). Essilor has no particular financial interest (that I'm aware of), I'm just professionally curious.
One of the interesting things Dr. Feinberg mentioned was using traditional Varilux Comfort as a progressive of choice. When I was still dispensing, traditional Comfort used to be my go to lens for any patient with prescribed prism (rationale being the lens had a "sweet spot" that helped the brain figure out exactly where to look- which could be an advantage for a visual system where binocularity is challenged).
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