The Spectator

Do you or a member of your family struggle to concentrate when reading, have visual stress or suffer from Dyslexia?
25% of the population, across all age groups, suffer with some form of visual stress whether it be mild or severe. For many people a unique precision tint can actually help and relieve a lot if not all of the symptoms.
Here at The Eye Place we now have an intuitive colorimeter to find the optimal precision tint needed to provide relief from visual stress. This instrument was developed by Professor Arnold Wilkins and the Medical Research Council. This examination lasts between 20-30 minutes, in which it can go through as many as 100,000 colour combinations, to find the individual colour to match your needs. This bespoke colour can then be reproduced on spectacle lenses, with or without prescription.

Visual stress or Meares-Irlen syndrome as it is actually known, is a sensitivity to visual patterns. Symptoms can still occur despite normal vision. In some individuals this condition can cause visual perception problems which interfere with reading. Patients may exhibit signs when reading of fidgeting, skipping words or re-reading the same line, having to use their finger as a marker or poor comprehension of reading content. In many this leads to frustration and low self-esteem. Patients with visual stress describe symptoms such as movement of printed text, letters changing in size or shape, patterns or colours running through the print and feeling tired or having headaches after reading. This condition affects both children and adults of all ages and quite often diagnosed incorrectly as ADHD.

It is thought that this discomfort when looking at the print is due to a hyper-excitability of neurones in the visual cortex. This means that some of the cells in the part of the brain which deals with processing of visual information work too fast and do not respond in the way they should. Certain cells in the Visual Cortex are colour sensitive and therefore placing a colour in front of the eye can help to slow and calm these cells, therefore reducing visual stress. Due to the individual unique nature of people's brains this very precise examination selects the colour, hue and saturation for the individual person's visual cortex.
Visual stress is not the same as dyslexia, but it is more common in those who are dyslexic. Those with dyslexia often find once these visual stress symptoms have been alleviated, any remaining difficulties are more easily dealt with.
Please contact or come into The Eye Place for more information on colorimetry.

if you'd like to make an appointment, please copy the link:

https://the-eye-place.mysight.uk/Patient/Appointment

or call us on: 02035883886