CN FORUMS ARCHIVE Telescope Reviews: A Droopy Eye & Using Collimated Binoculars

About five years ago, at about age 52, I started sometimes to see double ... mostly when tired or in dark settings, such as theater, cinema or tv-watching. My optometrist at LensCrafters explained something about a weakened eye muscle, and about it being harder to maintain fused (binocular) vision when tired, or when lacking visual foreground and background reference objects (as when viewing a uni-distant, lighted scene in the dark). He offered two imperfect solutions:

(1) He could adjust the "prism" factor of my very mild prescription glasses (which I only use for particular activities; not for viewing through binos) to fuse images for me. The problems with this solution: The practice is to correct for one-half the doble-vision difficulty, and let the eye muscles do the rest. This works, but-- (a) when you take the glasses off (as I often do), wow, bigtime worse double vision; (b) letting the correction do half the work makes the relevant eye muscles lazier, so over the years that "prism" correction must increase to chase a worsening condition. Nevertheless, I took a free trial. Wow, the correction was great, and wow-wow, when I took the glasses off it was like living in a funhouse. So I returned them.

(2)Vision Therapy, which is quite commonly used for kids discovered to have this condition. The therapy consists of learning exercises, and doing them, and it is well-documented to work. Only problem: adults don't to them. Since I am a pretty disciplined guy, I had him direct me to the opthamology professor in Chicago at the eye institute who knew all about this therapy. His resident tested me and trained me in the appropriate exercises, and one reason I returned on schedule for appointments was the enjoyable view of her. Also, I noticed that 80% of the stuff I was doing at the clinic could be done at home if I got online and bought the equimpent (simple stuff, maybe $100 total). But my optometrist was right; I stopped doing the exercises (and the resident graduated).

The final part of this story is a personal hypothesis: Viewing daily through perfectly collimated, high-quality, smallish exit-pupil binos is akin to some of the vision-therapy exercises. It trains one to relax or focus or whatever it takes to reflexively (unconsciously) fuse a binocular image. As I said, my double vision problem was a sometime thing, but definitley there--certainly enough to attend to with some time, effort and money. I have not noticed it lately, and I attribute that to the just-mentioned hypothesis.

Edited by Neil Weiner (04/08/07 09:57 PM)