Use phone in the dark, go blind...temporarily
After playing with smartphone in bed, young women mysteriously went blind for up to 15 minutes. Easy to prevent doctor discovers.
After playing with smartphone in bed, young women mysteriously went blind for up to 15 minutes. Easy to prevent doctor discovers.
MOBILE PHONES & HEALTH
Use phone in the dark, go blind...temporarily
It's late at night and you can't sleep.
So you grab your phone and check your Facebook timeline, hoping to get sleepy.
Warning, you could go blind, only temporarily blind, but blind nevertheless.
Going blind for only 15 minutes could still be frightening.
Use both your eyes to read in the dark. That is the secret.
HOW COULD YOU READ WITH ONLY ONE EYE?
If you read with your head on your pillow, let's say one is covered by the pillow, so you are reading with one eye.
The problem is that the eye looking at the phone is adapted to the light and the eye in the pillow is adapted to the dark.
When you put the phone down, you may not be able to see with the eye reading from the phone.
It takes a few minutes for the phone eye to catch up to the pillow eye and adapt to the dark.
This temporary blindness is, however, harmless, maybe a little scary but completely avoidable.
That this temporary blindness doesn't happen all the time and doesn't happen to everyone, is also noteworthy
MEDICAL CASE STUDY PUBLISHED
A medical case study on this temporary blindness is published in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine with the title "Transient Smartphone 'Blindness'" (see here).
Two women, aged 22 and 40, experienced "transient smartphone blindness".
The two women "complained of recurring episodes of temporary vision loss for up to 15 minutes" for a period of months.
The two women were given a variety of different medical tests by their physician, including expensive MRI brain scans, but nothing wrong with them could be found.
Like Sherlock Holmes, the detective, their doctor finally determined what the problem was by asking the two women exactly what they were doing when they went blind: their head on their pillow with one eye covered.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/temporary-blindness-tied-smartphone-dark-40058162
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1514294
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/22/482817177/using-a-smartphone-in-bed-made-women-momentarily-blind
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