Relying on a couple of patients and a series of tests, researchers have cautioned against using smartphones while in bed.
Advertisement
In the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors have detailed the cases of 2 women who went temporarily blind from constantly checking their phones in the dark! As a result, temporary blindness lasting for up to 15 minutes would occur in the eye that was not staring at the phone. They wrote this one up in an effort to save people time and money. The use of smartphones while in bed is rising rapidly.
For two women in the United Kingdom, mysterious vision problems that happened only at night or early in the morning turned out to have a rather innocuous cause: looking at a smartphone in the dark.
Though the loss of vision varied between the two women, doctors were able to find a pretty significant similarity between the two women. She could see perfectly out of her left eye, but could barely make out shapes in the room through her right. The other eye was usually covered with a pillow.
Finally they conclude these transient episodes of “vision loss” were harmless, in that one eye was being used to look at the phone and the other eye needed time to “catch up”.
In both cases, nothing bad was going on. However, one retina was adapted to light and the other to dark.
“The retina is pretty fantastic because it can adapt to lots of different light levels, probably better than any camera”.
The study explained that the symptoms were caused by each eye trying to adjust to different lighting.
The researchers asked the two patients to do a little experiment, viewing the smartphone with just the left eye, then just the right eye on separate occasions.
The problem was that both women laid on their side in bed while looking at their smartphone with one eye, while their other eye was obstructed by a pillow. They weren’t going blind per se-it was just taking a few minutes for their eye bathed in smartphone light to readapt to the dark room. “It did actually feel quite odd”, he says of his self-experiment.
So, can smartphones cause blindness?
The mystery was solved by an eye specialist who figured the problem should involve some kind of exposure and not be connected with internal health problems.
Advertisement
After visiting a neuro-ophthalmic clinic, both women revealed that the symptoms occurred after several minutes of viewing their smartphone screens while lying in bed in the dark.
