so is it true? Do we finally have a cure for visual snow syndrome? today we're
going to be taking a look at some newly published research which looked at using
NORT which stands for Neural Optometric Rehabilitation therapy and its efficacy
as a treatment for visual snow but stay tuned because we'll also share some tips
on how to find a specialist who could offer you this sort of treatment let's take a look
Eyes and Shine
my friends Dr Joseph Allen here from the doctor Eye Health show helping learn everything about
the eyes and keeping you seeing your best so first off what is visual snow so if you're new here to
the channel or if you've never heard a visual snow syndrome before visual snow syndrome is a complex
and largely misunderstood neurological condition but it presents with visual disturbances most
notably is that of your vision kind of blanketed by these moving spots or flashing white dots that
sort of resembles snow or something kind of like the static you'd see on an old TV set or as if
with a newer camera you jacked up the iso super high and that makes everything kind of look grainy
and people see this all of the time even if they close their eyes they can still kind of see this
static going on now the symptom of visual snow can be something extremely mild such as what I
personally have experienced since I was maybe about nine years old it it's just it's very
subtle enough so where it doesn't really bother me however if I really kind of zone out and look
around me yeah I can see it I'm aware that there's like this static on everything but however for
some people it can be really extreme to the point where some people they can't even really function
they can't see to read they can't see to drive and even do some just basic activities of living now
visual snow syndrome also presents with other neurological symptoms and I've gone over those
more thoroughly as well as the proper diagnosis of visual snow and I've done that in a previous video
and you can check that out here but however we have this new research that's out and specifically
uses NORT what is NORT and what did the study find in this new study which was published just at the
end of 2022 took about 21 participants which is a smaller study and they had them go through about
12 weeks of Nord which again stands for neural Optometric Rehabilitation therapy which if you've
never heard of Nord before it's really just a fancier way of saying vision therapy now if you're
unfamiliar vision therapy and something called orthoptics are basically just different forms
of eye muscle exercises orthoptics is sort of used in the industry more to describe treatment and use
of these eye muscle exercises as a therapy for binocular vision issues such as somebody having
double vision and doing these eye muscle exercises to get the the brain to use the muscles a little
bit better the eyes to correct that problem of double vision whereas vision therapy which I think
has historically been used a little bit longer but in more recent years has sort of shifted to
describe the use of these eye muscle exercise therapies to treat things outside of even just
standard visual conditions and some practitioners even use them as a treatment for other a wide
variation of conditions and symptoms such as helping with traumatic brain injury for example
now this study did use a pretty wide range of eye muscle exercises but some of these exercises if
you've ever seen them before are pretty cool so let me just kind of show you some cool interesting
ones so you have a better idea of what's going on for example some of these exercises work on
your accommodative and virgin's muscle control this is where you may look through certain lenses
at a near object and you can see through the lenses things are very blurry and that forces
you to use your eye muscles to focus through and clear that image then they'll switch those
lenses to something that then makes those letters really blurry again and you have to relax your eye
muscles to clear it up and then they kind of go back and forth and this trains your eye muscles to
be able to focus better and relax easier kind of like learning to lift weights with your arm
and then relax it again doing that over and over another type of exercise could be for sycaddic
eye movements where you're able to look around from side to side darting your eyes from one
object to the next and just having more precise control and wider and shorter ranges of movements
and then there are even Fusion exercises such as this Lifesaver card here this is where you will
have like a red object and a green object that kind of look like Lifesavers but the challenge
with this type of card is that you try to kind of go cross-eyed and then you can bring those
two object images together until it forms kind of a flashing red and green Lifesaver that appears to
lift off of the paper and then the challenge comes from looking at the different Lifesavers that are
appearing because they're spaced apart differently and that'll challenge you to use a wider range of
your eye muscles and this also trains your ability to control those eye muscles really well now
in many ways I am just simplifying kind of the explanation of some of these tests there are a
plethora of different eye muscle exercises used in this study and exist in vision therapy orthoptics
and nort so if you want to know more detail of what some of these sort of exercises are I will
of course they list it out in the study and I will put a link to the full study if you want to read
it yourself in the description below but again for the study they have the participants go through a
12-week program that included having a one hour session every week with a vision therapist or an
eye doctor who would help them go through these eye muscle exercises and challenge them making
them harder and harder and then they would also have them throughout the week do different kind of
homework and do a lot of these vision therapy techniques on their own at home so
what did they find first the most important thing I think people should understand when
they're looking at the study is that they did not have Improvement in people's visual snow symptoms
like it didn't wipe away the snow or the static symptoms they reported no significant Improvement
in people's ocular health ocular pain color vision or peripheral vision however what they did report
was not only improvements in visual function scores for distance and near Vision but they also
reported statistically significant improvements in Social functioning mental health role difficulties
and dependency along with improvements in overall quality of life and although I wouldn't call it
a cure for visual snow by a long shot it sounds like there are a lot of benefits here and I say
this because so many people with visual snow struggle with just daily activities in their
life whether it be work stuff study or using their phone or computer screen even driving and
then going out and doing social activities these can all be affected by their visuals no symptoms
so if we can improve somebody's eye coordination and improves their overall focus and decrease or
dampen their symptoms to a point where it improves their quality of life and all of their activities
that's a huge win and I can tell you just from my personal experience for the patients who've
come to seek me out asking about visual snow and getting a diagnosis it feels good for me
to finally have something to be able to offer to my patients uh that there that there could
be something to help them otherwise in the past there's very few if not any real treatments or
ways to really help people with visual snow so I'd love to ask you what do you think about the
findings in this study if you have visual snow syndrome would you want to go through 12 weeks
of vision therapy or nort in order to improve your kind of quality of life knowing that it wouldn't
get rid of your visual snow symptoms especially for a 12 week program a vision therapy or nort can
cost usually a couple thousand dollars like two to three to five thousand dollars to go through that
length of a therapy would it be worth it for you please let me know in the comments now for those
of you who are watching this and have visual snow and you're like yes I I've tried so many things
I'm excited to try this even if anything anything that can help I want to go through this how do you
find a doctor or a clinic that is offering these sort of services first I do just want to call
out the end of the study and the conclusion they did say that they need to do further research on
this and just recognize it was a smaller study of about 21 participants and they found a lot of the
participants had binocularity Vision coordination issues to begin with so not surprising that they
had some improvement with these different exercises there's also a good chance that a
lot of doctors and researchers may have not even read this study and don't quite know about it so
one way you can find doctors or a clinic that may be willing to offer this and try to help you out
first I would recommend going to what is called the Nora website this stands for neuro-optometric
rehabilitation Association these are usually doctors who specialize a little bit more on
the neuro side of things things that involve the brain people who've had traumatic brain injury all
of those sort of things but if you do go to their website they do have a search engine for doctors
who are part of that Association and so you can type in your area code or search for a doctor that
may be in your area that offers vision therapy or nort as a possible treatment I think that might be
a great place to start otherwise you may have to just call around to different clinics in your area
ask them first if they offer anything like vision of therapy and if they've ever done previous work
with people who have visual snow syndrome or if maybe if they've even heard of this study and and
maybe they'd be willing to read into the research into this study and being able to offer it to you
as a possible form of treatment or therapy I think as long as people are willing to accept
hey this is one study it's a smaller study it's a little anecdotal but again if there's no real risk
of being hurt or if there's no real problem with it and you've been suffering with this
anything could help hey thank you so much for watching the video sticking around toward the end
if you are new here to the channel and you haven't subscribed already kind of like you know 90%
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to learn again let me know and we'll talk about it keep an eye on it we'll see in the next one