It’s hard to imagine our lives without a smartphone now, but one should not forget the repercussions technology has in our lives. A woman based in Hyderabad reportedly lost her eyesight after excessive use of the smartphone.
Dr. Sudhir Kumar, in this Twitter thread, talked about smartphone vision syndrome that allegedly leads to disabling vision.
30-year-old Manju had severe disabling vision symptoms for one and a half years. This included seeing floaters, bright flashes of light, dark zig-zag lines, and at times inability to see or focus on objects.
He explained the patient’s history and said the symptoms started to show when she quit her job to take care of her child. To pass time at home, Manju started spending hours on her smartphone.
Soon after the diagnosis came it was clear that she was suffering from smartphone vision syndrome (SVS).
Long-term use of devices such as computers, smartphones, or tablets can cause various eye-related disabling symptoms, referred to as computer vision syndrome (CVS) or digital vision syndrome.
Dr. Sudhir further explained how he didn’t prescribe medicines to Manju and counseled her on the cause of this syndrome and asked her to cut down on her smartphone time. Even though she insisted on giving medicines, Manju decided to cut down her screen time completely.
Following her 1-month treatment the results were in Manju’s favour as the screen cut down gave positive results.
At 1-month review, Manju was absolutely fine. Her vision impairment of 18 months had gone. Now, she had normal eyesight, did not see any floaters or flashes of light. Moreover, her momentary loss of vision at nights also stopped. Our suspicion was proved right.
He then urged people to avoid looking at screens for a long time and explained the dangerous causes of it.
The thread ended with how this has been a common syndrome and many cases of transient smartphone-induced blindness have been reported.