#1 session

I purchased a light tube called the Colorboy from Optomatters in Belgium.  It, along with the filters, cost me roughly $1,000.  It's a heavy gray metal tube that looks and feels like military equipment.  All it is, is a tube with a light in it, which is powered with an external power supply--sort of like a laptop.  And I spent $1,000 on it.  I know, I'm smart.

The filters that I ordered with it filter the white light to different colors.  They're labeled as Alpha Omega, Mu Delta, Alpha Delta, and Mu Upsilon.  I have only a vague idea of what I'm doing, which is par for how I've lived my life so far.  There isn't much information available out there.  A friend of mine, Michael Lievens, who is a strabismic like myself, has a vision therapist who gave the following prescription.

Alpha Omega for the first week consecutively.
Mu Delta for the second week consecutively.
Alpha Delta for the third week consecutively.
Mu Upsilon for the fourth week consecutively.

So you power it on, and you stare at the light while wearing one of the filters for 20 minutes.  I'm looking down the tube at a red circle of light (Alpha Omega), which is somewhat dim, because the filters are dark.  The immediate thing I notice is the hypertropia on my left eye.  It wants to go up relative to my right eye, so the result is that its input looks down, relative to the input from the right eye.  So I try to fix this by consciously controlling that eye, pushing it down, so that the images of each eye lays on top of one another.  This takes effort.  For about five minutes, it's tolerable.  By the time the buzzer goes off, it's just about unbearable and I'm beginning to sweat.  The rest is most welcome.

That's my initial impression.  It is a brutal workout, which I find promising.  That's one of the things that I had always worried about when doing my normal vision therapy exercises: the exercises I did didn't feel very difficult or strenuous.  Were they doing anything?  Usually gains require pain.  But boy, have I found a new source of pain.

Most of what I'd heard about Syntonics caused my bullshit detectors to ping all over the place, especially when I read about how it's used by chiropractors and how it's used to ameliorate all kinds of things (among autism).  That said, I still am skeptical about it, but I decided to give it a try anyway since I know people who have used it and say that it's helped.  It's just another experiment.  Here goes nothing, but hopefully something.