This Podcast is in Partnership with Neurolens

Optometrists may be surprised to realize that there is a very common condition that they might have never heard of that’s causing our patients to suffer from chronic headaches, eye pain, and visual discomfort. And it’s completely treatable by optometrists with a novel new technology to help you diagnose and prescribe glasses that relieve the issue. Sound like a game changer for our profession? We sit down with Chief Technical Officer, Mr. Aric Plumley and Chief Commercial Officer, Mr. Pierre Bertrand of Neurolens in this podcast. 

Neurolens technology was inspired by the work of Dr. Krall in Mitchell, South Dakota who was treating chronic headaches with glasses. To investigate his results, researchers visited a team of neurologists who were treating patients who suffered from chronic headaches that were not responding to conventional medical treatment, which included Topamax and Botox injections. These patients were labelled as refractory because no traditional medicine was working for them. They convinced the neurologists to let Dr. Krall try prescribing his headache glasses, and found that 81.6% of these refractory headache patients achieved symptom relief with the glasses. It was a complete game changer for the neurology clinic, and they immediately added an optometry specialty to their office. Around that time, the Vision Council ran a study about the prevalence of computer vision syndrome – headaches, neck pain, and visual eye strain. They found that 65% of US adults are experiencing these symptoms. At that point the founders of Neurolens decided the best place for their technology was with independent optometrists who were seeing these patients on the frontlines. 

Mr. Pierre Bertrand, Chief Commercial Officer of Neurolens

“I see Neurolens allowing optometry to expand their scope of practice,” Bertrand explains. “We can own headaches. We can own eye strain. These are things that cannot be treated outside of optometry. Our vision for optometry is that we can play a part in redefining good vision beyond 20/20.” He shares how before progressive lenses came to the market in the 1950s, vision was limited to 2 set distances by bifocal glasses. Prescribing generic, standard glasses for digital eye strain complaints is similarly limiting to the relief of headache and eye strain symptoms caused by our high demand digital lifestyles. Neurolens is designed to relieve the underlying issue that is causing the strain – ocular misalignment and trigeminal dysphoria.

Trigeminal dysphoria is a condition that many doctors may not have learned about in optometry school, but it is a common cause of asthenopia resulting from misalignment of the eyes. The extraocular muscles are connected via proprioceptive fibers to the trigeminal nerve. When the extraocular muscles are strained, they send a signal to the trigeminal nerve, resulting in a feeling of referred pain. That’s why when eye muscles are tired, feelings of headache, neck strain, and eye pain similar to a dry eye sensation are the result. Only 2% of glasses that are sold in the United States have any prism component to address ocular misalignment. “The problem lies in the difficulty in measuring eye misalignment,” Plumley explains. There is no uniform measurement for the amount of fixation disparity or the prescribing criterion to address it. “The Neurolens diagnostic device is an objective measuring device for ocular misalignment,” states Plumley. “It’s three times more reliable than any other alignment measurement.” The researchers at Neurolens then wrote a prescribing algorithm based on the input of several highly succ...