An overview of vertical heterophoria with Dr. Scott Irvine

Vertical heterophoria can be a small misalignment that causes our brain to work harder at receiving visual signals.

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[katiekidd]

I just came across Vertical heterophoria the other night. I've been experiencing dizziness for over 10 years and headaches even longer than that. I've tried everything. Botox, physical therapy, acupuncture, medications for anxiety. My driving anxiety has gotten soooo bad this year. I really hope this can be fixed with a pair of glasses. Thank you for your video!

[juanbotello]

Thank you for this video. I’ve been going crazy going to doctors and nothing has helped. I’m a truck driver and I can’t drive more than an hour when I get this big sensation of being dizzy, which gives me terrible anxiety. I’ll be making a trip to my eye doctor.

[TL_]

Hey doctor.
When i read from afar i see the words dripping down.
In the mirror i can see at the top of my iris that, the whites of my eyes are slightly covering my iris.
I hear from many others this doesnt get worse, i hope it doesn't get worse.

[lukehall]

I have a slight misalignment vertically in both eyes. Vertical hetraphoria wasnt mentioned. Ive been doing vision therapy since 2021 and i didnt feel any better. From ehat im researched vision therapy cannot bring the eyes up or down, only side to side so i tjink VT is only good for horizontal issues.

[bastianweik]

Its quite strange that there are so may people where you can see clearly that there is a vertical heterophoria, but they don’t suffer from any symptoms. Whats the reason behind that?

[bastianweik]

I suffered from the described syptoms. Theses symptoms startet in a light way years before, but they did not really bother me. In a period of intense work, when I wrote my masters thesis I started to get dizzyness and headache every day. I thougth that it's just a reaction to the stress, but even after my masters thesis symptoms stayed. Aftter months of searching for the cause of my problems an optometrist prescribed me prism classes, which helped me. The problem with these prism classes ist that they are really addictive, meaning that once your visual system gets used to them, the symptoms come back even stronger. For me as I like to do different kind of sports like soccer and wrestling this is a problem. So I started visual therapy around 6 months ago. I take it really serious and do my exercises every day. For working I use my prism classes, after work I take them off. However after 6 months of training, a change of my diet to more healthy food, a better sleeping rythm I sill suffer from dizzyness after taking off the classes or when I try to work without them. It seems that vision therapy is quite a long road. Also a lot of optometrist claim that there's no way to get rid of vertical heterophoria with visual training.

[brightpinkgoldfish]

When you say it can develop later on in life, what ages do you mean exactly?
I’m 38 and started having weird heatwave like vision when focusing on things in the distance. It feels like my eyes are strained and overworking everyday

[ricoevangelista]

can wearing small amout of priam .5 diopters only can be bad in the long run?

[davidhodge]

I have had minor prism in my glasses the last 5 years to correct for this. Now I’d like lasik but they said I’d still need glasses due to vertical heterophoria. Can therapy correct this issue?

[SkrimpSkirmp]

Can this be mistaken for astigmatism as well?

[zkckmyl]

Can therapy help or only prisms? So hard when every specialist says the opposite.

[otiebrown]

What is the average prism required?
1prism Diopter?