MY PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH REVITALVISION
BY JORDAN DAU, OD
Dau Family Eyecare, Jacksonville, FL
I CAN’T BELIEVE I HAVE BEEN IN PRACTICE FOR ALMOST 10 YEARS ALREADY…
When I first started, I believed I could help every single patient walking through my door and make their lives a little bit better. However, as time has gone on, I have realized how many patients I CAN’T help, or at least not to their level of (sometimes high) expectation.
No matter how many patients’ lives I’ve improved in a day, I am always bothered by the few that I didn’t. I know you all know what I’m talking about: The young man with already cross-linked Keratoconus with no better than 20/50 acuity in glasses yet cannot get contacts into his eyes; the older woman who finally got cataract surgery, but isn’t happy with the quality of her
‘perfect’ 20/20 vision her ophthalmologist insists she has; even the early presbyope with headaches that just simply does not want to wear reading glasses after a lifetime of great vision. I even have a patient who bet me a steak dinner that I could not get him to 20/20, which I later found was because of his bilateral congenital nystagmus – I did NOT win the bet.
These are all patients that we have all accepted that there is simply nothing more we can do, and worse we have convinced the patients that they just have to learn to accept the facts, that this is as good as it is ever going to get…
FROM SKEPTICAL TO CURIOUS: MY PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH REVITALVISION
Then I heard about a wildly innovative new technology called RevitalVision that promised to improve conditions that we have been taught our entire careers that we can’t. This started out as a program designed to improve adult (yes, ADULT) amblyopic vision by an average of about 2.5 lines and has since received FDA clearance, allowing some patients who had accepted they will never drive, a chance to get their license for the first time. This application, along with so many other conditions RevitalVision claims to improve, caught my attention. Not only adult amblyopia, but they claimed to help post-cataract and post-LASIK patients, pathologies ranging from Keratoconus to Stargardt’s, early presbyopes, low myopes, and even those elite eyes looking at Sports Vision training. That is basically a list of every patient I had felt like I couldn’t help.
Before investing too much time and energy into this ‘too good to be true’ technology, I did my research. With over 28 clinical studies going back 30 years, my opinion of this technology went from a unique idea to something where I believe we are just scratching the surface of how many patients can be helped.
“I heard about a wildly innovative new technology called RevitalVision that promised to improve conditions that we have been taught our entire careers that we can’t.”
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Well, let’s allow ourselves to oversimplify vision and say there are two parts: first is the eye itself that creates an image on the retina, and second is the nerve transmission and brain processing where we interpret the image. While traditionally we have been FANTASTIC at improving the first part, we don’t really have ANYTHING for the second. That is where RevitalVision comes in: it actually trains the BRAIN to improve its processing ability, to clean up the image projected on the retina. I think of this as an ‘Enhance Button’ the brain learns to press to 1) Enhance contrast sensitivity, 2) Improve vision via step 1, and 3) Increase stereopsis via steps 1 and 2. I love this because it MAKES SENSE, by improving the brain and teaching it to contribute more to vision, vision gets better. What is even better though is how easy this technology is to implement in the office!
This is an AT-HOME training that patients do on their own time, with each session taking 30 minutes and doing 3 sessions per week. Every single study shows that after 30-40 sessions (2-3 months, depending on what diagnosis we are trying to improve), that patients will experience the same, consistent results. All we must do as the doctor is to identify the need, educate the patient, and input patient data to generate a unique program and grant the patient a digital license to do their training, and the patient pays the doctor for the license access. There is no measurement device that takes up space, there is no additional testing beyond what we do in a standard comprehensive exam, and we simply follow up with the patient at their mid-point and end of training. We can track the patient’s progress on our portal, which allows us to stay involved with the patient care, but I love how ‘Hands-off’ this is for our practice.
REVITALVISION: GREAT FOR OUR PRACTICE, AND INCREDIBLY ATTRACTIVE TO OUR PATIENTS
RevitalVision has been a great addition to our practice. Patients have been absolutely interested in what this technology is capable of, and both my associate and I are excited about the possibilities. While it is fantastic to have a true treatment option for adult amblyopia and so many more conditions we face, we are looking beyond for applications in orthokeratology, soft contact lenses, night driving improvement, and virtually any patient where we believe increased contrast sensitivity can lead to improved patient satisfaction. This type of technology rewrites what we have been taught in school, and it makes me excited for the new ways we can both positively impact patients, and the industry.
