Hi, I’m Dr. Julie Steinhauer. And on our video today of Ask Dr. Julie, we’ve got a good question that came in from Alice. Alice wants to know, is it better to utilize the natural sunlight coming in from a window when you’re using your photo-syntonic light therapy goggles, or is it better to look at a bulb? Well, we recommend both. And it kind of depends on the time of year or location that you’re in. And also depends on the severity of the problem that you have visually. So I’d love to say that there’s a fast and easy answer, but there’s kind of not. If you have something like amblyopia, where one eye doesn’t see as well, we would recommend that you actually look at a tabletop lamp model. So it can be one of those kind of can lights, they’re small, and ten bucks on Amazon. They can sit on a table. Use a 40 to 60 watt bulb, no higher. It has to be incandescent. You don’t want to use anything like an Led light or some of these newer styles of lights. So the incandescent bulb is actually the best for that.
But you can actually use natural sunlight. So if you’re not going to get sunlight in at all, unless you go for a walk or if you’re driving in the car and you get to look out the front window, not the side window that’s tinted, but the front window, then get it in any way that you can. Certainly if you live in Alaska or in a place that you know is dark a lot of the time, where it’s dark early in the day, then looking at the bulb is actually the better option. But you can do both. We recommend for little children the easiest method for them is to look out a window with the natural lighting coming in. They can use pens and markers and they can just draw right on that window. As the sunlight comes in, they’re visually active, they’re mentally active, and they’re still getting what we call “syntonized.” This way, they’ll have a good result since it is really tough sometimes for someone who’s two or three or four or five years old to be able to sit still for a couple of minutes and look at a bulb.
So hopefully that answers the question well. Certain visual conditions like amblyopia, or maybe when we’re trying to trigger the brain to see well again after some sort sort of severe trauma or brain injury, or maybe there’s very little eyesight left from a stroke, then those are times we would really highly recommend that just look at a bulb that’s closer to you, as opposed to looking outside. While that is natural light and you’re getting all of that benefit, I do find that the bulb is a little bit of a stronger kind of stimulus to look at, because it can be set close to you and you can look at it direct with the goggles on and get a brighter kind of a stimulus to the brain.
So anyway, I hope that was really helpful. I hope that answers some of your questions that you might have about syntonics. And if you have questions, then certainly feel free to contact us. You can submit to us on any of our media outlets and we will certainly take those. You can email us too. They’ll end up in a video at some point, and you’ll be able to see it just like you are here today. Thanks so much!