Eye Doctor, Inventor Team Up To Remedy Problems In Vision
(This is an article from the Herald Citizen: September 24th, 2000)

Dr. Jim Miller, Ted Haselton develop 'blinking glasses'
By Karen A. Davis
Herald-Citizen Staff

Nine-year-old Mindy Wilson's family likes the way she sees things lately--and so does her eye doctor.
Mindy, a patient of optometrist Jim Miller of Cookeville, is one of a handful of local people to participate in a new visual therapy that Dr. Miller and his friend, Cookeville inventor Ted Haselton, have been developing.
The therapy sounds simple enough. It uses "Blinking glasses" to treat a visual condition that causes kids (and adults) to have problems with double vision and words that appear to move on the page when they read.
But the theory behind the treatment is somewhat complex.
The medical term for the problem is intermittent central suppression and it can make an otherwise "A student" do less than grade A work. It may even keep some people from learning to read, experts say.
About 1990, Dr. Eric Hussey, a Spokane, Washington optometrist, first developed the concept of blinking eyeglasses that he found would straighten uncrossed eyes in patients.
Hussey later found that the glasses also eliminated ICS in patients and he wrote several articles, one entitled "Intermittent Central Suppression: A missing link in reading problems."
" What most people don't realize--And what we just now figuring out--is that in order for our eyes to be able to read what is on the page, there are too visual pathways that have to work together.
" If the pathways are synchronized, you can read normally. But if they are not synchronized, then the words run together."
" This is all very well, very new research. A lot of people are making forefronts in this. They now think this is the reason children have Dyslexia," he said.
Although ICS may be easily detected with a simple visual test using an instrument called a cheiroscope, Miller said that many doctors like himself have not traditionally widely tested patients for ICS.
Dr. Hussey has used a pair of shop glasses coated with a special white material in his research. When an electric current was running to each lens in the glasses, a the material turned "Crystal clear. " the lenses could then be "blinked" intermittently.

So Miller and Ted Haselton decided to try to recreate the therapeutic glasses. Their first attempt was not as affordable or successful as they had hoped.

They decided to use the computer glasses, with some modifications. The glasses, that " kids used to play video play games," are commercially available at most any computer or technology store for about $50 and have a liquid crystal digital (LCD) lenses.

By attaching a control box, Haselton was able to develop glasses with a designated rate of blinking, and that frequency is changed on a weekly basis as a patient's condition improves.

After getting his equipment in order, Dr. Miller initially started testing the therapy on some of his patients, mostly children.

"And these were kids that were getting low grades, C's and D's in Reading," he said. "After about 30 hours (one hour a day for 30 days) of using the glasses, they rose right to the honor roll. That's what I said, 'We need to look at this on a larger scale.' "

The two realize they needed to the "Keep records and statistical analysis" on the research so that people would believe it.

"Two years down the road, I discovered a source for the 3D computer glasses in a magazine," Haselton said.

What people might not believe, they thought, was that the two pathways for vision in the brain were being re-trained by the glasses in people with ICS, causing the eyes to work in synch and apparently improving reading ability.

In a chance conversation with Miller one day in 1998, Janet Whiteaker was alerted to "The work in developing Vision-training devices to eliminate ICS" that Miller and Haselton had been attempting. Whiteaker is an assistant professor in the Academic Development programs at Tennessee Tech--and Dr. Miller happens to be her optometrist.

Miller, she found, had the experience to help students that Professor Whiteaker and her colleague, Carolyn Zolg, worked with at TTU, they said.

The women applied for a faculty Research Grant, got one and a project was born.

TTU students in developmental reading classes were tested free of charge for ICS. Some 41 students who had the condition volunteered to participate in this study.

"If it worked like we thought it would, it was something that could eventually improve their grades," said Whiteaker.

The students were divided into a study and a control group. The control group received no treatment so that their progress could be compared to the students who were treated.

At the end of 30 hours of treatment, 72% of the students no longer tested positive for ICS; and 76.5% had passing Reading Comprehension Test scores, compared to 54.2% of the control group with passing scores.

After 1 year, 73% of the students treated were still in school, compared with only 57.3% of the students in the control group. That figure dropped to 47.9% for control group retention in spring of this year.

Grade point averages were also very different for the two groups after treatment. The average GPA for the study group is 3.34 on a 4.0 scale, but only 2.94 for those in the control group. "All of the students who were in the developmental classes were considered academically at risk and also at risk for staying in college," Whiteaker said

"The fact that so many of the ones who participated did come back (retention) is really important. If we can get them to stay long enough, they stand a good chance of being able to graduate. "

Besides grades improving, Miller said he's seen a different kind of improvement in the students he's treated for ICS.

"The students who have had very low self-esteem realize they can be just as smart as the smartest kids in their class. And it happens very quickly," he said.

Miller thinks it is important to start ICS testing and treatment early in a child's educational process.

Although the research sample has been small thus far, Miller said it appears that the ICS therapy yields permanent results.

"Neurologically, it sets up a learning relationship between these two pathways that the child never forgets," he said.

"When you're wearing this device and its blinking at the proper frequency and both eyes are totally aligned so that they don't lose fixation as they go from one side of the sentence to the other, it's a learned ability. "

There have been other treatments for ICS, such as putting a blue acetate sheet over the written page or using colored lenses. But those have not been proven to be permanent as it appears this treatment is," Miller said.

The researchers would like to do more research themselves.

Whiteaker said She "did a crash ICS Course on the Internet. . . It looks like most of the research has been done on cats in the research lab so they can do post- mortem exams on them," she said, highlighting the need for more research.

Miller has talked with Michael Martin, Putnam Director of Schools, about treatment of school children here.

"Everybody's concerned, though, as to what it's going to cost the school district, " Miller said. "What we want to be able to do is to obtain a grant for them. It shouldn't cost them anything. "

The researchers hope to obtain much of the funding for future research projects from groups and organizations interested in helping the community and at-risk children. The four have already spoken to members of several Lions clubs in the area.

Haselton and Miller say that, in the future, they could train Lions Club members, who support site charities such as the KidSight program, to screen for and supervise the treatment of school kids with ICS.

That's because the earlier a child is treated for the problem, the less they will fall behind and the less they will have to catch up.

Whiteaker recently submitted an article on the TTU study to the 'Journal of Vision and Development.' That article is expected to be published in the magazine's fall (October) or winter (December) issue. The article has also been sent to the 'Research and Developmental Education Journal.'