A tip of the hat to this fellow for taking the time and effort to do this: "In this two-part investigative documentary series, I delve into the color corrective glasses industry, focusing on major brands like EnChroma, PileStone, and Carelust. The investigation exposes a landscape rife with scams and misleading marketing tactics, challenging claims that these products enable people with color vision deficiencies to see new colors."
I will personally admit to having been taken in by videos about EnChroma glasses, to the extent that I posted one or two of them here on TYWKIWDBI. After seeing this video I took them down, and I hereby apologize to any readers who were misled by my old posts.
No time for the video? Just look at this screencap of a scene in which a "colorblind" boy identifies colored balloons incorrectly -
- and note the the producers of the video labeled the balloons with the wrong names for him to recite.
The embedded video is excellent in terms of quality research and presentation.
I suffer from Daltonism myself, one of the many plagues that have ravaged my life, lol. Mainly red green amalgamation, which was a problem back when traffic lights were fired by glowing filaments and not light emitting diodes.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of glasses to correct that 'undersight' was tempting, albeit offset by the feeling of vulnerability I have when anything is that close to my eyes.
So it is good to know about them being a scam before hard earned moola was transferred anywhere.
I'll continue wearing my jersey as we southern hemisphere people enter winter, as to what colour that jersey is .... I think it is dark grey, but it could be dark green or purple.
Truly it is only my hair colour I am sure of - silver.
Hi Stan -
ReplyDeleteYou know I read about everything you post, but this time I have to disagree. I know this video well because I found it about 6 months ago and I have personal experience here, which I wrote about in a comment on his video. I'll put a better version of it below.
The TL:DR version is, “Oh yes they do work, and they are critical for some occupations. My brother is a physician and he is colorblind. I was with him when he got his. And there was plenty of ooohing that he did.”
My full comment…
Colorblindness runs in my family, and several of us are in biomedical fields. I have a Ph.D. in human physiology and I used to teach about it, and my brother who is red/green colorblind is an MD. When he was in medical school he participated in studies several years before the Enchroma glasses were available where he wore one red-tinted contact. The point of the contact (and the Enchroma glasses that he later bought) was the ability to differentiate colors, not to magically restore his eyes to full, gorgeous natural color vision.
The point is not to weep in ecstasy about your miraculously restored ability to see balloon bouquets. It's about not being barred from fields because you can't do what you are required to do. My brother applied for the Air Force but was turned down because of being colorblind.
In medicine, a disease is sometimes diagnosed by staining tissues with dyes and viewing them under the miscroscope. Red/green colorblindness is a problem because you need to differentiate the dye colors to see the diseased tissues. To my brother, pastels like pink, blue and violet, all look like grey to him, but these are some of the most common colors he would need to tell apart. I think having the one red contact helped him back then.
I was with him when he first put on his Enchroma glasses, and they did just what they were supposed to - allowed him to see hues he never knew existed before. Like suddenly he could see the difference between bright orange and bright green, which used to look identical to him. Now he could see pink from pale blue from pale violet, exactly the ability you need to examine stained tissues.
When he walked outside and looked at trucks going by, he remarked, “Oh, they have writing in them!” And signs on businesses all of a sudden were visible. Before that, a lot of painted colors blended together into a shades of brown so much that he hardly even noticed they were there. Red looked almost black. Only blue and yellow were unaffected.
Many colors surprised him by popping out from the surrounding colors, and the difference was obviously visible to him, which wasn't true before. He usually didn't have a name for the new intermediate color (like purple!) because he had never seen it before. Was this new color the same as what normal vision can see? Likely not, but that's not the point.
From our biomedical perspective, we could see that the Enchroma glasses were doing *exactly* what they were designed to do.They are absolutely not a scam and can potentially help a lot of people, since about 8% of men are colorblind. The Enchroma glasses don't work for all types of colorblindness, but they are hugely helpful for the ones who they do.
If people make stupid videos with faked emotional reactions, that may be deceptive. But your video here seems to be deceptive too. It feels like you are going overboard to declare a legitimate medical product a scam, just so that you can capitalize on the clickbait potential of your video.
If the Enchroma company sues you, I wouldn't blame them.
A pair of crutches allows a person to walk again who couldn't before. It doesn't turn them into a dancing Fred Astaire. Get over yourself and be more realistic about what a medical product can and cannot do.
Ann Reardon from the "How to cook that" YT channel covered that as well about a month ago:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY-NF_7R-pk&ab_channel=HowToCookThat