Tag Archives: medicine

Luminopia Collaborates with Crunchyroll to Continue Building Its Extensive Content Library for Pediatric Lazy Eye Patients

Crunchyroll

Luminopia, a digital health company pioneering a new class of treatments for neuro-visual disorders, has announced a collaboration with Crunchyroll.

This collaboration will bring beloved anime content to Luminopia’s platform, diversifying and expanding its content options for children with amblyopia, or lazy eye, using Luminopia. By partnering with Crunchyroll, Luminopia is offering even more TV episodes that resonate with young audiences and providing kids with the option to watch a wider variety of content as treatment. 

Lazy eye affects about one million pediatric patients nationwide and is the leading cause of vision loss in children. Luminopia offers a modern, FDA-cleared therapy that allows pediatric patients to watch TV within a VR headset for one hour a day, six days a week as treatment.  

This is a completely reimagined approach to lazy eye therapy. For decades, patients have been required to undergo eye-patching, which forces them to cover their “good eye” and go through their lives with poor vision, making everyday tasks and activities difficult. Luminopia works differently from eye-patching and doesn’t require patients to cover up their good eye; instead, it encourages the brain to use both eyes together. 

This collaboration with Crunchyroll, a subsidiary of Sony Pictures Entertainment, is a natural extension of Sony Innovation Fund’s investment in Luminopia. Crunchyroll  joins Luminopia’s growing roster of content partners, including Nickelodeon, PBS Kids and Sesame Workshop. Most recently, Luminopia partnered with Pokémon to bring hundreds of episodes of the original animated series to its platform.

Parents and guardians of children with amblyopia can inquire about Luminopia with their eye doctors today. It’s being prescribed in top eye institutes, children’s hospitals and private practices across the U.S.

Comic Books Teaching Future Doctors

We’ve seen comic books slowly creeping into academia and it looks like that will include medical school. Researchers at the University of Toronto are using graphic novels as a teaching tool. The goal is to teach and communicate the ethical and emotional complexities of illness, disease and trauma. It’s a new tool to communicate the concepts to medical students.

Allan Peterkin, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto said:

Cartoons and comics were dismissed as a trivial medium, but we realize now they are extremely sophisticated. It’s about that interplay between the words and the text. You’re using different parts of the brain to read carefully, just as you’re doing to diagnose in the clinic.

This past week saw the Comics and Medicine conference held at the University of Toronto Healt Centre on College St.. Those attending feel comics are a way to bridge the gap between the medical world and the rest of society. Comics for sale included ones with such titles as Radioactive, Cancer Vixen and The Adventures of Iggy and the Inhalers.

Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, tackled obsessive compulsive disorder, Catholic guilt and sexuality and was published in 1972. It’s considered the first autobiographic comic.

Graphic novels are used for more than educating; they are used for healing, too. There’s entire companies dedicated to printing comics for those going through treatments or recently diagnosed with a disease and need an easy to understand explanation of the cause or treatment they face.

Neil Phillips, an Australian psychiatrist and conference speaker, said he used principals from graphic novels — panels, a narrative, images and words — to cure a child of warts.

Four-year-old Jake had warts all over him, said Phillips. So, he drew four panels. In the far left panel stood a warthog, sans warts, crying over the loss of said warts. On the far right panel stood a blond boy — Jake — also crying because he had warts.

Phillips instructed Jake to fill in the two middle panels, answering the question: “How did the warthog and the boy get in this predicament?”

It is the fault of a “wicked wombat,” replied Jake, referring a marsupial found in the Outback. Finally, Jake had a way of visualizing his anxieties and a means to alleviate them.

“He came back a month later,” said Phillips, “and there wasn’t a wart on him.”

(via The Star)