Iatrogenic Functional Visual Loss

With an increasingly complex armamentarium of sophisticated diagnostic studies used to ply our patients, there is a tendency to forget to be a clinician, and make the diagnosis on the basis of common sense and the material at hand. There is emerging from the morass of high-tech neuro-ophthalmic massage parlors a whole cadre of patients whose problems may have started out relatively simple, albeit unexplained, who having suffered not only from their original symptoms, then assume a largely functional component to their visual loss that is aided and abetted by the continued tests without answers, and the insecurity of perplexed and puzzled clinicians.