"SAD" Glasses

Some ten million Americans suffer from seasonal affective disorder, a wintertime depression appropriately acronymed "SAD." People who live in northern climes are especially susceptible to the ailment, which involves difficulty in getting out of bed, a ravenous craving for carbohydrates, and general listlessness. Researchers think the cause is the body's biological clock, whose hormones get out of whack when days are short and dark. Now a spate of medical inventions is offering relief to sufferers who cannot afford a tropical vacation. Researchers have found that doses of bright light help "reset" the body's biological clock.

Until recently, the treatment involved a box containing fluorescent lights; patients would sit, excrutiatingly bored, in front of it for as long as four hours a day. Thanks to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center psychiatrist C. Lewis Ravaris, SAD patients can take their light with them, in the form of "glasses," called SADLITES, that contain their own bright lights. Ravaris has mounted two tiny reading lights, plus batteries, on thick glasses frames that direct fake sunshine into the eyes. The patient can walk around and conduct normal activities, even reading, while catching some indoor rays.

Ravaris has yet to patent the device one of several just becoming available to the public. Are there any depressed entrepreneurs out there?

Patients can catch their own rays.