Today I want to address a parent’s concerns about their four-year-old daughter, Julie, who has been diagnosed with farsightedness and lazy eye. The parent has been advised by an eye doctor to have Julie wear glasses full time and consider eye muscle surgery. I want to offer an alternative perspective that emphasizes the malleability of a child’s visual system and the potential for improvement through non-invasive treatments. Enjoy the show.

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

eyes, lazy eye, glasses, visual, system, learning, exercises, vision, podcast, prescription, muscle, surgery, eyedrops, bilateral, brain, focusing, today, cranial vault, child, body

00:06

Hey everybody, it’s Dr. Sam, I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. If you want to get in touch with me with questions, you can email me at hello@drsamberne.com. And you can always text me your questions at 1-844-932-1291. I would like to let you know about my new membership program. This is going to offer members new information on how to improve their vision and wellness. So you will get access to articles, video, blogs, podcasts, and webinars. Also a live q&a with me. And all of this information will empower you to make informed decisions about your vision, and your health. So to sign up to go to my website, drsamberne.com. And you can see the details there. All right now on to the show.

01:36

Hey, everybody, welcome to the program, doing a little urban broadcasting today. So I’m in downtown Santa Fe, actually, my old office is just over there. I closed that office in 2010. But this is a very sweet part of Santa Fe, it’s on the west side, pretty quiet and easy going. So I thought I would stop and take a question from a parent is very concerned about a four year old daughter Julie. So Julie has been diagnosed with farsightedness and lazy eye and she’s got an eye turning in. And her eye doctor said that she needs to wear these glasses full time, mom sent me the prescriptions about a plus six. And he also said that she only has about three more years to be able to improve the lazy eye. And he wants to schedule her for eye muscle surgery. Because the only way to fix this I turn is with eye muscle surgery. Well, of course, she is appalled by this. She wants other opinions.

And so she’s known me a long time. And so I wanted to give my point of view. So first thing I want to say is that with kids, their visual system is very malleable, very plastic in the sense that it’s versatile, it’s changeable. And when you start putting glasses on children are doing things like surgery. There’s even a technique where you can use eyedrops that can actually reduce a lazy eye. When you do all these invasive treatments, what ends up happening is it basically reinforces the problem. You know, the eyes are the only part of the brain that are outside the cranial vault. And since the eyes are brain tissue, especially in children, it’s a great opportunity to improve one’s vision by doing physical therapy exercises, because what you’re doing there is you’re creating new pathways, new ways for the child to use their visual system in the midst of using both eyes together.

So with the glasses prescription, you know the way glasses are prescribed is that the doctor is going to put in eyedrops that paralyze the focusing muscles. We call this dilating eyedrops. And once you do that, you have lost the opportunity to be able to measure the organic focusing flexibility of the visual system. And the reason is, is because those muscles are paralyzed because of the eyedrops. And so the prescription that the doctor is going to give is always way too strong. So in this particular case, one of the things we have to look at is First of all, what are the visual acuity requirements? So as a four year old are now in summer, probably not a lot of distance viewing, but you can always test the child, Julie.

And you can say, can you see the road signs out there? Can you see things far away? And that’s going to give you an indicator on, you know, maybe how much prescription she needs? Well, mom just did that. And she can see the road signs beyond 20 feet perfectly. So why would you give a plus five or plus six, when she sees perfectly at distance now up close, she’s learning to read and I asked mom to, you know, hold the book out there to see if there’s, you know, what she could see in terms of the print, and she had to pull it in a little bit.

But she was able to see the print pretty easily. And so one of the things that we might consider is doing a part time prescription. But I would only do like 20% of what the other person prescribed. So if it was a plus five, I would probably maybe give a plus one, maybe even a plus 75, we’d have to try it on. There’s also dynamic testing that you can do, where you can actually test a person’s focusing response. While they’re actually focusing either on a book or a target up close, it’s a pretty incredible test to use. And then you can put lenses in front of the eyes, to see where the best focusing response is. So that’s probably what I would do. Now, in terms of the lazy eye, first of all, there is definitive research now that you don’t have to be age seven or eight, like there’s a statute of limitations.

And after that age, you can’t be helped. In fact, there’s research that says that adults have been helped through different exercises that stimulate both eyes simultaneously, this can actually be done through a computerized program. And it’s a program that kind of gets both eyes to work together at the same time. So you don’t have to say, Oh, my goodness, by age seven, if we don’t fix this, that’s it, it’s just not true. Now, the third thing about the eye muscles, when you do surgery on an eye muscle, you start confusing the brain because it’s the brain that’s directing the eye muscles in the first place.

Learning to aim your eyes is a skill set. And the way you learn the skill set is by going through a set or series of motor skills, where you’re learning about how to motor and go through an obstacle course, where you’re using your visual system to guide your body through space. And there’s also an issue with bilateral reality that’s global, that’s with the whole body. It isn’t just with the eyes, it’s just the eye doctor is seeing it in the eyes, but it’s actually in the whole person. So this means that we want to go back and do some things like creeping and crawling, bilateral exercises, hopping, skipping, so gross motor, learning how to get both sides of the body to work together.

And then you bring the visual system in as a way to anchor the body and the body anchors the vision, where you learn how to use two eyes together. Now there are other exercises where you can work with visual tracking with each eye. You can even do by an ocular vision exercises, like with red green glasses, or stereo optical glasses, certainly that those are possibilities. And when you do that you’re presenting to the brain into the visual system.

This is what it’s like to use both eyes together. And you go through a curve a learning curve to do that. And when you when you go through that physical vision therapy, what you’re actually doing is changing the software in the brain so that the two eyes start to understand this is how I aim together. And when I aim together, I get stereo vision. my peripheral vision is more simultaneous, and it’s a much better way that’s long lasting compared to surgery, which is more treating symptoms. And by the way, if you do get the surgery, probably chances are you’re going to have to do the surgery again because the eyes are only going to get fixed temporarily where they look straight. But the brain gets very confused because now because the muscle is different.

How does it handle using both eyes together? So it’s a very different approach, but it is treating the Ha’s and not the symptoms. I also think getting some cranial sacral therapy, where you’re getting more movement in the bones around the eyes and the face the cervical spine. I’ve actually seen strabismus eye turns go away after cranial sacral sessions. And so as you change the positioning and the posture of how the bones articulate with the eyes, you then have a really good chance of learning how to use them together.

10:33

Some of the future trends that I see with lazy eye and strabismus is this is more for adults but for lazy eye using virtual reality experiences actually has been shown to reduce amblyopia lazy eye, and also video games. And you know, it’s it’s one of those things that we have, where these specific video games, the left eye is wearing one lens and the right eye is wearing another lens. So it’s activating different things in the visual system. So it starts to encourage to use both eyes together.

And then the third way is more of what I’m doing now, which is more about perceptual learning, using different eye patches and stereoscopic glasses and yoke prisms, where you’re connecting the vestibular system with the visual system, also working perceptually with parquetry blokes working more with the gross motor and things like the primitive survival reflexes, and getting those in integrated.

Those are the infant reflexes that I’ve referred to in many, many podcasts. But here it is, this is another option in the buffet. So if you decide you don’t want to continue along the more traditional route. This developmental functional approach is quite exquisite in helping kids stimulate and learn to develop their vision with their body. So that’s my show for today. I want to thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, take care

12:17

Thank you for listening. I hope you learned something from the EyeClarity podcast show today. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to subscribe on iTunes or Spotify and leave a review. See you here next time.