I’ve read that one way to remedy ‘lazy eye’ in kids is to give them an eyepatch over their normal eye to give the ‘lazy eye’ a chance to get stronger. First, is this a true and effective remedy, and would something like that work for adults as well?
That sounds like a rather archaic remedy.
My SO has a lazy eye, but has been “cured” with a proper eyeglasses prescription. Now his eye only goes “wonky” if he is really tired and/or his glasses are off.
That’s just personal knowledge.
“Lazy eye” or Amblyopia has many causes. One being that the muscles in the weak or “lazy” eye do not pull the eye into proper alignment causing the eye to cross and not focus properly. If caught early enough some treatments are avaliable including patching the strong eye. The idea is to force the muscles in the weak eye to work harder and align the weak eye so that it will focus better. At the age of 8 years I had to wear a patch for 1 year and had other therapies during that time to make my lazy eye stronger. All this with no results. It was to late the Doctors said. To correct Amblyopia in this manner it must be caught very early. Adulthood is to late. There are surgeries avaliable now but if not treated early enough the ambyopic eye may never develop properly and as in my case may even become functionally blind.
I’ve got a lazy eye, my left. Very poor vision. When I was young, probably pre teen (bad memory) or early teen, they had me wearing a patch over my right eye. It hooked onto my glasses. I didn’t like it at all and half the time would look under or around it. My vision is still bad in that eye.
Amblyopia (what is commonly called “lazy eye”) can occur any time there’s a significant difference in visual imput between a very young child’s eyes (such as when one eye is significantly more nearsighted, farsighted, or astigmatic than the other, or when the child’s eyes are “crossed”, causing double vision). The visual cortex (the part of the brain responsible for vision) normally devotes about 50% of its cells for processing visual imput to the signals from each eye. But when there’s such a great difference in vision between the two eyes, the child’s brain starts to favor the imput from only one eye in order to produce a clear and useful visual picture (instead of double vision, for instance). The neurons initially assigned to the less-favored eye are gradually re-assigned to the favored eye; eventually, this causes the “lazy” eye to be functionally blind. This neural re-wiring is permanent after early childhood passes, so amblyopia untreated during early childhood (up to about age 5) cannot be reversed later.
What patching the “lazy eye” for a few hours each day does is prevent this reassignment of the neuons in the visual cortex from progressing, and (with luck) reverses it. During the time the favored eye is patched, the weaker eye is providing 100% of the signal to the visual cortex, and so the visual cortex (no longer forced to favor one eye over the other to produce a clear visual picture), not only keeps the neural wiring to it intact, it may re-assign more neurons to that eye again in order to provide better vision. Kids often out grow mild strabismus (“crossed eyes”) on their own, and in that case patching may be all that’s needed to correct the problem; otherwise surgery (for severe strabismus) or glasses (to correct other visual problems) will also be needed as a part of the treatment.
So you parents out there - get your toddler’s vision checked by a pediatric ophthalmologist, so that developing amblyopia can be treated successfully. It’s important! The earlier the problem is diagnosed, the greater the child’s chances of having normal vision later in life.
Artemis (who has no depth perception because of amblyopia which wasn’t diagnosed until the age of 4)
The patch won’t work for adults. By that time the muscles of the eye have becomed conditioned to the imbalance. I had surgery to correct my eyes at age 4, 6 (twice), 12, and 31. I began wearing glasses to correct the problem at age 2.
Around age 30 I began to get incredible headaches and eye strain from the effort at keeping my left eye looking straight ahead (the surgeries had limited success). I went to an opthamologist (who turned out to be a pediatric doctor, I was in the waiting room with about a dozen little kids), and she told me that refinements in the surgical techniques made it much more likely I could get good results. Due to the amount of scar tissue on the muscles of my eye they had apply some special suturing, but other than that it was uneventful (except for having to go back to the Dr. and have her remove a piece of scar tissue right in the corner of my eye. I got a shot of novicaine RIGHT IN MY EYE SOCKET!).
Long story short, I finally got my lazy eye fixed after 31 years.
I was also diagnosed with a “lazy” left eye. Had to wear the eyepatch for almost 4~5 yrs (mostly at home, since I was too embarrassed to wear it outside).
However, when I visited another optician, he told me that I wasn’t suffering from lazy eye but my left eye was simply more astigmatic than my right, while my right eye was more myopic than my left (right eye: ~1.50 diopters, left eye perfect).
Now this is really strange, and I hope I can get some answers: did I really suffer from lazy eye?
By the way, what’s depth perception?
**Xejhk **, you probably did have amblyopia as a child, as you had significant visual differences between your two eyes. That’s why you wore the patch - to keep your brain from disconnecting neurons supporting your less-favored eye. You just did not have strabismus (crossed eyes), which is the most common cause of amblyopia.
“Lazy eye” is not a medical term, and most people use it to mean both strabismus and amyblopia, which are really two different things. Although untreated strabismus can result in amblyopia, not all amblyopia is caused by strabismus.
**
Stereoscopic vision, or binocular vision - the ability to judge an object’s position in space solely by using the parallax effect that results from the spacing of our eyes in our head. If an object is in front of you, each of your eyes is seeing that object from a slightly different angle, as you’ll see if you hold out a finger at arm’s length and close your left eye, and then open your left eye and close your right eye - the finger will appear to be in a slightly different position with respect to distant background objects when viewed by your left eye versus when viewed by your right eye. Our brains can use that information (the difference in the visual “angle” of our two eyes) to “triangulate” and determine the distance of objects, even without reference to a background (such as when catching a fly baseball) - but only if we’re seeing with both eyes simultaneously.
In my case, although I’m not blind in my left eye (I see just fine with it when I close my right eye), my brain simply doesn’t use the visual imput from that eye unless it absolutely has to, favoring the visual imput from my right eye instead. Only in the extreme left part of my visual field (the part my right eye can’t see at all) does my brain pay attention to the imput from my left eye. So I am effectively seeing from only one eye, even though both are open - and therefore I have no stereoscopic vision. This isn’t a huge handicap - the brain does have other tricks it can use to determine an object’s position in space, which work well enough most of the time - but it does limit me in some ways. I can’t watch 3-D movies, or catch a fly ball, or see the hidden object in those “magic picture” drawings, and my visual defect would prevent me from ever becoming a commercial pilot (to mention a few things). If my amblyopia had been diagnosed when I was younger, things might have been different.