November 23, 2022 - EyeClarity Podcast
I want to share this session with you where I counsel parents who’s two year old son’s left eye has started crossing in. They were referred to me by a holistic pediatrician and you’ll hear how I take the parents through a journey and offer different protocols and exercises that are going to get the child back on track. Enjoy the show. If you want more, sign up for my newsletter at:Â www.drsamberne.com.
You can now text me! Text ‘Join’ to 1-844-932-1291 to join the community and ask a question!
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
eyes, left, vision, movement, reflex, crawling, eyepatch, turning, roll, child, age, john, body, movement patterns, crawl, visual, brain, integrated, birth, development
Hello, everyone. It’s Dr. Sam. I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. This is a show that offers cutting-edge information on how to improve your vision and overall wellness through holistic methods. I so appreciate you spending part of your day with me. If you have questions, you can send them to hello@drsamberene.com. Now to the latest EyeClarity episode.
Hey, everybody, it’s Dr. Sam. And I’d like to welcome you to another EyeClarity podcast. So for you parents out there, when you have a young child, and you start seeing one of the eyes crossing in or crossing out, it can be very well, let’s just say scary. it can be frustrating, can be confusing, and you don’t really know what to do. And there are a variety of opinions out there, you know, your pediatrician has an opinion, your ophthalmologist may want to do surgery, or eye patching. And in this particular session, I counsel parents, they have a two year old and they started, they started seeing the eye going in, it’s the left eye crossing in. And fortunately, they were referred to me by a holistic pediatrician. And you’ll hear how I take the parents through a journey. And in the end, offer different protocols and exercises that are going to really get this child back on track. So I hope you enjoy the show. Thanks for tuning in. I looked at the picture. And so what we’re talking about is the observation of John’s left eye. You’re referred by Dr. Huxtable.
01:25
Yes. Okay. Yeah, she first noticed it when he was just a tiny baby. And I think now it’s to an age where if we needed to do something, like, give him an eyepatch, or, you know, to strengthen that eye, he might actually wear it, but he just wanted to get your input on what might be causing it. Yeah. And it’s
01:50
not a consistent thing either. Like, sometimes he looks, you know, bolt, they’re perfectly aligned and you know, moving and then just at other times, like in the picture, it’s like, oh, yeah, that will look slightly off center. So it’s that kind of infrequent, but it is noticeable still.
02:09
Okay. So when did you first notice it?
02:14
When he was just a baby, like, in his first? I don’t remember exactly. But
02:22
we’ll just say like January of 21.
02:25
Back when he was two months old, maybe?
02:27
Months. Okay. And if I may, can I ask you a little bit about what was the birth experience? Like? Did you have it at home? Did you were you in a hospital? What was it like?
02:44
We drove up to our midwife’s home an hour and a half away and I was I was pretty calm about it all i i knew i was having contractions, but I let him sleep a few more hours because of the timing of them. And the the midwife said I had a textbook perfect birth, everything went really well.
03:13
Great. So now
03:18
natural birth.
03:20
How long was labor? 16 hours. Okay, but the actual pushing was 20 minutes.
03:28
20 minutes. Okay. And so once he was born, you were able to bond with him and everything was good that way there wasn’t there any.
03:38
We did have a challenge of he was what I thought he was latched. But um, he wasn’t latched well. So he wasn’t getting food as much as he needed in the beginning, but we caught it very quickly with the visits and weighing him. And we did have to do lip and a tongue tie release for him. And ever since that, it was like almost instant that he was able to I could tell the difference, you know, get milk.
04:09
And so what did you see there was different at that point.
04:15
Was he stopped crying?
04:20
Yeah, like if you look at it, if you looked at an early picture of him, like his face was pretty, not pudgy, or, you know, baby fat like him like and it likes them to find like, lines under his eyes, and then he filled out really quickly after that. Yeah, the weight gain was pretty significant. And then just the ability for him to latch without like, causing pain was almost instantaneous. It
04:45
was extremely painful for me when he was trying to feed in the beginning and he wasn’t latched properly. So that was a really big challenge to overcome and figure out
04:57
okay, All right, well, I want to, I want to go a little macro here. And then I’ll come right back into micro things that are new. But let’s go macro for a minute. And the reason why is because I’m a little different, which goes back to my training and just my perspective on vision development. And one of the places I trained, was called the gazelle Institute. And it was started by a physician named Arnold gazelle. In the late 1940s, I went there in the mid 80s. And it was a place where we learned how to evaluate kids. And we did it from a developmental kind of lens. In other words, you know, we start developing our eyes at this age, and what is the difference between eyesight and vision? And how does say an eye that’s crossing in or crossing out? How does that reflect in the in the child’s development, especially gestation, birth, and bonding, those things kind of highly influence how we learn to use our, our eyes and vision. And then years later, when I studied cranial sacral, and we did perinatal, and prenatal therapies, we looked at children and their development around their vision. And so when you say something like, Well, I see the eye turning, what if we use an eyepatch? That’s a very mechanical way to think about it. Because one of the principles is that when I’ve evaluated a child’s vision, I’m looking more than at the eyeball, like the eyeball is reflecting kind of a deeper pattern. It’s in the body. And when I studied cranial work and other body centered therapies, a lot of times, we never use things like eye patches, or you know, things like that, because it was very much a symptom. Answer, and it didn’t really work very well, but it traumatize the child to say, what, patch eight hours a day or six hours a day, it’s a very mechanical forcing. And so what I’m here to say is that number one, on a prenatal level, the eyes originate from the brain very early. So every tissue of the eyeball, the eye muscle, the eye lens, the eyelid, the retina, the optic nerve, is brain tissue. So we work with vision, we’re working with the eyes, with the brain. And on top of that, one of the best ways to develop your vision and vision is how we, the eye brain body connection, how we process information is through movement. And through stimulating what we call the vestibular system, which is the inner ear, and especially at John’s age, there’s some really great things that you can do from a stimulation standpoint, to let’s say, encourage guide to support John learning to use his eyes together. So we don’t want to enforce something on him that he doesn’t understand. Hi. Hi. And we’re kind of at a formative age where it’s it’s normal to have the eyes kind of wandering and looking and one eye is in and it goes out. And so again, you want to keep the big picture here. He is trying to figure it out. Because the eyes are like his guidance system. They like his GPS that helps him you know, move the world. And vision is really about vision is about spatial understanding and standing movement
09:21
there is there any reason to physically look in his eyes anymore. I just wonder he might fall asleep here soon if now
09:29
I know. I’ve got I’ve got his his situation. Okay. You can Okay, by me bad weather is your belly button. That’s my belly button. Very good. So is it okay to continue? Yeah, go ahead. Okay, so are you both following me so far? as kind of a backdrop of, okay, important No. out. One of the one of the things that you may have heard of, are these movement patterns that all children go through called the primitive survival reflexes. And one of the famous ones is called the Moro reflex, the startle reflex. And what happens at birth is that these reflex movements are a protective mechanism when the newborn comes out of the birth canal, when they’re born. And these reflexes, if they’re not fully integrated, by, say, age two, they, they begin to interfere with visual coordination and visual development. And there’s a there’s a really strong correlation between these early infant movement patterns, and our ability to track and coordinate our eyes later. And this body of work comes from a group of optometrists that I studied with in Scandinavia, because in their, in their treatments, since the mid 1970s, they found instead of putting patches on kids, and, you know, forcing strong lenses, glasses, they worked with these primitive survival reflexes and integrating them. And then they found that the vision would actually get better on its own. And I tested this out with many, many school aged children, and spectrum disorder kids, even adults. Sometimes if you’ve been traumatized, these reflexes emerge again, so the reflexes are controlled by the brainstem, which is our reptilian brain. And if they’re not fully integrated, they affect our fine motor control our cognitive skills. And in looking at John, there might be one or two reflex movement patterns that will encourage bi lateral integration. That’s a key phrase here, bilateral both sides. Integration, okay, now, we see it in the eyeballs. But I can tell you that that confusion in the bilateral integration is not only happening in his eye, it’s also happening in his body. And so the things I’m going to suggest are going to start off to be whole body things. And we’re going to cue the vision so that we can encourage coordination, so that we’re working with both eyes together. And the worst thing that you can do would be to try to introduce an eyepatch. And the second worst do is go to a doctor and have them put drops in the eyes and give you the strongest glasses possible. Those are two things that are taught in the schools, but they’re very eye centric, eyeball oriented, they’re not holistic, they’re not functional. And it’s the wrong way to go, you will go further away from developing the coordination, which is what John is trying to do right now. And for his age, he’s kind of in the perfect spot of exploring what it means to use both sides of his body together with his vision. So what you’re going to see in this process that I’m gonna teach you is that some moments, the eyes look straight as an arrow, some moments, the eyes might wander, if he’s tired, if he’s coming down with being sick, you might see it more because it’s a weak part of him. And all of that is normal. Because in learning how to see and learning how to use your eyes, it’s a nonlinear process. Meaning that it comes from exploration. It comes from trying different things. And I’m back to again, at his age, motor movement, stimulates vision development. You know, if you came to me with this problem, we probably work a little more on the eyeballs. But for John, because of where he is in his development, we’re going to start by working with his body and his movement and stimulate different aspects of his vision, but do it in a way that he might have a better context of understanding, but what am I supposed to do with all this here? So it’s meeting him where he is and understanding why he’s exactly where he needs is to be in his learning curve around using his vision. So I’m going to pause here and see if you’ve got some comments, questions. And then we’ll go more into the practical exercises.
15:16
Yeah, just sounds like you’re suggesting to do certain exercises with him to strengthen his eyes. And is it something that kids usually will when they do that they’ll grow out of?
15:30
Well, yes, so what happens is, we’re not so much strengthening as we are developing a better skill and connection. It’s like, if my arm is here, and I don’t have really good connection with it, you know, the muscles are fine, but how can I learn to use it with this one, and so the activities will be set up. So I got to use these both together, and I need to move in, I need to move out. So it’s not so much strengthening is developing a skill set through experience. And by doing that, he will integrate and evolve to a higher level of functioning. So when he does that, the old adaptation or compensation that he’s using now, will will fade away, it will dissolve. So you could look at it as he’s growing out of it. Or you could look at it as well, now that he’s learned this, he doesn’t have to do the other thing anymore. I mean, part of what he’s going through here, is he’s trying to figure out what do I do with the two eyeballs? Look, how do I look? How is this related to my body? And how is it related to my movement? So what we’re going to do is I’m going to give you several things, to, to explore with him. And you know, like you or me, you give us an exercise A, B, C, D, we’d be very regimented, but with him, it’s got to be more flow, it’s got to be more, okay, we may get 30 seconds out of him on this one, then let’s move to another one. Or he’s not willing, he’s resistant of doing this one today. Let’s try some of these other ones. And when I work with a lot of special needs kids, I have all my equipment set out in my, in my therapy room, and I have to kind of go with their nervous system. You know, what’s their mood like today? How much sleep did they get? And I introduce things and sometimes they go, Wow, yeah, I can do this. And other times, they might resist me. So the point of the story is this. The overall goal for you three, is to help John develop better visual aiming with both eyes, and visual coordination. That’s kind of the goal. And so in doing that, the first exercise I’m going to give you is helping him integrate that Moro reflex, the Moro reflex is the startle. And when I show it to you, you’re gonna go oh, this is moving his body and his head and his eyes together simultaneously at the same time. So what I’m going to do right now is I’m going to demonstrate it. Oops, it’s not what I wanted to do. And get my screen. No, there we go. Alright, so you should you should be able to see my screen. So when you are I do this exercise.
19:06
We we see you but I don’t see your your computer screen. Is that what you meant?
19:10
No, no, no. See me. I want you to see me. Okay. Yeah, we can see me. Yeah. And I should be pretty big. In the screen, like, okay, so I’m gonna lie down because this Moro reflex is done. It can be done lying down or sitting up. I’m gonna demonstrate it. We call it the starfish. Okay. I get out here a little bit more. So my arms are out. And I’m coming in and I’m doing this kind of thing. This is a view and I were doing it. My head comes up, my left goes over my right eye, uncross and my right goes over my left. That would be the way you and I would do it. But what you’re going to do with John, is you’re going to have him sit on your lap. So that his back is to your front. So he’s going to be sitting on you, and you’re going to have his arms out, and you’re going to lean back and open his arms. And then you’re going to bring him in like this, where you’re wringing his arms, and maybe even his legs in to a fetal position. So you’re going out. And you’re gonna do, again, if we were going to make it structured, you’re going to do about five of those on each side. And it’s not as important. But again, if you were going to do this, you would want his right arm over his left arm to start and his right leg over his left leg. So we’re coming into what we call midline, middle, right. And when one of the eyes turns out, or turns in, we are not connecting to the middle, our visual middle, or our body metal. And so when you get him in a situation where you’re supporting him, you’re moving out and you’re moving in, you do the sitting up, and then you go the other side, left over, right, right over left, that’s going to start to get his brain to go, Oh, I’m using both sides together, I’m I’m in a peripheral situation with my body. And now I’m in a central situation with my body. And so one of the ways to improve visual coordination at this age, is to cue the body and the brain in this type of integrated bilateral movement. So just some of the things that happen when you have the Moro reflex, it can occur, where you’re not integrating, because there’s been some optical or something happened at birth or around the birth, like you were talking about, that begins to interrupt the continued integration that needs to happen in that primitive reflex. And that’s why I asked you about it because it was a place where it was a hard moment for him. And that can start to interfere with the sensory motor exploration, it kind of gets frozen in that. So you’re going to do that Moro reflex, I would do it every day, if you can. And it’s a very loving, you know, I would say protective kind of a movement where he’s, he’s, you know, sitting up against you, and you’re getting him to move his arms and his legs, you may not get five out of him, you may get one or two, you can angle you can sit up, you can sit back, you can do it lying down, because all of that is going to stimulate what we call his vestibular, which is his inner ear. So one of the ways to start to get both eyes to work together, is to connect the inner ear. With our eyes, there’s actually a reflex called the vestibular ocular reflex, the VOR. And when somebody is having difficulty aiming both eyes together, there’s usually an underactive vestibular system. In other words, he’s trying to do it all through his visual. So number one exercise is that Moro starfish. And I’d like you to do that for about two weeks.
23:38
Okay, it’s kind of primitive, how many times a day,
23:42
once a day, once a day, you only need to do once a day four or five on each side. And again, it doesn’t need to be perfect. It’s we want to give the beam mapping new pathways and the way to do that is by introducing these kind of prescribed movement patterns. Alright, so that’s, that’s number one.
24:06
Is does it matter if we alternate or should it be five right and five left?
24:14
It’s better if you alternate. Okay, so you’re doing upper left, come open, leftover, right? Because you’re you’re you’re dancing with both. Not just doing five on one side. Again, well, he’s in getting us both of his eyes together, is going to be to start dancing with his right and left is Artanis. I believe. One of the best ways to get your eyes work together is to teach them how to jump rope. And do these bilateral exit poses in the eyes straighten because the body’s alternating tells the brain Ain’t Intel’s the eyes oh, I’ve got to show up in this alternating simultaneous way. So some other things that you can do with him would be rolling like a log. So if you can get him to roll, you can maybe roll him up in a blanket. In other words, you want to roll him so that he’s experiencing both sides of his body in the rolling. You know, one of the best things to do, we may be a little young here to do that would be to do some kind of an obstacle course, getting him to move from point A to point B. But he’s got to use his eyes to move around the obstacles, so that he’s using his eyes in his movement. And that’s going to help him start to understand spatial experiences. So let’s say for example, let’s say it was the right eye. And let’s say the right eye was turned in as an example. Whatever it is, what you would want to do at that point is you’d want it to make him move a little more to the right in the peripheral area. So you’re forcing him or making him look for his eye is in making him look out into the peripheral vision. Because when our eye turns in, we’re not using periphery. So you can take a look at, you know, are you seeing it just in one eye? Are you seeing it? Alternating? What what are you guys seeing in this dancing? He has? Is it just the left eye? Is it both eyes? What are you observing? Okay, um, somebody?
26:53
I think I mean, as far as like the eye wandering, I think it’s only been the left. Um, and
27:03
do you see it more out or in? In in? Okay, it’s
27:08
only been inserting pictures. I never have noticed it looking at him. Have you? Not really, right.
27:14
I again, that’s what I saw. I think it’s an intermittent situation. Yeah. And so if we think about the left eye, and neuroanatomy, the left eye, is innervated. By the right hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere of the brain is our creative, intuitive side. When our eye turns in, emotionally, we might be either a little confused or afraid. That’s kind of what the emotional behavioral, I’m turning away from life towards my middle. I’m too overwhelmed. So since you’re seeing in the picture, though, I would start moving a lot of things in that peripheral part of his left I feed him. Give him stimulation with the left. Okay. Auditory, it’d be bells, it could be stickers, it could be penlight. It could be, you know, some objects, make them small, make them large, make them close, make them far, get them to look out to the periphery on that side. Hey, John, look what’s over here, this way. Okay, I’m sorry, I interrupted you. Go ahead. Well, yeah,
28:35
no worries. I said two quick questions about the rolling like, like a log, and then the obstacle course, um, lately, like he has really liked me playing we call it rolling bully, where I will just kind of wrestle with them, and I roll him on the bed, is this something you want him to try to roll himself or like us rolling him that’s acceptable right now, just to kind of get that sense of roundness.
29:00
Both ultimately, we would want him to initiate it. I think if rolling him. So what you’re doing when you roll him is you’re you’re activating the right side of the body in the left side of the body in this loop, which is going to cause the brain to get more lit up. And you know, it would be really great is to have them be over there. And you say, Hey, John, can you roll to me and see if he can do that and maybe put some obstacles in the way and he says, You’re gonna have to go around these things. So that’s one thing you can initiate it eventually we’d like him to initiate the movement. And while we’re at it, what’s his crawling like? Gone through
29:49
pretty minimal. I mean, he’s, he’s mainly just up and running in
29:54
red, red flag, red red flag there. So one of the causes Some of the eyes doing this, whatever they’re doing the left is not enough crawling. We skip that stage because the crawling does a couple things. It starts to develop our near vision because we’re looking down at the floor. And it’s this cross patterning. Cross patterning is one of the best ways to negate one of the eyes wandering.
30:26
Okay, so I guess I might have answered your question. Like, he did crawl back when he was a crawler like now at the age of two, he’s almost always running or walking. But um, when he was crawling, he actually did do more of like, a weird scoot at times, like he would crawl but then like, he realized he could get a lot route a lot faster, like having one leg up and then kind of scooting the right leg like or your left leg, but just kind of like scooting on his butt up, in a sense. But yeah, it really will crawl for a little bit. No, it wasn’t like
31:03
that’s a primitive reflex. signal that the primitive reflex was not integrated. So we may or be able to go back to that. But what we want is right hand, left knee, left knee and right knee. Now another way you could do that is marine crawl. That’s where he’s more on his belly. One of the ways you could get him to experience it is you do the marine calc crawl, and he’s on your back. And that will kind of get him to understand that right and left, left and right. So that he’s able to go this is no, this is tricky stuff here. Can he also crawl backwards? Can he also go backwards? Because one of the things that when the eye is turning in, we’re not using our side vision. And one of the best ways to develop your side vision is by learning to motor your body going backwards. Yeah, because you have to open the periphery. Again, I’ve seen I’ve seen strabismus go away completely just by kids getting more comfortable going backwards. Again, ahead.
32:23
Yeah, I’ve never seen I don’t know if I can recall him crawling backwards. But I have seen him, you know, walking backwards. Like if I say Can you back up he’ll like back up. So can you can he do like that’s a good thing to keep doing is also just encouraging the backwards movement, even standing or walking
32:42
in an obstacle course. Okay, in other words, that he’s using his eyes to see where his body needs to go. So any way that you can bring his eyes into his movement, you’re going to get to the goal fast, okay.
32:57
And playground is pretty good obstacle for us, right? Like just telling.
33:04
Okay, great acts. Absolutely. And so then some other things with that would be any kind of spinning, or turning activates the inner ears, which is going to help the eyes. Okay, now the spinning can be slow, it doesn’t. In fact, think of it this way. We want his movements to be slow, medium and fast, not just fast. So we want to increase the range of his neurological experience. By having a go at different speeds. Most kids just like to go fast. But in our in our physical therapy, we really want the kids to be able to go at all speeds, to go backwards, to walk backwards to do bear walk, get him to do bear walk, get him to do marine crawl, get him to do crawling, getting him to do rolling, getting him to do the somersault so as many different ways that you can encourage his movement. And if the left eye is the eye that’s turning in, I want him really turning left where he’s looking, has to look into his peripheral. Because if you start
34:17
looking at because I do feed him from the left, good, good. Dinner Table, I’m always to his left. And if Mike and I wrote
34:29
make it even way out there high, low. In other words, very word comes from knock him look at it and track it. So that he starts to develop that skill of fixating the fixation. Okay. I have words. So like his, he’s in the School of vision now. And the school of vision is okay, how many different ways can we end adduce the world to him. So he’s got to lead with his vision, through movement, through tracking, through spinning through, you know, this is how this is how these kids, this is the language they understand. And you’ll find, you know, the good news is you’re not seeing this on a daily basis you’re seeing in some pictures. So I do think it’s, it’s very superficial, I don’t think it’s, you know, deeply embedded problem, you know, thank goodness, he had a natural birth, the more stuff you put on Burb birthing, with Pitocin. And, you know, so many, so many of those combinations, it really does affect the sensory motor development. Now, another thing that you could explore if you haven’t already, would be, and you would need to find a specific practitioner, like myself, somebody who’s experienced in pediatrics, to have him get a cranial sacral session, do you know about cranial sacral?
36:21
He’s had it done. Yeah.
36:24
So it might be a regular thing for him, where, you know, even if he goes every six months or, but with what you were telling me about the latching, there is a little bit of trauma there. A little bit? Not a lot.
36:43
Yeah, we try that in chiropractic care. Before we did the release, I tried a lot before I did the release, I’m sure
36:50
and you know, it’s also depends with kids, I find it’s how available they are. And you know, I have a child, now I started treating him at three, he’s 13. Now he lays on the table, he loves the cranial work, when he was three, he had an eye turning in, I could get maybe 10 minutes out of him at the most. And a lot of times mom would have to lay with him on the table, because he just, you know, he’s really fidgety and stuff. So you know, you do what you can, if you’re, if you feel like that that checkbox has been checked, then you don’t have to do it. But I do think the cranial sacral can help reduce this confusion between the two eyes. It’s very good for that. Okay, and many other but you know, it’s not going to be none of this is the magic bullet, you’re going to be in a process of of cultivating his eye, his eyes to connect better with his brain and his body through his movement. And the movements can be more coordinated. Maybe you introduce a ball, you roll a ball to him, can he roll it back to you? Can he bounce a big ball to you can you bounce it back to him? Again, he’s still kind of young. When he starts riding some kind of a three wheeler or bike or something, make him do an obstacle course he can’t just go straight ahead. Climbing is good getting him to climb and he’s cross patterning. That’s all really great stuff. And then on the visual level, stimulating the part of his vision that you feel he’s not accessing, either through eating food, all kinds of things. So is this make sense? Is this make sense?
38:52
Yeah. Um, so for him, it been his left eye and turning in. I know, for the most part, his car seats in Shannon’s vehicle, which it’s only the right side do you think it’d be advantageous to maybe switch him to the left side so that it kind of fuses out left left as well?
39:13
Absolutely. Okay. That’s what I’m talking about looking. The best way to heal this is through 24/7. How can you stimulate that left side? Okay, it’s not just two minutes of exercise a day. That’s not going to do it. Yeah, exactly. You need to you need to give him as many experiences as you can. Where you’re stimulating his vision. It becomes a game. Okay. Okay. You can you can use things that are auditory driven. And then he looks visually. You can ask him to Uh, what do you see out there? Make them describe to you what he’s seeing. So he’s bringing his auditory verbal into his visual experience,
40:13
we do that a lot in the car seat, you know, look at the airplanes, look at the animals, whatever we’re seeing, so we’re not helping it. Right, by having him on the right.
40:24
And make him go into detail. Well, what color is the animal? What kind of animals do you think all its young? Make him use his imagination. I that’s another thing. Art. If he’s doing any art stuff, drawing a, in other words, bilateral swing is is another good one, you know, being in water? I’m sure you’re doing all these things.
40:54
Yes. And one thing about his speech is he’s he’s talking really well, to the point where I’ve had several other mothers asked me, you know, how old is he, because they have, you know, little kids, three or four that aren’t talking as well as him, probably has to do with the birth, right.
41:16
I think the birth, what you feed him, you know, his environment, you know, mom and dad are there, you know, it’s all of those things, because basically, you’re in a bubble, and he’s in your bubble. And that is kind of in an outer bubble, this is in gestation. So it’s all of these things. And to view this not as a problem, or something that’s lazy, or you know, something’s wrong with him, you’re just going to take the basics and make it better. That’s why I don’t recommend you going to these regular eye doctors, because they’re so scary. And it’s really counter productive. When this is an organic situation, the term is called plasticity. Okay, eating that. John is at the age where all these new pathways are getting formed. It’s the time of life when Bring it on, I want, I want to, I want life experience. And if my eye is turning in, well then give me experiences. So I gotta look over there. Okay. And because of the plasticity, and because you haven’t done things that interfere, so I work with, with kids, and the more vaccines, the more birth trauma, the more bad food, the more illness, the harder it is. The less you have of those interferences, then the faster the changes, because, you know, you don’t have to overcome those those obstacles. Excellent. And he’s obviously very smart. I wonder, I don’t know. But I wonder if part of the verbal development is because the vision is lagging behind. Hmm. That could be that is a common thing that I see highly verbal kids. There are other systems are not as develop. So visual puzzles, but simple stuff. You know, you can you know, in other words, bring the vision more into it. Start with movement. Start with the big stuff. Maybe do a little detail. I don’t know if you read to him. Pictures. Oh, yeah, look I’m looking at I’m sure you do that. But I want to I want you to bring the vision into whatever you’re you’re doing with him. And I want you to vary the vision. Either through movement, body coordination, going forwards, going backwards, rotating him going at different speeds, that kind of thing. And if you do that, your goal that this is a preventative, proactive way of getting him to connect his eyes to his brain and body. Okay, cool. And then you got the cranial work needed. What other questions do you have? I’ve got a question. I’ve got a question. How much tummy time did he do?
44:58
So that one was actually kind of a A concern in my my mind, because he just hated being on his belly. We could maybe get about 15 seconds usually was like his average and then eventually be like, Oh, he’s good for like a minute. But yeah, we’re trying to over the course of a day gets 60 minutes cumulative. And we I mean, we just never really got close to that mark at all.
45:27
Tom, tummy time is one of the best ways to learn how to control your head, and eventually your eyes, because you have to lift up. So here’s what I want you to do, I want you to go back. And I want you to do this thing where he’s riding on you doesn’t on your back, and you’re on the ground, and you’re moving around, it could be crawling, it could be bare walk, it could well, I would say marine crawl might be better. In other words, get him more into some belly time would be good. That’s another developmental milestone that and the bilateral crawling forwards and backwards hopping. You can also get them on the bed or someplace and do some trampoline stuff, you know, this hands? That’s great for to do some jumping, spinning rolling obstacle course. That’s
46:24
Kate loves the trampoline. We we have one and John’s nanny right next door has a big one. So
46:33
good. Yeah, that’s gonna continue, you know, in a supervised way, of course. But you know, I think this is more superficial than something deep. And remember, it’s gonna it’s gonna be up and down. There’s a lot of variability in these in this situation. And if you see it happening, he’s probably tired. Or he’s fatigued. And so that’s just a signal. So you’re not going to get hooked into Oh, my God, it’s turned. So keep the big picture because he’s really trying to figure it out right now. And that’s really normal. And the worst thing you can do is go to a medical intervention, which will completely stop the visual development, if you strongly name an eyepatch. It goes against all the other things that you’ve done with him. Which is why he’s so free and open. And why he’s going to change.
47:42
Excellent, quickly. Dr. Burton, where are you located?
47:48
I’m in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
47:50
Okay. Just curious. Okay. I do you have any other questions about John? No,
47:59
I really appreciate all the insight. So
48:03
I contact eye contact. I would be playing an airplane with him on my hit him on my belly. Yeah, I mean, you’re you’re already doing that. I mean, what sleep like with him? Does he sleep with you guys or what’s going on there?
48:22
For the most part, he’s, he’s in his crib, until anywhere from six in the morning till sometimes if we’re lucky, like 730. We put him down for bed around what 8pm ish.
48:37
Anywhere from 730 to 830. He goes to bed.
48:41
And for the most part, he may wake up once or twice throughout the night. But all I have to do is go down to his crib and say, Hey, like we’re all still sleeping, you gotta go lay down and he bounces right back out. And then he’ll go home and
48:55
I’m sorry, above his mobiles and things above his
48:59
bed. Glow in the Dark glow in the dark stars. And then when he falls asleep, there’s like a light of green and blue stars
49:07
like a light projector.
49:10
I mean, if you want to, you know, get a little more skin in the game, you could do moving mobile moving thing, something that would move or something that would really attract his attention. You know that that’s some sometimes parents will do that or change the position of the crib changed the predisposition of the nightlight. So he’s got to change his fixation. I mean, think about how you can get him to look to his left in a wide way. That that would be one of my strategies. And I want to set it up either with the car seat with the crib with the eating. So I’m making him look over there. Okay. What’s there I’m making him move over there. Got it. So to summarize, we have a two year old who’s got a left eye that is wandering in. And the parents are mostly seeing it in pictures, they’re not actually seeing the left eye turn in in real time. And we call this convergence strabismus, where the left eye is turning in towards the midline. And whenever the two eyes are not tracking together, and one of the eyes turns in, the brain is either going to see double, or the brain shuts off the eye to avoid double. Now two years old, it’s very common to have this scenario because you know, these young kids are still trying to figure out how to use their eyes, in relation to their brain and body. And there are a couple of key points, there was a little bit of stress at the birth, there was a problem with latching. But not too much, there was the natural birth was was really important and healthy. And so there’s not too many obstacles in the sensory motor development. But there, there definitely are a few things like lack of tummy time not staying in crawling long enough. And these developmental milestones actually shape how a child begins to use their vision. And I’m defining vision is how the eyes and the brain and the body work together. And one of the essential movement patterns, the primitive survival reflexes are a great way to help a young child integrate how the eyes and the brain work together. So by including activities, in your daily living as part of the lifestyle is so much more effective than saying, Okay, let’s impose a patch six or eight or 10 hours a day, to force the other eye, or the eye that’s turned in to look straight. A young child like that is going to have no context on how to do that. And also, prescribing strong glasses for the child is also going in the wrong direction. Because when you prescribe a strong lens at that age, you are freezing the child’s ability to learn and develop and use their eyes as it relates to their body. And they know this goes against a lot of the mainstream medical advice, but it works, what I’m saying works. So that’s our show for today. I want to thank you for tuning in. And I hope this helps parents, especially when they’ve got kids who are showing some kind of eyes that are wandering, turning in turning out. Don’t lose hope. There’s a lot of things that you can do organically. And it’s really about the plasticity of the eyes in the brain. We’re taking advantage of that. Okay, everybody until next time, take care.
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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More