April 17, 2018 - Double Vision (Strabismus)
Hey folks, it’s Dr. Sam. Good morning. I want to address a question on double vision.
This is a condition where the two eyes are not matching up and they’re not aiming at the same place at the same time. And this creates two scenarios. Either you see double or the brain says I’m just going to suppress or shut off one or the eyes to avoid double.
In either case, this makes it difficult to navigate the world, so I want to give you some ideas on how to repair this situation.
So some of the choices out there involve surgery, where they change the length of the muscle (strabismus surgery). Another option is doing Botox injections. Both of these options only treat symptoms and they’re not addressing the causative factors of double vision, so I do not find them to be the best option. In fact, in strabismus surgery, the success rate is somewhere between 30 and 80 percent. And often the doctor has to go back in and do multiple surgeries because when you do eye muscle surgery you’re not telling the brain what you’ve done. So it actually creates more confusion in a person because now the brain is trying to direct the muscles, but the muscle has changed its length. This confuses your muscle memory, so it doesn’t work very well.
What I recommend is an eye-brain re-education process called vision therapy. This is a physical therapy for your eyes that retrains your eyes how to aim together.
We know that the eyes originate from brain tissue and that the eyes have something called neuroplasticity. And I remember many years ago when I was working in some of the hospitals where people had a traumatic brain injury and they suffered double vision. I was very successful at getting them to reduce the double vision by doing some of these physical therapy eye exercises. Another thing that worked really well was something called therapeutic prism prescriptions. Now, this is very different than a corrective prescription you get from an eye doctor that tries to fix or force your eye into one position. This symptoms-based approach doesn’t work well either. But in terms of the therapeutic prisms that I use, they can actually shift your spatial awareness from left to right or up and down or expand your peripheral vision and they’re very effective at helping a person figure out that if they use more peripheral vision, they can reduce their double vision and eventually eliminate it altogether.
As you continue to work on getting rid of the double vision eventually the dominant pattern is going to be binocularity, which means that the two eyes work together.
Now some of the causes of double vision could be things like trauma, so traumatic brain injury. Stress is another reason why you can develop double vision. Neurological conditions like M.S. or Parkinson’s can also cause a weakness in the eye-brain connection. Keratoconus, corneal dystrophy, uncorrected astigmatism, cataract surgery, Lasik surgery, and dry-eye syndrome can also all lead to double vision. So there are many reasons why you can develop double vision and the way you want to think about it is that you want to use the brain-eye connection because it’s the brain that directs the muscles to aim together. So if you try to fix it from the eyeball perspective it won’t work very well.
I would also say nutrients are really important. So magnesium, chromium, selenium, Bilberry, lutein, taurine, omega-3 fish oils, beta-carotene, and zinc are all important for the eyes. So make sure you’re getting enough nutrients for the brain and the eyes to work together.
So double vision is a condition that you can definitely reduce at any age. I recommend vision therapy which is a form of physical therapy for your eyes and brain. And I do not recommend surgery or botox injections. So that’s my message for today. I want to thank you so much for tuning in. And until next time take good care.
Recommended: 90-Day Vision Therapy Protocol for Double Vision