March 12, 2020 - EyeClarity Blog
For children with strabismus, vision therapy can lead to great success in reducing the problem if you take a two-pronged approach. First, you must assess the child’s vision based on their developmental age and compare their performance age with their chronological age. That means that there are certain milestones that every person goes through in their cycles of development; understanding where a child is and re-patterning the eyes, brain, and body from that place instead of from where they “should” be is more effective. The second part of physical therapy for the eyes is understanding that you must include the whole body. There is a hierarchy in our motor development and accessing it starts with moving our bodies in a more primordial way, or accessing the primitive survival reflexes. These early infant reflex patterns set the stage and create the foundation for us to be able to stand up, crawl, skip, hop, jump rope, play ball, and eventually hold a pencil and copy things from the board, write and read. So if you start working with the body first and then bring the eyes into therapy, you’re going to be successful in reducing the strabismus pattern. Strabismus will start coming back in moments of stress, trauma, and illness, but eventually, the visual integration will become so dominant that the strabismus pattern will completely go away.
It’s not an overnight process. It takes time and there are many factors to be aware of. Parents need to be very dedicated to maintaining a consistent physical therapy schedule. They are going to have to work with the child for 15 to 30 minutes every day for about six months to see lasting change. Another thing for parents to be aware of is whether or not the child’s strong prescription is necessary. I suggest switching to no prescription or a very mild prescription to support the visual development and visual coordination of the child. No one should ever force the child into doing something with their eyes. Encouraging, inviting, and supporting a process of integration and learning is always more effective than forcing anything.
I’ve had great success with treating strabismus over the years in both children and adults. There is some outdated research that says that after a certain age, you will either go blind or your vision will get worse if you do not do eye surgery. This is untrue. In a research study about neurogenesis and neuroplasticity, they crushed animals’ optic nerves and began adding something called BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). BNDF is a protein that helps facilitate the growth of brain cells when its concentration increases in the brain. After giving the animals BNDF, within a week, the optic nerve began to grow back by about 17%. After two weeks, it had become 50% regenerated. This study shows that we can heal and regenerate our eyes if we learn the skill set of using both of our eyes together.