Amblyopia in My 5.5 Year old...treatment?

There are some really great and helpful websites out there on the best types of patches and tricks to get your child used to wearing them.

We were blessed my daughter's issues were caught before she lost vision in the "weak"/misaligned eye (her eye was drifting.severly to the side) She had surgery to correct it.

Don't feel bad this happens a lot that the eyes are so slightly misaligned that it isn't caught sooner. Sometimes much later than 5.5...

The specialist will tell you how long to patch a day, if glasses are needed, give you resources to help and if surgery is considered don't worry, it was the best thing for my daughter and she did great!!

Keep us posted!!

my 3 year old daughter is currently being treated for Amblyopia. Its not bad, they are just retraining the eye to not be so weak. My daughter has other conditions that attributed to the severe astigmatism in her one eye, so we are working with that as well. The patch treatment is very old, very simple and very effective. My daughter is currently using Curad large bandages with a small amount of skin tape to hold them on. We let her decorate her patch daily, but you can get re-usable cloth ones from the eye doctor and pharmacy. They dont really like the pirate patch types cause they dont get close to the skin and block out any light and they can cheat by pulling it up and looking if you are not there to observe them. My daughter has to wear the patch every day, for 4 hours a day. We go back every month for a re-evaluation. Already its pulling her lazy eye straight and we have only been doing it for a month. Its not hard to do, there is no stigma to go with this, the worst that they get socially are questions like "what did you do to your eye?" or "did you get hurt?" I just tell people that she is fixing her bad eye. I dont go into detail. Usually it gets a ring of admires and sympathizers and no one really bullies her or teases her. My daughter already had glasses and we tried it for 6 weeks alone before doing the patch therapy. She is FINE with them. She has not broken them yet, however there is a company that makes really cool wrap around super flexible, shatter proof glasses for accident prone, or highly active children. If you want there info let me know. Our daughter is fine with just regular glasses. We are told she will need corrective lens for the rest of her life. Her Amblyopia treatment is for her very weak eye, and her lazy eye. She has Strabismus as well. So that's why we are doing Patch. There is no definitive time frame, its when the eye doctors feel the eye strengthens enough to match the other one. In some really awesome cases it helps so much they can get rid of the glasses till they get older!!!

Feel free to PM me for any more information regarding this.

A friend of mine's daughter is going through this right now. She won't cooperate with the traditional patch, so they have to put drops in her eye to blur it out. She is in kindergarten right now and they really couldn't even do the testing on her because in a sense she is almost blind (one eye blurred and the other with horrible vision). She wears glasses now. They have their fingers crossed that it will work for her because her vision is really bad right now. Good luck!

Our daughter was diagnosed with amblyopia at age 4. She had to wear glasses all the time and a patch for an hour a day to start. When the results were not what we wanted to see, she was able to use drops in her good eye to blur it for a period of a couple of days. It was the equivalent to patching for all of her waking hours for 2-3 days.

They will likely be more aggressive with your son's treatment since you've not caught it until now. I'm sure that they told you that here is a relatively short period of time to correct this before the neuro-pathways are laid down.

If he has to wear glasses and a patch, I would check into a patch called "frame huggers". They fit over the lens by attaching through the frame and are much more comfortable than the regular "pirate" patch. My daughter hated those (traditional patch) and would constantly peek through the gap and complain that it was uncomfortable. I would ask about the drops though. They were the most helpful and easiest form of treatment for us.

Our daughter's eye corrected in about 2 1/2 years with consistent treatment. Wearing the glasses is hard because in most cases when kids need glasses it's because it helps them see better. In this case the glasses are blurring the good eye to make the weak eye respond and it's really frustrating. They can't see better.They don't like it, but it's imperative to make them wear the glasses, patch, whatever, until it gets better because the time for correction is so limited.

Best of luck. Don't feel bad that you didn't know sooner that he couldn't see well. We couldn't tell until we took our daughter to a routine physical and they happened to do a paddle eye test. It was really obvious she couldn't see out of one eye, but how often do you cover one of your kids' eyes to see how well they can see....? The success of correction is pretty good for this!

My now 13 yr old had the same problem. We patched for an hour a day for a year, then every other day for another 6 months, then no patching at all. All that time she wore her glasses. By the end of 2 yrs her vision was better then 20/20 in each eye and she has not had to have glasses even. BTW there are some NEAT eye patches now, google and you will find some with army, animal and other prints.