Standard Amblyopia treatment -“weakest medicine with the greatest negative side effects, please!”

Imagine that you came down with an illness that caused you significant limitations in your abilities. Fortunately you are not in pain, but your condition is blocking you from doing your job easily and applying yourself in other day-to- day activities.

At first you had no idea that you even had a problem as your condition was discovered on a routine visit to the doctor. But once it was diagnosed,  it began to explain why you had trouble doing so many of the things that your friends could do easily. And,  there is good news. Your doctor explained that your condition is treatable, as long as you don’t wait too long. If you wait too long, you’ll simply have to live with the problem for the rest of your life!

So, absolutely, you want this over and done with a soon as possible. Therefore,  you ask your doctor  to outline the treatment process. He says, your condition is one that requires you to take a medicine that has been around for over a hundred years. Yes, as he describes, “it can work, but really slowly and difficult to comply with because it has lots of bad side effects!” On the other hand,  there is an advanced modern treatment for your disease that works faster, better and has virtually no side effects, but your doctor wants to start you on  the weakest medicine that will make you feel worse than when you came into the doctor’s office and will give you only a partial recovery from the condition! Yes, even though there is evidenced-based advanced treatment, that is faster, better, safer and makes you feel good about yourself, the doctor is prescribing the weakest, cheapest medicine with the highest amount of documented side effects. How would that make you feel?  Now imagine the patient in this story is not you, instead this is about your child!

Indeed, this is what most children with Amblyopia (Lazy Eye) are prescribed. An outdated standard treatment approach called occlusion therapy (eye patching) or atropine penalization eye drops in which the treatment causes the patient to feel worse due to it’s serious negative side effects, compliance is poor and the patient only gains partial improvements. Compare that with an evidenced-based Advanced Amblyopia Treatment protocol involving office-based optometric binocular vision therapy that gets faster, much better results without any negative side effects plus the treatment is enjoyable.

Given the choice when confronted with your own illness would you say, ” “Doctor, give me your weakest medicine with the greatest amount of negative side effects, please!?” Probably not!

More importantly,  the problem with this scenario as it relates to Amblyopia treatment, is that most parents of children diagnosed with Amblyopia are not given the choice.  To help shed more light on the subject, take a look at our latest video to address this public health issue entitled,

 “Amblyopia: Advanced Treatment for Lazy Eye”

For all of the facts including latest research click on Facts About Amblyopia

The choice is now yours!

Dan L. Fortenbacher, O.D., FCOVD