Today I am going to talk about intermittent exotropia and what protocols I use to manage it in children, teenagers, and adults. Enjoy the show.

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

exercises, spasm, eye, muscles, reflex, integration, working, infants, stress, toddlers, vestibular stimulation, called, muscle spasm, visual, bilateral, brain, vision, overwrought, patching, movement patterns

 

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 [email protected].

Hey everybody, its Dr. Sam, I'd like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast today. So I'm going to take a question from Dr. Pillai, who's asking about a condition called intermittent exotropia. For infants, toddlers, teenagers and adults, and how is it different? How do I manage it? What are the protocols? So, let's break this down.

When our two eyes are working together, they're both aiming at an object in our environment, whether it's up close or far away. So the goal is both eyes are working together. Now, when one of the eyes tends to wander, this is called strabismus. Now we can have an eye wandering in, which is called esotropia. Or we can have an eye wandering out which is called exotropia. In any case, what's going on is there's an integration problem in the brain, in the eyes and in the body. Now, exotropia means the eye is wandering out. Obviously, if it's intermittent, it only happens sporadically some of the time.

And maybe some of the time it happens when especially we're talking about, you know, teenagers and adults, it happens when you're stressed or tired, or fatigued, or you're not feeling well. It's kind of a weak link in the eye brain connection. Now, when one of the eyes wanders out, two things happen. Either you get double vision, or the brain says I'm just gonna shut off onto the eyes. And so take your choice, a lot of times, we start off seeing double, but then over time, the brain just says I'm going to ignore, you know, this double image, and I'll just use the eye that is lining up.

Now when we see this condition in infants and toddlers, it's a timeframe where there's a plasticity going on, in that we don't want to necessarily try to fix it, either through surgery or patching. But what's a better approach is to work with the whole body through different specific movement patterns. And to encourage bilateral integration with both sides of the body and both hemispheres of the brain, this is going to help you and then tell the eyes, okay, I can have a better opportunity for straightening out. So it's something that I counseled parents to watch, and to maybe do some proactive exercises that can help.

But you don't want to do something as invasive as surgery War II patching. Because, first of all, those methods don't work very well. It creates more trauma in the infant toddler, and it's really makes no sense to them. Glasses is also another poor option, because that's not going to do anything as well. So the bottom line is that by doing some bilateral exercises, doing some vestibular stimulation things with these infants and toddlers, working with something called primitive reflex integration, this is primitive reflexes are the motor patterns that we come out of the birth canal with. And they're very important in helping us integrate our, our movement patterns with our vision.