Don't shut your eye with your eyelid. It takes too much effort to keep one eye shut, too much strain.
You can cover one eye with your hand and see if it helps, but it isn't necessary and I don't think you'd find much benefit from practicing the exercises one eye at a time. I think Bates only had his patients do so when they had amblyopia. So I think you should do things pretty much as if your eyes are the same.
David
Site Administrator
"Half of our funny, heathen lives, we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away." - George Meredith
I just wanted to mention what my Vision therapist told me. She said to cover the strong eye with an eye patch at least two hours a day, more if possible. She said otherwise what will happen is that the stronger eye will keep doing all the work for both eyes and the weaker eye will not get any stronger. Now I cannot say if this is true yet, because I just started doing it last week. But I will let you know if I see improvement. By the way, she said not to do this when I'm at the computer, only when I'm going about the house doing stuff like cleaning, etc.
About 2 weeks ago I emailed a Bates teacher who had amblyopia, and I wanted to know her methods to seeing better than 20/20, as my left eye is a little worse than my right. She said that you should work with both eyes together until you can easily see the 20/20 line in moderate conditions, and then after that, work on catching up on the weaker eye by covering the stronger one with your hand or an eye patch (with the covered eye open as well) for short periods of time practicing good vision habbits on the eye-chart.
LizzyB Wrote:I just wanted to mention what my Vision therapist told me. She said to cover the strong eye with an eye patch at least two hours a day, more if possible. She said otherwise what will happen is that the stronger eye will keep doing all the work for both eyes and the weaker eye will not get any stronger. Now I cannot say if this is true yet, because I just started doing it last week. But I will let you know if I see improvement. By the way, she said not to do this when I'm at the computer, only when I'm going about the house doing stuff like cleaning, etc.
Lizzy
Lizzy, Do you have amblyopia?
David
Site Administrator
"Half of our funny, heathen lives, we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away." - George Meredith
I had to look it up in Wikipedia first! I have never been told I have amblyopia. All I know is that my left eye has always been prescribed at -0.5D to -0.75D stronger than my right one. I've only been told I have myopia on both eyes and astigmatism on my right eye. Do you think patching won't help? I've seen more improvement on the left than the right so far, but I don't know if that's due to the eye exercises, the patching, or just plain more overprescribing on the left than the right to begin with...
The word "amblyopia" -- has a number of very poor definitions.
But is basically means that your OD can not get your
Snellen to 20/20 with a minus prescription.
I would strongly suggest that you get a Snellen, and
see what you can read:
1. With no glasses -- and with both eyes open.
(I suspect you will read 20/30 on a good Snellen), and
2. Read the Snellen WITH your prescription on.
If you can read the 20/20 line (read 1/2 letters correctly)
then you do not have amblyopia.
Click here:
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.smbs.buffalo.edu/oph/ped/IVAC/IVAC.html">http://www.smbs.buffalo.edu/oph/ped/IVAC/IVAC.html</a><!-- m -->
And then on "Display" several times. Step back 20 feet,
and you will find you can pass the 20/40 to 20/30 line.
In fact, the BEST way to confirm that your work with
Bates is successful -- is to personally confirm the
effect by reading your Snellen.
