Strabismus Treatment St. Louis

The term "strabismus" refers to misaligned eyes; the two eyes are not lined up in the same direction. (Also known as "cross-eyed" or "wall-eyed"). Generally, 2% to 4% of the population in any given area will have strabismus or amblyopia.

The way we treat strabismus is with a combination of eye-patching if there is associated amblyopia, or atropine penalization if there is significant amblyopia, or with glasses if there is significant refractive error, or eye muscle surgery.

Eye muscle surgery can be done at any age, child or adult. Multiple procedures can be done, if needed, and strabismus surgery can be done to promote binocular vision, to improve depth perception, and to avoid double vision.

In general, when you do eye muscle surgery on children, it is better to do it when they are younger rather than older, so that they can have a better chance to develop sensory fusion and depth perception.

Often we will do surgery on adults that have had previous surgery when they were a child, to correct residual strabismus.

We will sometimes do a "wake-up" adjustable technique, where we will wake up the adult patient during the procedure and fine-tune the alignment with an additional adjustment.

Strabismus surgery is the most common surgery that I perform. On average I will do six or more cases every week; I've done several thousand eye surgery procedures. I have over 15 years of surgical experience doing strabismus surgery, and I will commonly be referred patients for strabismus surgery that are a couple of hours travel away, and will coordinate their care with the referring eye doctor.

We commonly evaluate people for a second opinion with regard to eye muscle surgery; several people who have been told that they weren't a candidate for eye muscle surgery were in fact excellent candidates for surgery.

Feel free to contact us for an expert and experienced medical second opinion on a strabismus condition.

~~ Dr. Andrew Blatt