by Kellye Lynn
Jul 28, 2006 5:30 pm US/Eastern
article obtained from www.wjz.com
(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

(WJZ) Cockeysville, MD Strabismus, or crossed eyes, is a condition in which the eyes don't align meaning that one or both eyes may turn in or out.

Surgery was once the main form of treatment, but now doctors are using a non-invasive method that straightens the eyes and improves vision.

For a long time, leading neuroscientists taught that there is a brief "critical period" in infancy when a baby born cross-eyed could develop the brain function to rewire itself and change. Conventional wisdom followed that if you were born cross-eyed and did nothing about it until two that your window of opportunity had closed dramatically.

When Sue Barry was three months old, her parents noticed that her eyes were crossed. By her second birthday, she would have the first of three surgical procedures to straighten the misalignment.

"By the time I was ten or 12, my eyes looked straight but were not effective functionally," she says. "That is, I still used one eye or the other at all times."

However, Barry's view of the world changed with vision therapy.

Dr. Paul Harris, a Cockeysville optometrist at the Baltimore Vision Center described the therapy to Healthwatch reporter Kellye Lynn calling it "a sequential step-by-step stimulation program to first awaken the quiet pathways in the brain [in order] to start to use the eyes in a normal way."

The exercises are designed to improve the brain's ability to control eye alignment, movements and visual processing.

After 8 months of therapy, Sue could finally see in 3-D.

When my vision changed, it was the most joyful experience of my life," she says. "Second only to the birth of my children."

Vision therapy can also help people with lazy eye. Dr. Harris says the therapy is the most effective in patients under the age of six.