I have a lazy eye. How do I know which one is the dominate eye is which one is t!

I have a lazy eye. How do I know which one is the dominate eye is which one is the lazy eye?

When I look straight ahead, I only see out of my right eye and if I keep my head straight and look to the elft, I see out of my left eye. I want to know which one is my lazt eye without going to the eye specialist.

1 month ago
My eye doctor said the lazy one is the one I see out of most is this right or not because I would think tis the opposite.

When we are just born, we open our eyes and begin to learn the language of sight. There is only a certain abount of time in which this will occur such as the first 3-6 months. After that, the eye is normal in structure, but the brain will not "use" it for vision. It hasn't learned. So in later life, this eye will not "see" as well as the normal eye. Its image is sort of ignored. In testing, this eye won't have the ability to see as well as the good eye. The vision will be 20/100 or a little better or a little worse but no where near 20/20.

Since it doesn't have an image that the brain uses to fix onto, it may drift, either towards the nose (esotropia) or towards the outside or temple (exotropia)

There's an entire subspecialty of ophthalmology and this is usually associated with pediatric ophthalmology in trying to diagnose and treat or reduce the vision loss in a lazy eye and straighten out the eyes so they aren't 'crooked'..

One can force this eye to "learn" to see" by blurring the vision of the good eye. This can be done with drops that paralyze the focusing muscles of the good eye so its image is really blurred and the brain will "use" the bad eye more, or sometimes the good eye will be patched to eliminate all the input and make the brain dependent totally on the "lazy one". This occlusive therapy usually involves a patch that sticks to the skin so NO image can get through or around the sides.

Whether or not the eye is straight doesn't make it lazy, as some people can adapt. For instance if the eyes are crossed and the right one is looking towards the left and the left eye looks towards the right, some people see 20/20 or "perfectly" out of the eye looking in THAT direction while the brain totally ignores the eye looking in the other direction. So when the person looks to the right, will use the left eye, and the brain supresses the image of the right eye which is crossed and looking to the left. If no suppression of the image, there would be two images, or double vision or diplopia, and that's not well tolerated. Try looking straight ahead (normal folk) and push one eyeball through the lower lid GENTLY to move its direction. That double image...well, we don;t like that very much. It's not tolerated.

Which set of stairs do you go down? And if you guess wrong, you get to learn to fly...all they way down the stairs.

The eye that is ignored, the suppressed one....it has SUPPRESSION AMBLYOPIA. so when it's not being used, it's pretty much 'blind' or supressed.

This can go on and on and on, but should give you an idea of what one is dealing with.

There are REASONS this happens. Some are mild, others related to a weak muscle or group of muscles, or a weak nerve going to one of the muscles or group of muscles to the eye that are in charge of moving it up and down and right and left, and even rotating the eyeball a little when you tilt your head. Then there's always systemic disorders sich as Thyroid disease that can affect the extraocular muscles, or tumors that push the eye in an abnormal direction, or trauma that causes scarring and entraps a muscle so it can't act.......etc..