Issue No. 1990
24 - 30 August 2023
COSTA BLANCA SOUTH • EUROWEEKLYNEWS.COM
LAZY EYE HELP
THE Ophthalmology service of the hospital of Sant Joan in Alicante is working on a theory that no child should grow up with amblyopia (lazy eye). For this, they have used two mascots, ‘Ambli’ and ‘Pía’, to help raise awareness among chil dren and their parents of the importance of wearing an eye patch. Four per cent of the chil dren referred to the hospital suffer from amblyopia and early detection and treat ment are essential to recov er their visual capacity as much as possible, reported the Sant Joan d’Alacant Health Department on Thursday, August 17, in a statement. Lazy eye is the most com mon cause of visual loss in children. “Amblyopia occurs when one eye experiences blurred vision and the other a normal vision, but the brain only processes the normal vision.
SANT JOAN HOSPITAL: The importance of wearing eye patches.
“By not processing the blurred vision, the blurred eye stops working and it be comes lazy,” explained the chief of the Ophthalmology Service of the Hospital de Sant Joan, Encarnación Mengual. “We use these little rats
with glasses when the chil dren come to the consulta tion, we make them see how important it is for them to wear the patch on their working eye in order to make the lazy eye work,” said Cecilia Sirvent, nurse co ordinator of the Ophthal mology Unit. “You have to force the eye that doesn’t work as well as the other to work. If it doesn’t learn, when the child is older the amblyopia will no longer have a solu tion, that eye will be with out vision for life and it won’t work with glasses, surgery nor a laser,” said Doctor Mengual.
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