Lined Paper Problems

My daughter has always had trouble with her eyes, she wears glasses now (she's 11) but was patched for several weeks when she was 4 years old, she's had eye therapy to keep from losing vision in one eye to ambliopia.  She may never have sterioscopic vision, but can see out of both eyes now.  She has complained about not being able to read a computer screen and gets poor marks on the standardized tests that are administered this way.  The school has tried to acomodate by diming the lights, etc.  Anyway... she was working on our home computer last night and I asked her about her eyes. She said "I can see the computer better, but the lines on lined paper keep moving so it's really hard to read and write" and she's also said that graph paper keeps waning back and forth too.  What could cause this?  Is it something I should be alarmed about?

[John C Hagan III, MD, FACS, FAAO]

Your daughter should be evaluated for latent eye muscle problems, latent refractive errors such as uncorrected symptomatic hyperopia. She might best be treated and evaluated by a pediatric ophthalmologist. You can go to www.aao.org and use the Find An Eye MD feature to locate one near you.


JCH III MD