"Fixing My Gaze" by Sue Barry
I am honored to introduce a book written by a lay visual scientist about her experience as a vision therapy patient in an optometrist's office in Northhampton, Massachusetts. Her experince mirrors thousands of patients, who have also achieved improvement of their visual condition...be it a crossed, lazy or wandering eye condition.
Dr. Eliot Kaplan, Developmental Optometrist
Book Reviews:
REVIEW #1
I just finished reading a newly published book, Fixing My Gaze, by neurologist Susan Barry, PHd.
It is about her experience of recovering stereo vision after four decades of seeing only with one eye at a time ,due to strabismus. It is by far the best non-medical book I've ever read on the experience of being a strabismic and about the amazing changes she goes through as the world begins to snap into 3-D depth. Then she ties the whole process to the brain and the changes it goes through, making new connections, discussing the phenomenon of brain plasticity and debunking the long held beliefs about "critical periods," after which the brain has been thought to be unable to make changes or develop.
Just 155 pages of easy to read material with lots of technical information, presented in simple language: including a bibliography of medical and brain and perceptual research sufficient to satisfy the most skeptical "show me the studies" critic. The noted neurologist Oliver Sachs wrote the foreword.
Thomas Lecoq, Optometry Consultant
REVIEW #2
From today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (7-2-09), an unqualified and ringing endorsement of Sue Barry's book, and of specially trained and imaginative optometrists which reads, in part:
"Capitalizing probably more on latent neuronal connections than on the creation of new ones, Barry benefited from orthoptics — a hidden corner of restorative medicine. With contrived ocular exercises, specially trained and imaginative optometrists treat patients whose eyes are cosmetically aligned but imperfectly foveated. The simplicity of the exercises and of the apparatus (such as beads on a string, papers taped to walls, and strips of film) is bracing for a profession enamored with technology.
The book’s main contribution, however, is exposing the wrong-headed dogma that acuity and binocular vision can be restored only during a critical developmental period. Surgical correction of strabismus is dominated by this notion, first posited by Claud Worth in his landmark 1903 book, Squint: Its Causes, Pathology, and Treatment, and set at a hard stop at 2 years of age by his student Francis Chavasse. The experiments of Hubel and Wiesel are often cited as confirming the lost malleability of the adult brain, but Barry points out that they did no such thing because there was no attempt at restoration of fusion. Her experiences and those she recounts from others belie the “nothing else can be done” message that ophthalmologists gave t o her and to her mother throughout her childhood.
Several visual scientists have now demonstrated the reversibility of infantile loss of vision and stereopsis, but blindness to these findings and underappreciation of the solutions offered by orthoptics still persist."
