This is one of the reasons I read HN every day. So much to learn. One of my kids has strabismus. He had surgery when he was seven. My wife wanted him to hav

This is one of the reasons I read HN every day. So much to learn. One of my kids has strabismus. He had surgery when he was seven. My wife wanted him to have surgery earlier (2 to 3). It took five years to convince me that the idea made any sense. It didn't. Not to me. As an engineer I saw this as a control problem, not a mechanical problem. Doctors (as in PhD's) at UCLA insisted that these conditions are caused by weak or strong muscled. I called bullshit (as in, to their face). I found them condescending and barbaric in their approach. Kid after kid goes through these bullshit surgeries for no good reason. Well, maybe not, it's easy money as evidenced by the pressure my wife put on me to go along. At the time I devoted considerable time to building various contraptions to try and see if I could figure out a way to re-train my son to converge his eyes. The most elaborate of these rigs was a goggle with cameras, LCD shutters and 50% mirrors. I could use the LCD shutters to occlude each eye individually from a remote control panel or dim each eye. The 50% mirrors allowed me to use the cameras to watch his eyes and measure position. With this device in hand I would sit him in front of the TV or Playstation and put on his favorite cartoon or game. I'd sit there and gently try to get him to either switch eyes or encourage him to use both eyes. I could dim the "good" eye to force the other eye to come over and help. Or I could simply occlude it and force a switch. I got some results but I couldn't find much out there to guide me. Nobody wanted to talk to me. As I said, the PhD butchers at UCLA were only interested in surgery. I studied books [0] and articles on the subject and all I got was condescension and a refusal to even approach a discussion. I worked with advanced hardware and software technologies during my day job but somehow was not worthy of their attention. Talk about feeling small. I finally reached a painful conclusion: The problem with these conditions is that small children (2 to 5+) are incredibly difficult to work with. The concept of having such a small child spend an hour doing very difficult eye work is, well, utopia at best. Therefore, they become victims of a research community that doesn't seem interested in addressing the real problem and, instead, clings to a good sales tool "tight muscles" or "weak muscles" and cuts away. Through this thread I learned a number of interesting things and now am hopeful to return to some of my ideas, perhaps with a different twist. I also learned of Stereo Sue (http://www.stereosue.com/ http://www.stereosue.com/). Crap, I cried while watching her TedX video. Few things can touch someone more than something that can potentially change your kid's life. Wow. [0] http://www.amazon.com/Models-Oculomotor-Control-George-Hung/dp/9810245688 http://www.amazon.com/Models-Oculomotor-Control-George-Hung/...