By the time you read this page, even if you have had an amblyopic eye, it should have been corrected at your early childhood itself. An amblyopic eye is often called as "lazy eye". An eye becomes lazy if it doesn't develop normal sight, while the other eye develops, during early childhood.

Like everything else, an infant's eye and sight too develop considerably in a faster pace. But in some cases, only one eye becomes normal and the other gets blurred image. If undetected, after a while the dominance of the eye with clear image causes the other eye to lose the ability to see altogether.

So this has to be detected as early as 4 years or even younger to allow the treatment to make use of the natural growth of the child to correct the amblyopic eye too. The above statement might puzzle you, to understand that, you need to first understand the causes of the amblyopia. The major causes are:

1. Misaligned or Crossed Eye also called as Strabismus, where the crossed eye sacrifices the ability to see, to avoid double image.

2. Refractive Errors, where one eye is out of focus because it's more shortsighted, longsighted or astigmatic than the other.

3. Cataract, where the light is prevented from being focussed on the retina.

In all the above cases, the affected eye loses its ability to develop the sight. The worst part is that the child most likely doesn't understand that an eye's sight is lost. So how can this be detected? The surgeon who checks the child carefully monitors the child's response to a moving object or something like that, when one eye is masked.

In case of misalignment or refractive errors there is a possibility of treating the eye without going through the surgical methods. The most common method is to mask the normal eye and allow the weaker eye to become strong. This may take up to weeks, months or even years depending on the status of the child's eyes.

The treatment for amblyopia is not complete if the causes are untreated. Similarly, the treatment is not complete if the causes alone are corrected without treating the amblyopic eye.