Eye Complaints in Children

Your child is rubbing its eyes. It blinks, squints, complains of burning, itching, pressure. Perhaps it has been prescribed glasses, perhaps there is conjunctivitis, perhaps it has suddenly started to squint, perhaps a stye is pulling at the eyelids. The list of possible diagnoses is long: myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, strabismus, tear duct inflammation, recurring conjunctival irritations. Ophthalmology has its explanations, its measurements, its treatments for each of these phenomena — and that is a good thing.

And yet a question remains that no measuring instrument can answer: why right now? Why this child, in this family, at this phase of life? Why the eye — and not the abdomen, the ear, the skin?