If you have been diagnosed with amblyopia or lazy eye, you have probably wondered if this condition can be considered a disability and, if so, whether you may be entitled to receive a lazy eye pension.
The first thing you should know is that visual impairment occurs when there is a significant decrease in visual acuity, even with the use of glasses or contact lenses that, to some extent, correct that decrease. A person with severe and disabling vision problems may be eligible for disability benefits, whether partial, total, or absolute.
What are the criteria that determine if there is disability due to lazy eye?
The truth is, as with everything, it will depend on many factors. However, there are some requirements that must be met, such as the vision problems being permanent and untreatable.
Within that group, other variables such as Visual Acuity (VA) and Visual Field (VF) are taken into account.
Who values those variables?
To determine if you are eligible for a disability pension, you will need to be assessed by a disability assessment team (EVI). These teams are based in each Autonomous Community, but their decision is valid throughout Spain.
This is where the Wecker scale comes into play. It's a medical criterion that establishes different levels of vision loss, and it's what Spanish judges use to determine whether a person is eligible for disability benefits due to vision loss.
The operation of the scale is very simple. 1 is the equivalent of a healthy eye, while 0 would be the equivalent of blindness. On each side of the table you must choose which is the visual acuity in the healthy eye (or the one with less vision loss) and which is in the bad eye. The number that comes out will be the loss of visual acuity that you suffer.
For example, if your weaker eye has a 0,4 diopter loss and your healthier eye has a 0,7 diopter loss, you would have a 17% loss of vision. Would that be enough to qualify for disability benefits?
The answer is no. The percentages to be able to consider that your case is disabling are the following:
Partial disability: 24-36%.
Total disability: 37-50%
Absolute disability: > 50%
Is the Wecker scale enough?
The Wecker scale is only a reference point for the EVO . Along with the score on the scale, other factors such as age and profession are taken into account, since visual acuity does not have the same impact on the work of a mail carrier as it does on a laboratory technician, for example.
It is not possible to give a conclusive answer to such an ambiguous question, since the EVI (Disability Assessment Team) will assess each case individually , but, in general terms and simplifying, with a visual impairment of less than 50% you could qualify for a total or absolute permanent disability pension, and with less than 10%, for a Severe Disability pension.
Conclusion
If your condition is permanent and you have no treatment options to help you recover, your case could be assessed for possible disability benefits.
However, there is no magic formula to determine whether you can access disability benefits or not, since, in addition to the criterion known as the Wecker scale, other factors come into play that the Disability Assessment Team must take into account to determine a verdict.
The best thing to do, therefore, is to put yourself in the hands of an expert who can advise you and tell you what steps you should take to have your case assessed for a possible lazy eye pension.
At Dicopt we offer a treatment for lazy eye using Virtual Reality.