An Introduction to Vision Therapy

For best visual clarity, depth perception, and ocular comfort, your eyes need to be able to work together--with ease!  But every single day I see patients whose eyes struggle to do so, causing uncomfortable strain, fatigue, and even double vision or severe headaches and migraines.  For these patients, their day is a constant battle getting their eyes to function – either struggling to fuse together, to keep near objects clear and in focus, to move eyes smoothly and easily for reading vision performance, or even to adequately process peripheral vision information for important activities like driving or walking around.  These are skills many of us take for granted; our eyes just naturally perform them.  But for a multitude of people worldwide, these "normal" visual skills are a daily struggle, and no single pair of glasses or LASIK surgery is going to solve the problem. Luckily, optometrists are dedicated to helping your eyes not just see clearly, but to maximizing every area of your visual performance.  

Vision Therapy can address a plethora of visual function issues, from
binocularity to accommodation to visual processing.  Via

Are you working in high demand visual environments like all-day computer use, where so many of us now spend our work days?  Visual performance can take a major dip under these scenarios, causing eye strain, headaches, and even blurry vision at the end of the day. And in children, visual system development issues can devastate their school performance, causing them to reverse numbers and letters, and struggle with reading speed and comprehension.  These problems often go undiagnosed. Children with visual efficiency issues would typically pass a pediatric office screening exam; affected adults might have perfect driving and distance vision, and many times never had any vision problems until they started their current job. But vision is not just about being able to read the 20/20 line. By not having their visual system evaluated fully, potentially hundreds of thousands of school children could be struggling unnecessarily in their classwork, or even being misdiagnosed as having attention deficit issues!  Luckily there are a growing number of optometrists dedicated to helping these patients retrain their visual system to work more efficiently.  Eyedolatry is honored to bring you a series of posts dedicated as a primer to vision therapy – what signs and symptoms to look for in your routine eye exams, what equipment you need to get started, and how to practically incorporate vision therapy into your office.

Meet our Vision Therapy panelist, Dr. S

She is a residency trained pediatric and vision therapy specialist, currently practicing in Illinois.  Her insights and experiences in starting a vision therapy practice will be featured throughout the coming posts.  Please email or post comments here if you have specific questions for her in her area of expertise.

Up this week: The symptoms to look for when investigating visual system inefficiencies that could benefit from therapy.