What Does Vision Therapy Treat?
Vision therapy can be used to treat patients with wandering, crossed, or amblyopic (lazy) eyes. It works to build the patient’s ability to voluntarily align their eyes, which in turn improves visual function and depth perception. It is also commonly used in cases of stroke or traumatic brain injury which have affected visual function.
Many of our patients appear to have normal eyes and often have 20/20 vision. However, these patients often see words blurring, doubling, or moving on the page when they read. They may have headaches, tired/strained eyes when they read or work on the computer. They may have slow, hesitant reading, lose their place when they read, or take hours to do 20 minutes of homework because their eyes do not work together as they should. Vision therapy helps treat these visual dysfunctions which can dramatically impact a person’s ability to read, learn, and play sports effectively.
Some of the most common binocular dysfunctions include convergence insufficiency, convergence excess, oculomotor dysfunction, accommodative dysfunction, visual processing or visual perceptual disorders, strabismus and amblyopia.
What Does Vision Therapy Not Treat?
Vision therapy does not treat learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders or dyslexia. These are complex neurological conditions which may have a visual component, but are not exclusively a vision problem.
However, many visual problems often go undiagnosed, and some may even be misdiagnosed as reading or learning problems. Developmental Optometrists specialize in the diagnosis and treatment of visual function disorders. This includes helping to rule out other potential causes for symptoms which may not be visual in nature.
