Vision Therapy is a behavioral approach to correcting various eye problems that affect one’s ability to both “see” and “process” visual information. A child may pass a traditional vision screening and still have developmental vision problems. The areas most often affected are focusing, eye teaming, eye movements and visual processing. Vision Therapy is an individualized treatment program designed to improve and sometimes eliminate conditions such as lazy eye (amblyopia), crossed eyes (strabismus), focusing problems, eye muscle coordination dysfunction, and learning-related vision disorders.
Specialized lenses, prisms and instruments are used in a training program, which is customized for each patient. Vision Therapy is a sub-specialty of Optometry and only 5-10% of optometrists provide Vision Therapy. I often use Visual Evoked Potentials (VEP) to measure the strength and speed of the visual pathway and can compare results after a therapy program to confirm improvement.
Once an initial diagnosis has been made I offer a highly specialized vision therapy program to help stimulate the damaged pathways in our brain. The eyes have been called “The window to the soul” but it is more appropriate to call them the window to our brain! Through our eyes we can stimulate various cranial nerves and even regions of our midbrain and visual cortex!
