Who Is Vision Therapy For

Traumatic brain injuries often result in the disruption of cognitive function. Because so much of the brain is devoted to the visual process, any injury to the brain can negatively affect visual function.

What Vision-Related Issues Does a Concussion Cause?

• Eye Movements The ability to fixate on objects or people, to follow them during movement, and shift between objects at different distances.
• Eye Teaming: Pointing the eyes on the same object with both eyes simultaneously. This visual skill is critical to depth perception.
• Eye Focusing: The ability to rapidly and accurately change focus, as well as sustain focus, maintaining clarity
• Visual Decision Making
• Visual Processing Speed

Without these critical visual skills, patients often suffer from a number of vision-related conditions:

• Inability to track objects
• Inability to focus on objects
• Impaired binocular vision
• Increased sensitivity to light
• General fatigue
• Headaches when reading
• Difficulty with decision making
• Trouble in school
• Delayed reaction time

As a result, children who suffer from concussions may experience the following symptoms:

• Memory loss/ decreased retention skills
• Loss of balance
• Handwriting issues

Treating the functional vision issues that result from a concussion or traumatic brain injury is critical to restoring overall function. A functional vision exam along with optometric vision therapy can help diagnose and treat these issues to improve vision skills and restore normal function.

80-90% of classroom learning comes through the visual system. Children must have excellent visual skills in order to thrive in a classroom learning environment. Vision therapy can aid children without the appropriate visual skills to learn in the classroom, read better, spend less time on homework, and mentally visualize what is taken in through the eyes to aid in visual memory.

Many children who are struggling or underperforming in school without a diagnosed learning disability often have visual issues. In fact, in some studies, up to 25% of all children have a vision problem that is significant enough to affect school performance. With deficient visual skills, a child’s ability to learn and comprehend knowledge will be compromised.

These are common indicators that children are having visual issues:

• Not performing up to potential
• Avoids reading and/or homework
• Enjoys being read to, but cannot or chooses not to read independently
• Takes longer to complete assignments than understanding of a topic or intelligence would suggest

According to the American Foundation of Visual Awareness, the typical vision screening only identifies 5% of vision problems in children. Children who are either struggling or underperforming in school are often diagnosed with learning disabilities. While these diagnoses may be accurate, statistics show that functional visual issues may actually be the issue, or compound the issue. In fact, 6 out of 10 children with learning disabilities have undiagnosed vision problems. In another study, 85% of learning disabled children were found to have visual issues.

Providing the proper optometric vision therapy for these children can reduce the visual symptoms of these learning issues, helping the child better adapt to their disability.

Amblyopia, commonly referred to as lazy eye, is a common visual issue that requires dedicated attention to correct. This condition, in which one eye has stronger visual skills than the other, results in a lack of binocularity – causing the brain to rely on the stronger eye for visual input. Consequently, the brain disregards images from the other eye, making it less sighted than the dominant eye. Keep in mind that there is nothing wrong with the lazy eye!

Receiving vision therapy is the only way to train the brain to use images from both eyes.

Amblyopia is frequently first noticed in a school environment, where students may have difficulty throwing and catching objects, or bump into obstacles. These issues with depth perception are caused by the lack of equal input from each eye. Without the proper treatment, this serious condition can have far-reaching effects.

Strabismus is the medical term for eyes that are not aligned – a relatively common issue in which the individual’s eyes do not point to the same place in space at the same time. This condition occurs because of an issue with eye teaming, a critical visual skill, which prevents the brain from forming one image between the two eyes. With this condition, the eyes automatically turn in a different direction to avoid confusion or double vision. Ultimately the brain will learn to suppress the turned eye – ignoring the input all together. Without binocularity, the brain will not be able to properly process the information in the surrounding area.

Optometric vision therapy can help people with strabismus improve their eye teaming abilities by improving the way the brain is processing and correlating the visual input from the two eyes. If the neurology is not taught to coordinate, the eyes will turn again, which is why often more than one surgery is needed to correct the problem (the most common way strabismus is treated in the U.S. is by surgery). If surgery is recommended, as is sometimes necessary, the most forward thinking surgeons will recommend (as we do) vision therapy before and after the surgery to train the neurology to work together, thereby decreasing the chance for repeated surgical procedures.

During the treatment, we take four factors into account:

1. Direction of Eye Turn: Inward, outward, up, down, or rotating
2. Frequency: Constant or intermittent
3. Eyes: How many are affected
4. Severity: To what extent will the eyes turn

Patients with untreated crossed eyes could result in one of the following conditions:

1. Double Vision: Both eyes perceive each image, but twice, and these overlapping images disorient the patient.
2. Suppression: The patient ignores images from one eye.
3. Anomalous Correspondence: The patient attempts to align the images in each eye, with some margin of inaccuracy/error.