Having normal eyesight is not the only part of healthy vision. Your visual skills are also vital for comfortable eye movement, eye-hand coordination, and reading. Vision therapy is a non-surgical approach to enhancing these skills using exercises and therapy sessions designed for individual patients.
Before we can create our tailored treatment plan for you or your child, we first have to perform a functional vision exam. While regular eye exams can help search for eye diseases and determine your lens prescription, a functional vision exam assesses your visual skills.
There are several skills we look at during the exam, including:
This exam is essential for determining what skills vision therapy needs to focus on, and if certain problems you or your child may be experiencing may be better served by a different kind of treatment.
Vision therapy is a series of different guided exercises designed to help improve certain visual skills. Our patients have found our program can help them perform at school, play sports, recover from injury, or even overcome lifelong visual issues.
We can create a customized, science-based treatment plan depending on the visual skill you wish to focus on. These programs can help treat various visual skill problems, including:
Learning-related vision problems affect the visual skills you need to succeed at school. These skills can include reading from the white-board, eye-hand coordination, keeping place while reading a book, poor reading comprehension, and more.
In some cases, learning-related vision problems may be diagnosed as a mental health disorder like ADHD. For our program to be the most effective, we recommend having vision therapy as soon as you or your child start to notice problems in school that could relate to vision.
Visual processing refers to the skills you use to perceive and understand the things you’re looking at. This helps you remember shapes, tell the difference between letters, recognize the distance between objects, write within lines, or navigate space while you’re moving around.
Disorders in one or more of these skills can make it much more difficult to learn at school, play sports, or take up hobbies like playing an instrument.
Did you know that nearly 60% of those who experience a concussion can develop a vision problem? Our eyes are inherently connected to our brains, so if our brains suffer an injury, it’s quite possible to develop a problem that can affect a variety of visual skills.
Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and concussions can lead to blurred vision, double or ghosted vision, binocular dysfunction, convergence insufficiency, and accommodative insufficiencies.
Convergence insufficiency and excess are problems that affect how both of your eyes work together while focusing on something up close. Convergence problems can make it difficult for your eyes to create a singular image for your brain to interpret.
TBIs and concussions can cause convergence issues, but you may still experience these problems if you have Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or Graves’ disease.
Divergence insufficiency and excess are problems your eyes can have when viewing objects that are at a distance. This condition may result in double vision, eye strain, headaches, or even nausea.
Accommodative dysfunction refers to problems with your eye’s focusing mechanism. This is different from a refractive error, as the muscles in your eyes aren’t expanding or contracting correctly to help you focus on an object.
Strabismus and amblyopia are common issues that affect the binocular alignment of your eyes. Strabismus (crossed-eyes) and amblyopia (lazy eye) can occur in children as young as 3 years old and can remain well into adulthood without treatment.
These issues may be caused by uncorrected refractive errors, cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injuries, Graves’ disease, or even brain tumours.
Amblyopia and strabismus can both cause eye strain, blurry or double vision, and headaches.
Vision therapy is safe for everyone. However, it may be particularly beneficial for those who:
Vision therapy includes a series of sessions that take between 30 minutes and 1 hour to complete. Sessions may occur in our offices, at a computer, or home, depending on each patient’s needs.
Our eye doctors oversee all in-office sessions and may use any of the following tools to test or improve your visual skills:
Vision therapy can benefit you and your loved ones in surprising ways. Take the Quality of Life Survey by the College of Optometrists in Vision Development (COVD) if you think vision therapy might be right for you. Please keep in mind, however, that taking this quiz does not replace a comprehensive eye exam.
Reach out to our practice now and talk to a team member who can tell you more about this approach to strengthening visual skills.
You can find Perception Eyecare in the Southmount Health Care Centre in the Fortinos Plaza.
We’re located in a standalone health centre with ample free parking on 3 sides of the building.
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