Vision Therapy for Children
By Gina White
Looking into vision therapy for your child can be
a bewildering experience: not only are there many
different names for it, but doctors also disagree about
whether it's effective or a waste of money. The simple explanation
is that many different activities are lumped together as
vision therapy; some of them have evidence supporting their
effectiveness, while others ... don't.
Before we can make sense of this, we
need to sort out all those names. Vision therapy is sometimes
called vision training, visual training, behavioral optometry
or developmental optometry.
Other names are actually types of vision therapy.
Orthoptics, also called optometric vision therapy, is the
use of eye exercises for conditions such as
amblyopia and
strabismus.
You might hear about vision therapy for children with learning
disabilities as well: usually, tinted lenses (also called Irlen lenses)
or eye exercises. Another branch is dedicated to reducing
refractive errors, such as nearsightedness.
Finally, syntonics, also called optometric phototherapy or
photoretinology, is the use of colored lights for a wide range of visual ailments.
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Many eye care practitioners believe that vision therapy can help
children with learning disabilities that are caused by poor visual skills. | |
Orthoptics
Orthoptics, the use of eye exercises to improve vision,
is the most widely studied type of vision therapy. Clinical
studies have shown it to be effective in treating amblyopia, strabismus,
convergence
insufficiency and certain accommodation problems.
So what exactly are these eye exercises? Actually,
there are many exercises available and the therapy is
individualized for each child. Exercises to improve
accommodation, for example, may involve looking at a specific
far object with one eye covered, then looking at a specific near
object (with the eye remaining covered); the child
would repeat these actions several times, then switch eyes.
Orthoptics is not the only type of treatment available
for these conditions. Other strabismus and amblyopia
treatments include: eyeglasses, patching, eyedrops and surgery.
For convergence insufficiency and accommodation dysfunctions,
eyeglasses may be appropriate.
Learning Disabilities
Doctors recommend a multidisciplinary approach to
treating learning disabilities such as dyslexia and attention
deficit disorder (ADD); what this means is that several
doctors may be involved, such as a pediatrician, a psychologist,
a neurologist and so forth. The types of vision therapy
most often recommended for learning disabilities are tinted lenses
(Irlen lenses) and eye exercises.
Most eye doctors do not recommend using tinted lenses,
citing lack of scientific evidence that they work.
Treating a learning disability with eye exercises is an area
of controversy amongst eye doctors. What they agree on:
your first vision-care step should be to take your child to an eye doctor to
rule out visual problems that impede learning, but are not learning
disabilities, such as being too nearsighted to read a blackboard. At this point,
optometrists and
ophthalmologists part ways.
Most optometrists support eye exercises as part
of the multidisciplinary approach to learning disabilities.
The exercises may include those intended to correct
accommodation, vergence, processing and motor function.
Processing refers to how the brain interprets information from
the eyes; dyslexics, for example, have a processing
problem in which letters or words appear to be in reversed
order. Motor function refers to movement such as
saccades, where the eye jumps from looking at one point to
another (such as when you read), and pursuits, where the eye tracks moving objects.
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