Blog

According to the Prevent Blindness America organization, vision problems affect 25% of school-aged children. And these vision problems can prevent a child from achieving their academic potential. Many teachers may find it hard to believe that 25% of their students have a visual barrier to success because they don't see a quarter of their students wearing glasses. The reason for this difference is that many of the vision conditions affecting students are not treated with glasses.  

Winter is winding down but there is still time to enjoy your favorite winter sports. The great thing about hard-packed snow and ice - it lets you go fast. The bad part – it is hard, very hard. As we know, what goes up must come down. Unfortunately, for some people this means coming down head first; resulting in traumatic brain injury (TBI). A literature review performed in 2000 (Levy, AS, et al.) estimated 50-88% of fatalities at ski resorts were from a TBI. The majority of TBI accidents on the slopes is from hitting their head on an object or hitting their head on the snow. 

The eyes are a complex organ that can take an impulse of light and turn it into vision; a truly remarkable feat. Even more remarkable and complex is vision itself. 66% of the connections within the brain are involved in the process of vision; sight, binocular vision (eye teaming), visual perception (making sense of visual information), and visual integration. As you can imagine, when an aspect of the visual system is not working properly it takes specialized care to correct the visual deficit. In the area of binocular vision and visual perception there are several terms, which are misleading and confusing for patients when used interchangeably. In this four part blog we will discuss each of these terms; vision therapy, vision rehabilitation, eye exercises and brain training as they relate to the visual system. In today's blog we will discuss vision therapy.

You may think that one sense is heightened when another isn't working properly, but a vision problem can negatively impact your other senses.

With the rise of ADHD being diagnosed in the United States, researchers are working to determine a measure to objectively diagnose the condition. Currently, for a child to be diagnosed with ADHD he or she must exhibit a certain number of symptoms in two different settings. This current survey-based approach is subjective and one person's responses to the survey can change the outcome of the diagnosis. What if there was an object way to determine if someone has ADHD?

A parent called into our office with this question last week, and she is not the first to do so.  Vision therapy takes many forms. Some optometrists offer in-office vision therapy with a trained therapist, others put patients on the computer or in group sessions, and others prescribe a home-based program. At Advanced Vision Therapy Center we provide all vision therapy sessions in a one-on-one environment; relying on our therapists, rather than a computer, to train visual skills. Abundant research has been performed in the area of vision therapy and the effectiveness of these various modalities. The research continues to show that in-office vision therapy with trained professionals is the most effective treatment for convergence insufficiency (a binocular vision condition). So it should not come as a surprise that when you sit a kid in front of a computer for months, the question often arises