Does vision therapy help?

The main thing to know about vision therapy is that it is considered controversial. Some medical professionals view it with a skeptical eye. Some folks on this board though have had good results with it and I’m sure you’ll hear from them. The problem is that so far there really isn’t any research to support VT as an effective treatment for most kids displaying ADHD or LD symptoms. So, the bottom line is it is difficult to say whether it will in fact help your child, though it certainly might. You have to weigh the costs and benefits of pursuing vision therapy and come up with a decision that works for you.

Andrea

See my post from yesterday on the Teaching Reading board. If you live in the northern Virginia area, you can go to a lecture that 2 developmental optometrists give about once a month to parents who are trying to figure out if their children have visual problems. email me privately if you want that info.

Linda W, can you e-mail me that information also. Thank you.

I can’t say if it will help yet. One thing I know for certain is that my son has real visual issues. I waited on VT because of the so called controversy. I think much of the controversy comes from the uninformed. The phonographix authors and many other respected reading authorities admit that in a percentage of the population vision does affect reading.

I have to say now that I know how severe my son’s problems are (and it is evident when you see him struggle with vision exercises that are easy for my 4 year old) I am sorry I waited. I am also concerned because I think that if I went after these issues earlier they would have been easier to remediate.

It was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to my son. They did extensive work with computers. They also did work with different lenses, where he would have to read a line with a near sighted lens and then switch and read a line with a far sighted lens. Tis was to teach his eye to focus correctly. Some of the computer stuff was to help him to know when his eyes focused correctly and some was to help with visual processing and memory.

He did 6 months of once a week in office and another year at home with a computer program. His CAT scores in Reading Comprehension went from the low 60th percentile to the high 80th percentile from 2nd grade to 4th grade. It was well worth the time and effort.

For my son who had tracking and focusing problems we saw great improvement with VT. We were lucky that a local university provided VT through their school of optometry, so we were able to do VT at the fraction of the normal cost.

This is not well thought of in the educational setting but I can speak from experience that it has been a wonderful solution to some of my vision problems. It has allowed me to enjoy reading, which I used to hate. I swear by it and did the exercises for a year. I won’t bore you with my results but it has improved the quality of my life. I am a sped teacher and can’t recommend it because of $$$$ and previously mentioned issue. For those who wonder about kids and tracking problems, try this simple test. Take a pencil and have a child focus on a spot on the pencil - slowly bring it into their nose trying to force them to cross their eyes. If they are unable to stay tracking and one or both eyes shoot off - they may benefit from further checking. I still can’t cross my eyes but there’s a lot more that I can do. It’s really a muscle thing.

I did vision therapy at the age of 26 while in college working on a 2nd degree and taking 23 hours. I thought I was going blind. So see it’s never too late to remediate - don’t beat yourself up!

I, too, put off VT because it not well regarded in education. I would agree with the above poster so said the controvery comes from the ill-informed. Many seem to confuse VT with the colored-overlay thing. My child certainly fit the bill-wouldn’t read for more than a few minutes, struggling the whole while, rubbed her eyes, said it hurt. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Of course, this was taken as avoidance and being manipulative as she had the phonics skills. The opthamlogist had pronounced her 20/20. I finally bit the bullet and found a long-time VT practioner. Best money I ever spent. It was summer and we did a crash course - two sessions at home every day.

The developmental opt. was able to show us our daughter’s problem using the technique samantha describes above with the pencil - one eye just could not maintain focus. The eye would flicker. The exercises prescribed are very similiar what LindaF has been describing in posts on these boards the last couple of weeks-the ball, the scanning exercises. In our case the only time a computer was used was for testing. He said we could buy a similiar program but didn’t need to as the exercises were going so well.

So does VT help? Yes, if your child has a focusing problem or other problem within the VT spectrum. Does my daughter still have processing problems(aka dyslexia)? Yes, but afterwards she could read and now reads for pleasure. Still can’t spell!:)

How do you know if VT will help? Go have an eye exam with a behavorial or developmental optometrist. Insurance covers the eye exam. find someone who will go for most of the exercises being done at home.

Good luck