What is Vision Therapy?

Also called Neuro-Visual Rehabilitation, vision therapy helps people who have difficulty with binocular vision or the ability to get their eyes to work together.  It is akin to physical therapy for the eyes where we work to help individual gain better visual function.

What Does Vision Therapy Treat?

In vision therapy we treat patients that have wandering, crossed, or lazy eyes (medically known as strabismus, exotropia, esotropia, hypertropia, amblyopia) non-surgically align their eyes and improve function and depth perception.  If someone has had a stroke or traumatic brain injury that has affected the functioning of their vision, vision therapy can help to restore that function.  

However, that vast majority of our patients often appear to have normal eyes and often have 20/20 vision.  However, these patients often see words blurring, doubling, or moving on the page when they read.  They may have headaches, tired/strained eyes when they read or are on the computer.  Or they may have slow, hesitant reading, lose their place when they read, or take hours to do 20 minutes of homework, all because they cannot get their eyes to work together as they should.  Vision therapy helps address these visual dysfunctions which can in turn dramatically impact a person’s ability to read, learn, and play sports effectively.  

The medical terms for these types of visual dysfunctions include convergence insufficiency, convergence excess, unspecified binocular dysfunction, oculomotor dysfunction, accommodative dysfunction, visual processing or visual perceptual dysfunctions.

What Does Vision Therapy Not Treat?

Vision therapy does not treat learning disabilities, ADHD, or dyslexia.  However, the vision problems that we treat can mimic or aggravate these conditions.