You are never too young or too old for Vision Therapy. If you are finding that either you or your little one is having vision problems, the best thing to do is to call our office to schedule a vision evaluation.
Like many skills, visual skills are developed. Since they are developed, they can generally be improved through proper therapeutic techniques. In vision therapy, the optometrist prescribes visual tasks to be practiced under controlled conditions with the direction of a vision therapist. Repetition of these tasks enhances vision by coordinating and improving eye movement, focusing ability and helping proper eye hand coordination develop as needed. The patient is guided through new visual experiences and learns new ways to perceive and interact with his or her visual world.
The Vision & Conceptual Development Center offers a broad array of vision therapies geared toward children and adults. Each patient receives his or her own individualized, custom-made program which is developed by the optometrist and provided one-to-one to the patient by the vision therapist.
While we work with all of the wide variety of vision problems children can have, our specialty is in working with visuo-cognitive difficulties, often described as visuo-spatial, visual perceptual, or visual processing problems. We tailor our approach and our therapeutic regime to your child's particular needs, designed specifically to address and to remedy his or her condition in the most positive and nurturing way possible.
Our staff is highly experienced in working with children diagnosed with Autism, PDD, ADD, dyslexia, and other learning disabilities.
Vision is learned. The children we see in our office have not yet learned how to use their eyes and vision correctly and have not integrated their visual skills with the rest of their senses and overall movement. These problems or difficulties are often not observed until second or third grade, when reading demands increase, but may manifest earlier. Some of the visual skills required for school are:
- Convergence: pointing both eyes at the object of regard
- Focus: seeing clearly at near and far, and changing between near and distant points
- Tracking: following a moving object smoothly and accurately
- Binocular fusion: using both eyes together as a team
- Acuity: clarity of sight
- Stereopsis: binocular depth perception
We evaluate the additional areas as part of our comprehensive Visuo-Cognitive Evaluation:
- General Movement including testing for retained primitive reflexes that interfere with visual development
- Visuo-Auditory thinking, the ability to visualize and mentally manipulate sounds and syllables
- Visual Thinking, the ability to make sense of one's visual world
- Graphic Thinking, the ability to represent what one is looking at or mentally imagining
- Visual Logical Reasoning, solving visually presented tasks through logic
- Over 15 Visual Skills critical to reading and learning
Based on our testing results, we are able to create an individualized program of office and home therapy to maximize your child's potential.
About Strabismus and Amblyopia
We are known for helping adults and children overcome the vision problems associated with strabismus and amblyopia.
Strabismus is a vision condition in which the person cannot properly align his eyes under normal viewing conditions, affecting roughly 4% of the population. There are many different types of eye turns and as a result there are many different treatment approaches. Untreated strabismus can cause headaches, poor depth perception, double vision, or amblyopia, among other difficulties. For more information on strabismus, click here.
Amblyopia, or lazy eye, is a condition in which one or both eyes has reduced vision, not caused by injury or disease, that cannot be improved by corrective lenses. Amblyopia occurs in approximately 3% of the population, and is most frequently caused by significant differences in refractive error (eyeglasses prescription) between the two eyes or by constant unilateral strabismus. Amblyopia can be detected at an early age and can be overcome with vision therapy, glasses, and/or patching. For more information on amblyopia, please click here.
