What is Vision Therapy?

Vision therapy is a personalized, goal-oriented program designed to target specific areas of the visual system. It is a neuro-rehabilitative approach that helps train the brain and eyes to communicate efficiently, developing and enhancing skills necessary for daily visual tasks such as reading, learning, and memory.

What is Neuro-optometric rehabilitation?

Neur-optometric rehabilitation is based on the principle of neuroplasticity; creating and fine tuning new brain pathways, leading to greater efficiency of the visual system.

What is Sports Vision Training?

Sports Vision is a form of vision therapy that focuses on the visual needs of a particular athlete. This starts with appropriate refractive correction and eyewear for injury prevention and athletic performance. Sports vision trains the athlete for maximum efficiency of their visual system and sports-specific visual needs. This includes skills such as tracking accuracy, hand-eye coordination, dynamic vision, and contrast sensitivity.

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How To Know If Your Child Needs Vision Therapy

Children with binocular vision disorders and/ or visual perceptual disorders benefit from vision therapy. Signs of these problems vary from child to child, typically involving difficulties with learning such as reading, handwriting, or math. Children may have difficulties with attention and sitting still, or a previous diagnosis of ADD/ADHD or dyslexia. Some common signs of vision-related learning problems include:

  • Skipping lines or words while reading

  • Whispering to themselves while reading

  • A Frequent letter or word reversals
  • Poor handwriting

  • Clumsy or uncoordinated

  • The Poor attention span for tasks involving fine details or near-work
  • Watery or burning eyes while in school or reading

  • Closing one eye to read

  • Headaches while in school or reading

Who Can Benefit from Vision Therapy? Many children and adults alike can benefit from a vision therapy program! It is tailored specifically to the patient, addressing needs related to difficulties with reading, hand-eye coordination, headaches, eye turns, focussing problems, and much more. Vision therapy is a very useful and often life-changing part of a patient’s rehabilitative program for concussion treatment.

Who Can Benefit From Neuro-Optometry? (vision therapy for children functions on the same principles as neuro-rehab for concussion)

Vision plays an important part of reading and learning, with over 17 different skills being required. Evaluation of these skills with a thorough eye examination allows us to identify and treat visual deficits surrounding tracking, eye teaming, focussing, and more. To assess these areas, we provide developmental eye exams and vision therapy for children with difficulties pertaining to reading and learning.

With numerous areas of the brain involved in the visual process, research has shown that following an acquired brain injury, 40% of patients demonstrate difficulties with teaming the eyes together to view near objects (convergence insufficiency), 30% show difficulties with focussing (accommodative insufficiency), and up to 90% have tracking deficits (oculomotor dysfunction).

Vision therapy, similar to physiotherapy, emphasizes the brain-eye connection and works to enhance the efficiency of the visual system. Vision therapy can help children eliminate visual barriers to learning, and dampen or eliminate symptoms related to acquired brain injury.

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Common symptoms related to visual deficits include but at not limited to:

  • Headaches or eyestrain with near work Contact Lenses
  • Light sensitivity

  • Screen intolerance
  • Nausea and dizziness Lenses
  • Losing place while reading

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