Help Your Eyes & Brain Work Together Effectively
Vision therapy is a method of vision correction that goes beyond correcting sight. These therapeutic exercises can use movement, training, and a variety of specialized tools to teach your eyes, brain, and the rest of your visual system to work together more effectively as a team.
Vision therapy can help with optical issues that affect more than just your eyes. For example, vision therapy can help someone who has experienced a brain injury recover from the visual disruptions caused by their injury.
What Vision Therapy Is
To understand how vision therapy works, it is important to know two things: vision is a complex set of skills that are learned rather than innate, and the neuroplasticity of the brain allows for learning at any age as long as the proper learning environment and opportunities are present. Vision therapy allows for the necessary opportunity and guidance to gain or improve the visual skills.
Vision therapy addresses visual skills deficits, which either were not learned to begin with or were lost due to a brain injury. We take people with reduced visual skills and help them meet or exceed the average person’s visual skills. We also help athletes improve their visual skills so they can excel in their field.
Visual skills include:
- Smooth pursuit movements as well as tracking along lines of text
- Saccade movements, jumping from one focal point to another
- Binocular integration (ability to interpret information from both eyes simultaneously, amblyopia)
- Depth perception
- Visual perceptual skills (figure ground, peripheral central, size constancy, visual extrapolation and many more)
- Ocular alignment (eye turns, vergence ranges)
- Visual fixation
- Balance
- Accommodation
Learning-Related & Neuro-Related Visual Deficits
Learning deficits in visual skills can cause eye turns, reduced visual acuity, lack of depth perception, vision related learning disorders, motion sensitivity, fatigue, and headaches.
Visual deficits following acquired or traumatic brain injuries can cause the same symptoms as well as severe motion intolerance, nausea, photophobia, balance issues, and visual field neglect or loss.
What Vision Therapy Is Not
- A singular set of tools, exercises, or practices designed to “hack” your body, such as improve your ability to play sports.
- A way to correct refractive errors which require other forms of vision correction, like glasses or contact lenses.
- A quick fix.
