While glasses or contact lenses can be pretty helpful, there are some vision problems that they can’t address. Oftentimes, patients also opt for surgeries and eye injections to treat their conditions. Even then, surgery, drugs, or glasses can’t address certain eye conditions.
Such conditions can deprive patients of practicing necessary visual skills for learning, reading, writing, etc. Optometrists have been using a method called vision therapy to fix these vision problems and improve visual acuity.
Vision therapy is suitable for both kids and adults and is proving quite effective in the field of optometry. It is the best course of action that your eye doctor can take to treat visual difficulties that are associated with muscular dysfunction in the eye.
What is Vision Therapy?
It is absolutely possible for someone to have a ‘perfect’ or appropriate vision as they take an eyesight test and still suffer from vision problems. Such developmental vision problems affect eye movements, visual processing, focusing, and eye teaming.
The behavioral approach of vision therapy can correct various eye issues that develop due to muscular dysfunction of the eyes. Vision therapy programs use specialized instruments and tools such as prisms, lenses, and filters that are customized according to the patients’ needs.
What Conditions Can Vision Therapy Treat?
Vision Therapy is an individualized treatment program for fixing vision acuity and eliminating conditions like amblyopia, strabismus, focusing on excess and insufficiency, learning-related disorders, and ocular muscle dysfunction. Let’s discuss a few of these in brief detail.
- Amblyopia
- Amblyopia or lazy eye is an eye condition that mostly affects children, but adults may suffer from it too. It affects eye vision in people with undeveloped or poorly developed connections between the brain and eyes.
- This connection between our mind and eyes is important as they carry information to the brain that enables us to see. Normally, these neural connections are developed at a young age, so children tend to suffer from this condition more. Amblyopia is hard to detect without running a comprehensive eye exam.
- Strabismus
- Strabismus or crossed-eyes is a condition that affects the proper alignment of both eyes. A person with strabismus is unable to simultaneously align their eyes under normal conditions. They may have one or both eyes turned up, down, or out in certain conditions.
- It may be intermittent where the eye(s) only turn out of proper alignment in particular situations such as illness or stress. In other cases, the misalignment may be constant, meaning the eyes stay turned at all times.
- Binocular Dysfunction
- Seeing from both eyes is important to maintain precise and coordinated vision. You can easily notice the difference if you try to close one eye and look around. We can only see an object clearly when we aim both our eyes at it. This is when the eye sends information to the part of the brain, enabling us to see.
- However, binocular dysfunction can cause the visual cortex of our brain to receive two different images instead of a fused one. As a result, the affected person sees double vision and experiences visual discomfort.
Conclusion
Vision therapy is a great treatment method to correct vision problems that significantly affect daily life tasks. It can effectively address amblyopia, strabismus, and binocular dysfunctions. Make sure you immediately start looking for an optometrist if you suffer from any of these vision problems.
