What is Vision Therapy?

At the grand opening of our office the most common question we were asked was,

“What exactly is vision therapy?”

The simple answer that we often give is ‘it is physical therapy for your eyes,” but it is SO much more than that. What we do here at Twin Forks Optometry is retrain visual pathways in the brain to gather visual information more efficiently so we can then teach our patients to process that information and integrate it with other systems to function at a higher level. It sounds complicated, but what we are doing is getting our patients clear, comfort vision that affords them the opportunity to reach their academic/professional potential.

The Work-Up:

Typically the first visit at the office will be a comprehensive eye exam that is more traditional where we determine if a patient needs glasses and that they are in good ocular health. After the basics, we do a full vision therapy work-up that includes tests that determine a patient’s visual posture and their accommodative (focusing) and vergence (eye-teaming) abilities.

For most kids and some other patients, we also perform a full perceptual work-up that assesses the following areas:

perceptual speed
oculomotor function
visual memory
visual form perception/recognition
visual motor integration
laterality/directionality skills

What Does Therapy Entail?

Once we determine that vision therapy is needed, we develop a tailored program that meets our patient’s need specifically. A typical therapy program is usually between 16-36 sessions, with the patient coming in twice a week for 40 minute sessions. On average our vision therapy patients are in active in-office therapy for no longer than 6 months.

Therapy includes lenses, prisms, and computer based systems to improve the patient’s visual skills.

Will I Need To Do This Forever?

NO! The idea of vision therapy is that you are getting to the root of the problem and teaching the visual system the proper way to gather and process visual information. Periodic re-evaluation ensure that therapy is addressing the patient’s needs and improvements are happening.

It should be noted that after in-office therapy has been completed, home therapy is dispensed and expected to be performed 5 days/week for the 3-6 months after therapy.