Sharing an inside look at Vision Therapy -

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[merry gardens]

...My comments – This whole process has been fascinating. It’s mind boggling how dramatic the changes are, in such a short period of time. They are really life changing. ...I decided to journal my journey to help others who are skeptics about Vision Therapy get an inside look at the process and three outcomes.

 

Misc. notes from office brochures

-Sight is being able to see

Vision is the ability to understand what we see and is a learned process

-poor reading comprehension is frequently one of the earliest signs

-fourth grade is often the year vision difficulties show up and achievement drops

-80% of slow readers have difficulty in control and coordination, 90% of these can be cured

-signs: head moves while reading, sub-vocalization during reading, writing up or down hill, irregular

letters or word spacing, misaligns numbers

-stress-relieving lenses are often prescribed

-VT helps both eyes move, align, fixate, and focus as a team

Thank you Michele for sharing all that! Very interesting and I'm really grateful that you posted all of that.

 

I guess I qualify as a skeptic, not because I doubt your experience, but because I doubt that almost all struggling readers need it. I wonder if there are other ways to develop these skills besides packing up the kids in a car for therapy and paying large amounts of money. Plus, I question if people who lack these skill always have reading problems. I know I supress one eye when I read--I even close one eye to read when I'm tired! I read all the time.

 

I wonder also, while reading uses those skills, it also develops some of those eye skills too. It makes sense to me that a poor reader would not have some of those skills as well developed. I would expect that the eyes of someone who has only been reading for a year wouldn't be quite as good at some of these things as someone who has been reading for five years, but that doesn't neccesarily mean that they won't get stronger just by reading or doing other things, like needle work, dot-to-dots, etc.

 

My son has been able to read very early readers for a while, but he just started really doing what I call "reading" this past year. I've read so many threads by those of you who have done vision therapy, that I start to thinking that we should try it. But my son has had more than just reading issues going on. Until we remediated some other things, he misunderstood the meaning of common words. He's got a poor auditory memory, (we're slowly improving that.) He had poor phonemic awareness, which is now remediated for the most part. I can't understand how vision therapy would help with any of those things, which contributed substantially to his reading and reading comprension problems.

 

A certain level of eye co-ordination needs to be there in order to read and do those other things in the first place. If that basic level is lacking, I can see that VT could be life-changing, (just as you have shared it was for your children.) I believe that vision therapy can be helpful for some people, but I just don't believe that everyone who has problems reading needs it

 

I don't mean this at all as a criticism of the hard work you have done for your children. I applaud you for that! Nice job! You wrote that your son learned to ride a bicycle during VT. That's huge!--and that to me looks like signs that your children really needed something like VT. I'm just not convinced that every struggling reader needs this.

 

Yet... I'm torn when I read stories like yours. It sounds like VT worked so well for you and for some other people here, and I'd really just like all our struggles to go away in a couple months of therapy too.

[PeterPan]

Merry, if I kind of follow your jist, are you partially asking whether the eye skills might COME with time, now that he's reading?? My dd was reading before VT. As for why some kids develop the pathways in the brain for proper eye use and some don't, don't know. It does seem to be connected to this convergence of tone, sensory awareness, and the dyslexia. When I was doing my initial reading on muscle tone and sensory awareness, I found an article citing a study saying that ~80% of people with tone problems would go on to develop opthomamological problems. I'm not dyslexic, but my peripheral vision isn't as wide a field as it should be. And I'm low tone. So is there a connection there with the muscles, not fully using the potential, not developing the sensory awareness, and thus not developing the pathways in the brain? That's what I think. And if that's the case, that explains why you have to do such intentional, challenging work to reverse it. They're not naturally going to push themselves to that extent, to redevelop the field of use, the sensory awareness, the coordination, and the pathways in the brain.

 

BTW, I've started doing dd's VT exercises on myself to work on the peripheral vision thing. I'm doing *everything* from her notebooks. Interestingly, the only stuff I'm having trouble with are the two areas I knew going in--peripheral vision and focusing (I have astigmatism in my left eye and get headaches with computer use, etc.). I can buzz through in a day what took her WEEKS to do. So it's not like they can fool you and have you spend money on things you don't need. You're only going to stumble on the areas where your eyes actually have the problems.

 

I don't know if Michele has disclosed this, but her boys' turned out to have a bit more eye problems, things she would never have suspected or realized. In other words, it was GOOD to go in and get a thorough exam. It's not like we're just talking about focusing here. These are eye docs, just doing an especially thorough exam, and in that exam they can turn up all kinds of stuff, stuff it's good to know about for future vision issues.

 

And no, I think Michele will say and I can say it's not like ALL our problems went away, lol. What improved were the problems directly connected to visual processing. We had some nice side effects like improvement in executive function because they happened to be incorporating executive function use into the visual processing therapy. But for us, it was stuff related to visual processing that improves. It doesn't change auditory processing or anything else. It's not a miracle cure, lol.

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[merry gardens]

Thanks Michele and Elizabeth for you thoughtful replies.:) I hope my first post didn't seem too cantankerous.

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[Joyofsixreboot]

Thanks for all this. It's interesting to see similarities and differences with what my ds is doing. It's only been 4 weeks but I swear to you, his handwriting has improved. He says it's much easier to see only one line to write on. I had no idea all these years and he never said anything because I suppose he thought everyone saw that way.

[PeterPan]

Joyofsix, is this your 10 yo? That's marvelous!! It's not your imagination. I had my dd do handwriting samples with each eye individually and then with both eyes together BEFORE we started VT and after. The results were DRAMATICALLY different. And what's interesting to me is to see how her handwriting continues to improve. What you're getting right now is just the functional stuff (can I get it on the line). After that you get into making it look as pretty or round or whatever as your mind intends. That's where I'm seeing the change, that it just plain looks prettier and like you'd expect (or closer, haha) out of a 12 yo girly girl.

 

So anyways, yippee for you!

[Joyofsixreboot]

OhElizabeth -thanks! Yes it's my 10 yo. Dh,ds and I keep trying to keep from getting too excited but anything that makes it easier is cause for joy here.

[nancyb]

Wow! Thank you so much! I am desperate to get my son in vt. My husband and friends are skeptical. This is so reassuring. I'm just really frustrated because we probably won't be able to start until the end of July.

Have you seen a change in attitude or behavior? My son has serious add symptoms which they tell me are part of the visual issues. I/m really discouraged lately and need to hear whether or not the attitude toward all things school will change.

[PeterPan]

Well if your dh is at least letting you *do* it, then I'd just plow forward. The RESULTS will erase the skepticism. Our changes were HUGE. As far as the attitude toward school, I think you have two components. One is that some things really might need to change on your part. The other part though is the way VT can help your ds give words to what is bothering him and get control. Right now, if his eyes are the problem, he knows nothing else and has no control of it. So as he does the assignments and starts to take control of his body, he'll get more words for what is going wrong in the day and why. It can enable you to have a more helpful discussion about your day, what is working, what isn't, why something is going wrong (a subject, timing, the type of materials, how he feels). Honestly, I think my dd grew up about 3 or 4 years during VT. She had a lot of silly little behaviors that she totally dropped, and I think it was this sense of empowerment and being in control and not having your body do all these things to you.

 

You can get results very quickly with VT. Did they give you a timeframe? I know it's hard to wait. However July will come. Are you waiting for appointments or $$? I know it's hard. We had to wait a while after we found out. But it will come, and now all is forgotten. How old is he? Have you already had your evaluation? Did they suggest he get an OT eval as well?

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