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Vision Therapy = Physical Therapy for your Eyes!

- Private group -
October 8, 2018

Have you ever wondered what exercises help develop or enhance your vision? 

Good vision requires your eyesight, visual pathways, and brain to all work together. When they don’t, even a person with 20/20 eyesight can experience difficulty reading, writing and processing information. This is when a unique service, Vision Therapy, becomes helpful. While it is the case that many visual problems are corrected with optical aids such as glasses or contact lenses, other visual functions and skills require a different approach.

Sussex Eye Center is excited to offer Vision Therapy in Southern Delaware.  Through Vision Therapy, devices and exercises are used to improve the eye-brain connection in order to make eye movements easier and more efficient. The patient learns how to correctly process and interpret the visual information that the brain receives from the eyes.

Vision Therapy is often prescribed to re-mediate Functional Vision deficits, which include the following skill areas:

Eye Teaming

This occurs when the eyes align to focus on the same point on an object and work together in a coordinated and precise way. Good eye teaming allows efficient, single, comfortable vision and depth perception.

If the two eyes are not both aligned at the same point, the brain won’t be able to correctly combine the image from each eye. When this happens, a person will experience double vision and lose 3D depth perception. Poor eye teaming may also lead to eyestrain and fatigue.  

Eye Focusing

This involves your ability to see an object clearly, and your ability to shift focus between objects at different distances. For example, a person may have difficulty keeping reading material in focus and may experience intermittent or constant blur. Or a student may be able to see the text in a book clearly but have difficulty shifting focus from the book to the board and back.

Eye Movement

This includes your eyes’ ability to maintain fixation on a moving object through space, move fixation from one object to another, or sustain fixation on a stationary object. Adequate eye movement is important for tracking along a line of text while reading, or for maintaining eye contact while listening. 

Visual Information Processing

This incorporates the ability to interpret what is seen. Good visual information processing means being able to quickly and accurately process and analyze what is being seen, and store it in visual memory for later recall. 

Visual information processing skills can be divided into several areas:

1. Visual Spatial Skills

2. Visual Analysis Skills

3. Visual Motor Skills

A deficiency in these capabilities can interfere with reading, learning, and daily life activities. Therefore, Vision Therapy may be prescribed to help develop these necessary skills. The goals of vision therapy are to obtain significantly improved visual proficiency, academic abilities, and coordination skills. By working one-on-one with Dr. Kristen Vincent, our patients will develop increased efficiency and control of their visual system through advanced therapy techniques. These improvements empower our patients’, instill a greater sense of confidence, and create lives that are more productive. 

  

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