Diane Serex-Dougan, OD, FCOVD | Behavioral Optometry | Optometric Vision Therapy | Maryland - New study suggests vision therapy is for real

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October 31, 2008

The Daily Herald Reports.

A new National Institutes of Health study is lending credence to vision therapy as a treatment for convergence insufficiency, a vision disorder that may affect one of every eight people across the United States.

Convergence insufficiency occurs when the eyes have difficulty looking at objects close up because they drift, causing double vision and other reading problems.

Jill Buss, the mother of three grade-school children in north Orem, said reading was always an uphill battle for her seven-year-old son. He underwent three eye surgeries in the first years of life to correct congenital problems before they tried vision therapy.

"We were working very hard -- I was reading with him every day, there was a tutor working with him twice a week, we were going to a computer tutoring lab," she said.

The key to 3-D vision

A visual impairment that condemns children to see in only two dimensions can go unrecognized for years and be mistaken for stigmatized disorders.

LA Times
By Susan R. Barry
June 22, 2009

I was 20 years old and a college student before I learned that I did not see the world like everyone else. I had been cross-eyed as a baby, but three childhood surgeries made my eyes look straight. Because my eyes looked normal, I assumed I saw normally too. But, in fact, I was stereoblind -- unable to see in three dimensions.,

That means I could not see the volumes of space between objects. Instead, things in depth appeared piled one on top of another, making me feel nervous and confused in cluttered environments. As a child, I didn't understand why my friends were so entertained when they looked through a View-Master. I didn't see Disney characters or Superman popping out at me. All I saw was a flat image.

When I got older, my gaze -- particularly at a distance -- was jittery, making it difficult to read signs while driving. I was always disoriented and easily lost.

The biggest effect of my vision was on my performance in school. I had trouble learning to read and did poorly on standardized tests. These problems were blamed not on my vision but on a lack of intelligence, and I was put in a class with other problem children.