You may need vision therapy if you’ve already had your eyes checked with a dilated eye exam for glasses but are still having symptoms of eye strain, headaches, double vision, or blur with reading and near work. You may also benefit from vision therapy if you’ve developed visual symptoms following a mild traumatic brain injury or concussion. If you haven’t had a routine dilated eye exam, it’s important to do this first. You may need an updated glasses prescription or have an eye health problem that is affecting your vision. If your doctor detected an eye teaming or focusing problem during your exam or if you continue to have symptoms even with your best glasses, you may have an eye muscle problem that would benefit from therapy. A evaluation by one of our doctors can determine if vision therapy is an option for you.

Vision therapy involves a combination of weekly in-office and home eye exercises to retrain the visual system to work more efficiently and accurately to relieve symptoms. The length of therapy is individual and is dependent on each patient’s diagnosis and the severity of symptoms. The exercises involve the use of lenses, prisms, eye patches and other instruments to teach better control of eye focusing and coordination.

Vision therapy used at UAB Eye Care is based on studies supported by the National Institutes of Health and other research results, in addition to the clinical expertise of residency-trained doctors.

Convergence Insufficiency (CI)

This condition occurs when the eyes have difficulty looking inward together for long periods of reading or near work. The eyes want to drift apart while reading and the reader must use extra effort to keep the eyes both pointed on the page. This extra effort can cause symptoms like blurry vision, headaches, double vision and fatigue with reading and near work. UAB was part of an NIH study that showed that vision therapy was a very effective treatment for this condition.

Exotropia

This is a condition where an eye drifts outward, away from the nose. Sometimes exotropia happens infrequently and other times it is constant. This condition may cause double vision and may be bothersome to patients because others notice that one eye doesn’t appear straight. There are different ways to treat exotropia including surgery and/or vision therapy. Your doctor will be able to determine which treatment will work best for you.

Accommodative Insufficiency

Each eye has a small lens inside of it that adjusts focus, like a camera lens, to make vision clear at different distances. While looking far away, the muscles around the lens relax to give you clear vision. While reading or doing close work, the muscles around the lens must tighten for the image to be clear. For patients with accommodative insufficiency, it is difficult to keep the muscles tight for near focus. These patients must work hard to see close things clearly and may report headaches, fatigue, and blur with prolonged reading. Accommodative insufficiency may be treated with reading glasses or therapy. Your doctor will be able to determine which treatment will work best for you.

People over 40 years will begin to notice a gradual decrease in their ability to see near work. This is not accommodative insufficiency but rather a normal aging process that causes the lens in the eye to lose its ability to adjust focus. This does not improve with therapy and reading glasses are needed.

Ocular Motor Dysfunction

People with ocular motor dysfunction have difficulty accurately directing their eyes from one place to another. This can cause difficulty moving both eyes together across the page while reading which can cause frequent loss of place. This can also make it difficult to find information on a busy background like copying information from the board at school or completing worksheets. Sometimes people with ocular motor dysfunction have difficulty tracking a moving object like hitting a ball with a bat. Vision therapy may be helpful by improving the accuracy of tracking skills and is commonly recommended for patients with ocular motor dysfunction.

Amblyopia

This is often called “lazy eye” because one or both eyes doesn’t see very well even with the best pair of glasses. The eye/eyes are healthy, but something interfered with the normal visual development when the patient was younger, resulting in poor vision. Treatment for amblyopia may include wearing a patch or using strong dilating drops in the “good” eye to give the weaker eye some practice. Occasionally, additional therapy may be recommended if the vision doesn’t improve with patching or drops alone. Recent studies show that specialized computerized games may also be effective. Click here to learn more about UAB’s participation in this new research.

There are many other conditions affecting eye teaming, tracking, and focusing that may also be treated with vision therapy. Your doctor will be able to determine if vision therapy is appropriate for you.

Vision therapy cannot cure learning disabilities. The goal of vision therapy is to eliminate visual problems that may make reading difficult. If the doctor determines that your child’s eyes are functioning accurately and efficiently, the doctor may recommend further evaluations with local reading and educational specialist.