You may have 20/20 vision, but still struggle with eye strain, headaches, fatigue, or attention and concentration difficulty. All of these performance-based skills are needed to be successful at school or be effective in an office based environment. To excel in these areas, you need to have excellent visual skills. Through vision therapy, you can enhance your visual abilities by learning how to use your eyes together and gaining better visual awareness. When the visual system functions correctly and efficiently, the energy saved can be used to improve visual tasks. Reading and learning become enjoyable again, allowing comprehension to improve and symptoms to decrease.
Vision therapy is a customized regimen of individualized activities and exercises used to retrain the brain and eyes to work better as a team and improve visual functioning. Various devices are used in vision therapy activities including therapeutic lenses, prisms, filters, and computer programs. The aim of vision therapy is to enhance visual skills through improved oculomotor function and eye-brain communication that can lead to better performance in reading, learning, playing music or sports, as well as improved memory, focus, balance, and visual attention.
These visual skills can include:
- Accommodation: The eye’s ability to continuously change focus between near and far and to maintain focus for extended close vision tasks.
- Saccades: Fast, simultaneous eye movements between two focus points. This is an aspect of vision essential for reading a sentence on a page.
- Pursuits: Smooth eye movements between focus points, which is important in sports performance as well as moving between paragraphs when reading.
- Convergence: The ability of the two eyes to turn inward toward the nose to focus on a near object – essential for near work at school or in the office.
- Visual Motor Movement: The ability to successfully move through space guided accurately by interpreting what you see.
- Depth Perception: The ability to discern near versus far objects.
- Peripheral Vision: The ability to see surrounding objects without focusing on them.
- Visual Perceptual: The accurate organization and interpretation of visual information.