At Performance Vision Therapy age is just a number! Because of the brain’s neuroplasticity, the brain remains dynamic and flexible throughout one’s life. Just as with training a muscle or playing an instrument, the more we practice, the more skillful we become and the better our visual system functions.
Reasons to Choose Our Office
Experience: Our Doctors are residency trained in vision therapy, are members of COVD (College of Optometrist in Vision Development) and NORA (Neuro-Optometric Rehabilitation Association) and have years of experience working with patients who have binocular and perceptual deficiencies. All of our vision therapists completed rigorous training directly under our Doctors and must pass a competency test prior to seeing patients.
One-on-One Sessions: We conduct 45-minute one-on-one sessions, so each patient receives individualized care. Each patients program is prescribed and monitored by the Doctor to ensure progress.
Sensory-Motor Integration: We use cutting-edge technologies and procedures to promote sensory-motor integration and to achieve maximum results.
Neuro-Optometric Therapy: This is vision therapy with a cognitive finish. It was developed over 25 years ago by a behavioral/developmental optometrist, a psychologist, and an educator. Patients graduating from the program consistently excel in academics.
Gold Standard of Care: Unlike many vision therapy programs, we treat the whole person rather than just the eyes. We are one of the few offices in the entire nation using this technique. The key to excellent results is the timely use of visual-motor activities, peripheral awareness, and visualization procedures.
How Long Will It Take to See Results with Vision Therapy?
For some people, progress can be experienced in as little as 3 months. For others, it may take up to 6 months to realize significant progress. However, this depends on each patient, their unique therapy regimen and their adherence to the vision therapy home program. Committing to 20 minutes a day, 5 times a week of home activities is vital to your success.
17 visual skills are needed to efficiently and effectively succeed in reading, writing, learning, attention/behavior, sports, and overall quality of life. “20/20” acuity is just one of those visual skills.
Optometric vision therapy works on the development of visual skills, among which are the following:
• The ability to follow a moving object smoothly, accurately and effortlessly with both eyes and at the same time think, talk, read or listen without losing alignment of eyes. This pursuit ability is used to follow a ball or a person, to guide a pencil while writing, to read numbers on moving railroad box cars, etc.
• The ability to fix the eyes on a series of stationary objects quickly and accurately, with both eyes, and at the same time know what each object is. This is a skill used to read words from left to right, add columns of numbers, read maps, etc.
• The ability to change focus quickly, without blur, from far to near and from near to far, over and over, effortlessly and at the same time look for meaning and obtain understanding from the symbols or objects seen. This ability is used to copy from the chalkboard, to watch the road ahead and check the speedometer, to read a book and watch TV across the room, etc.
• The ability to team two eyes together. This skill should work so well that no interference exists between the two eyes that can result in having to suppress or mentally block information from one eye or the other. This shutting off of information to one eye lowers understanding and speed, increases fatigue and distractibility, and shortens attention span. Proper teaming permits efficient vision to emerge and learning to occur.
• The ability to see over a large area (in the periphery) while pointing the eyes straight ahead. For safety, self-confidence and to read rapidly, a person needs to see “the big picture,” to know easily where they are on a page while reading and to take in large amounts of information, i.e., a large number of words per look.
• The ability to see and know (recognize) in a short look. Efficient vision is dependent on the ability to see rapidly, to see and know an object, people or words in a very small fraction of a second. The less time required to see, the faster the reading and thinking.
• The ability to see in depth. A child should be able to throw a beanbag into a hat 10 feet away, to judge the visual distance and control the arm movements needed. An adult needs to see and judge how far it is to the curb, make accurate visual decisions about the speed and distances of other cars to be safe.
If these skills are delayed or compromised during development, vision and quality of life will be affected. A developmental vision evaluation assesses these visual skills. Through the evaluation, our Doctors will determine which skills are delayed or compromised. They will then develop an individualized treatment plan utilizing therapeutic lenses and/or in-office neuro-optometric vision therapy that will address those symptoms that are negatively affecting quality of life and “teaching” the brain to efficiently and effectively use the visual system. In addition, they will collaborate with other therapists, physicians and educators involved in your care to ensure a complete, complementary treatment.