Quiet a few doctors are absolutely positive about how beneficial is vision therapy for children. While a few do not recommend this therapy citing it’s ineffectiveness. Vision therapy is known to be one of the best kept secrets in eye care.
Why Vision Therapy: Before, answering the question why, let us look at what is vision therapy? Vision therapy is a supervised program of visual activities aimed at correcting vision problems without the use of a surgery. In certain children, it can also be used to improve visual skills.
- The main idea of this therapy is to teach our visual system to correct itself without the use of a third party(lens/glasses) or a surgery. Visual therapy is not only meant for our eyes, but for the entire system of the brain that is associated with vision.
- Doctors indicate that past studies of visual therapy have yielded positive results. Many school children who suffered from reading problem have responded positively to vision therapy. May children have also experienced the reduction of eye strain that was put on their eyes due to computer vision syndrome.
The Idea of Vision Therapy: The most important thing to note about vision therapy is, it is not a combination of tools and techniques that is universally ideal.
- Vision therapy includes use of medical as well as non-medical stuff. It may use optometric stuff like, prisms and lens. On the other hand non-medical stuff like balls and boards may also be used. The use of computerised and non-computerised visual activities are also profound.
- The combination of the above tools over a systematic period of time would yields results and this entirely depends on the patient’s(child) response to the therapy.
Problems That can Be Corrected: Lazy eye, binocular vision problems, starbismus, eye movement problems, focussing problems and other visual problems associated with developmental disabilities can be corrected with the help of vision therapy.
Vision therapy does not promise you that you shall be rid of your glasses by the end of the therapeutic sessions. Nor does it claim to reverse near-sightedness after a few exercises.
Vision therapy aims at correcting a child’s vision through a series of medical and non-medical exercises and stimulation. Well, if you have to answer the question, ” how beneficial is vision therapy for children?”, it is entirely dependent on children themselves and how they respond to it.
