Visual Skill Problems
These involve difficulties with eye teaming, eye tracking, and eye focusing skills. A problem with one or more of these abilities can affect quality of life. Take a look at the “Vision Therapy” section to learn more about these skills.
Vision Therapy
Binocular Vision Dysfunction
Eye teaming is the ability for the line of sight in each eye to line up with each other. This allows us to perceive depth. Difficulties with this skill can cause instability with maintaining fused, single vision. The most common binocular vision dysfunction is convergence insufficiency. This is when the eyes cannot cross inward enough or cannot be sustained for long periods of time.
Common symptoms may include double vision, eyestrain, headaches, and difficulty maintaining attention while reading.
Oculomotor Dysfunction
Eye tracking, or the ability to track a moving target and switch fixation from one target to another, allows visual scanning and exploration. It is also an important skill for reading and copying information.
Common symptoms may include loss of place when reading, relying on a finger or line guide to keep place, poor eye-hand coordination, and poor reading comprehension.
Accommodative Dysfunction
Focusing ability is important for reading efficiency and comfort. This skill allows rapid and accurate shifts of attention from one distance to another with instantaneous clarity. It also allows us to maintain focus at reading distance.
Common symptoms may include visual discomfort and fatigue, headaches, or difficulty shifting between distance to near as well as occasional blurring of vision.
Vision therapy includes an individualized program designed to build a strong visual foundation in combining all these visual skills. The difficulty is increased by adding visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive demands. This helps strengthen and reinforce skills so that they become integrated into real life.
Traumatic Brain Injury
A brain injury commonly occurs from a stroke or head trauma (such as during sports or from a bad fall). These problems can significantly impact visual skills (eye teaming, tracking, focusing) as well as visual perception. A visual system that was previously strong and efficient can be weakened after a brain injury.
Brain injury symptoms can include the following:
Headache
Eyestrain
Double vision
Light sensitivity
Dizziness or motion sensitivity
Difficulty keeping place when reading
Sensitivity to an overly stimulating environment
Recovering from a brain injury can be a long journey, but vision therapy can help you along the way. We take a rehabilitative role to help you re-learn visual skills and visual perception that can significantly improve symptoms. Overall, a multidisciplinary approach is the most effective way to recover; vision therapy can be a critical part of a team that may include physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, cognitive therapy, and others.
Strabismus & Amblyopia
Also known as “lazy eye,” these conditions significantly impact binocular vision and are commonly associated with symptoms like double vision, poor depth perception, and difficulty reading. They typically occur at a young age and can persist for life.
Strabismus is an “eye drift” or “eye turn” where the eyes do not work together as a team. Each eye is aiming at a different point in space, which hinders depth perception. While double vision can occur, the brain may instead ignore the vision in one eye. This is called suppression and can cause amblyopia.
Amblyopia is when the vision in one eye has significantly blurrier vision than the other. This isn’t caused by a disease that affects the structures of the eye. The main causes include strabismus, a stronger prescription in one eye, or from something that is physically blocking the vision in one eye (i.e. congenital cataract or droopy eyelid) during the critical period of development. Suppression is likely to occur in the amblyopic eye.
Vision therapy builds a stronger eye-brain connection with activities designed for improving awareness of an eye turn, overcoming suppression, strengthening depth perception, improving eye alignment, and improving the vision of the amblyopic eye. This ultimately develops stronger, more robust binocular vision.
What Patients Are Saying
★★★★★
“I had a fantastic experience seeing Dr. Rebecca Aquije! […] The office staff were super friendly and even helped me run my insurance to help me with visit costs. I will definitely come back here for my next eye exam!”
— Cordelia Zhong“I used to feel a lot of stress around my eyes after 30min of reading or 10min under the sun. This bad feeling has disappeared after vision therapy for 6 months.
On a normal workday, I have to look at the screen for 10-12hrs and solely for this reason I developed myopia in the past few years which worsened quickly. Vision therapy helped stabilize my vision, and now my prescription is stable and not much changed. In fact, my prescription improved slightly in the past few months.
I also used to develop lots of soreness with my eyes and sometimes a headache in the afternoon after hours of work. The headache and soreness has largely gone away and whenever I feel them occasionally, some vision therapy practice (my "homework") would make an immediate relief.
I'm really happy with the changes vision therapy has brought to my life, and grateful to the help of Dr. Rebecca Aquije and Nelli through the treatment process.”
— Jie“Dr. Aquije is terrific! From her patient manner and in-depth knowledge, to her expertise, and patience to ensure she gets it right - hands down five stars!”
— Emma A.“Dr.Aquije was super friendly, sweet and understanding. She definitely had an ear for my numerous questions. Very informative and knows her stuff. I will be back to see her.”
— Zocdoc reviewer