Welcome to Optometric Physicians First Blog Post!

Optometric Physicians Vision Therapy is excited to announce we are starting a blog! Our passion is to improve the quality of life for every person that walks through our door and we wanted to be able to reach as many of you as possible. We also started a Facebook group called Nashville Vision Therapy. We will be posting a blog each week of different topics relating to Vision Therapy. Feedback and questions are much appreciated.

Let's start off this blog right and start with the basics! What is Vision Therapy? Vision therapy, visual training, or vision training is an individualized, supervised treatment program designed to correct visual-motor and/or perceptual deficiencies. Vision therapy trains the entire visual system which includes eyes, brain and body. The goal of VT (vision therapy) is to train the brain to use the eyes to receive information effectively, comprehend it quickly and react appropriately. You are probably wondering what Vision Therapy includes. Vision therapy sessions include non-surgical procedures designed to enhance the brain's ability to control eye alignment, eye movements, focusing abilities, and eye teaming. State-of-the-art technology and software allows vision therapist to offer patients challenging programs for the enhancement of eye teaming, focusing, binocularity, fusional skills, convergence skills, and perceptual skills. Vision therapy programs are individually designed for each person for maximum improvement. Each office session is approximately 30-45 minutes of one-on-one training with the vision therapist and at home exercises are given to help with self-reinforcing. Studies show that 1 out of 5 (20%) school age children have an undiagnosed visual issue that affects learning. This percentage dramatically increases within the special education, learning disabled and remedial reading populations, where as many as 70% of these students have a significant visual component to their learning problems.

Vision Therapy can help the following behaviors or disorders:

• Lazy eye, crossed-eyes, or wandering eyes
• Turn or tilts head to see
• Squinting or covering one eye to see
• Excessive blinking
• Short attention span (diagnosed with ADHD or ADD)
• Daydreaming
• Poor handwriting
• Poor visual/motor skills (hand-eye coordination)
• Frequently drops things or bumps into things
• Omits words while reading
• Reverses words or numbers
• Frequently looses place while reading
• Uses finger to keep place while reading
• Complains of headaches, eyestrain, dizziness or nausea while reading
• Complains of double vision
• Birth injury
• Brain trauma

Thank you for joining us on our first blog! We can’t wait to teach you more about what we are passionate about, Vision Therapy!