Vision Therapy. Looking for Success Stories About Tracking and Convergence.

Yes my son had VT for 12 weeks and it made a world of difference. It was spendy $120 a week but so worth it. With that and glasses his world opened up. His reading improved. He was in 4th grade when we did this. He passed every normal eye exam, it was not until they did extensive eye exam they caught what was going on. I had a lot of people tell me it was not worth it and so forth but I did not listen and for us it worked.

Good luck to you

YES! We did tracking and convergence when Kiddo was diagnosed at 5(he had convergence disorder and still has ocular motor dysfunction, which cannot be 'cured' but biofeedback exercises were great). We did a year of vision therapy and then were deemed 'done' by the optometrist we were working with. (For what it's worth, his attitude toward vision therapy was rather "middle of the spectrum" in that it wasn't hogwash and it wasn't a panacea, it was *eye exercises*... just like any other exercise, it could help strengthen weak muscles.) He gets checked annually.

Some activities which the doc recommended: rolling a small ball (and later, a marble) back and forth and 'catching' it with a cup; using one hand to stack small (read, tiny) blocks as high as you can; using a popsicle stick with a sticker on top or a pencil with a fun eraser to go closer/farther to work the convergence muscles (Kiddo could not cross his eyes at the beginning, they would pull back out of focus when the object came too close).... there were more. Everyday regular activities-- dot to dot, word searches, building with Legos (focusing on small pieces), toss/catch a ball or object. Anything where the child has to focus on an object in movement.

The upside, too, is that you can get a 504 for your child if they need accommodations in the classroom. Something to think about. It helped us when we started with Kindergarten; the teacher knew more about where to place him in the classroom and what to expect. I'd say strongly-- go for it! Nearly everything therapeutic, you can do at home. One word of caution-- try to do things in short spurts, a long school day plus an hour of eye therapy is hard for kids. You don't want them to hate it, you know. We didn't do X minutes every day, just diligently did a couple activities each day. AND I had him in half-day kindergarten, in part because we knew that the full day PLUS this was too much for him. Also, Brain Gym activities sometimes helped. You can find the book online or maybe through your local library. Very easy exercises. :)

And it didn't cost us 5K either! We went through our insurance (we had a referral to an OT before who noticed how he was holding his head and suggested it was a vision issue, not an OT one) and because it is medical, got our insurance to cover some of it. I think we might have paid a few hundred dollars out of pocket. Also call around and check to see if a nearby university has a program which they might offer discounts as their student ophthalmologists/therapists offer services. I just don't want you to be discouraged by comments from other people who haven't even tried it or experienced it... as I said, for my son, it definitely worked. :)

Some resources below on efficacy of vision therapy for convergence disorder:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12477022
http://oepf.org/sites/default/files/Summary%20of%20Resear...

One of my children did VT and while it is hard to know for sure if it was worth it, it seemed to be. I also have some trust in the doctor because we prepaid and then he said she was done earlier than expected and he immediately refunded the money. Her reading issues really cleared up so could be coincidence or it was the VT. I tend to think VT. They have lots of testimonials in a book in the office too. They are written by kids and not sure they could all be fake...

I have a friend whose daughter has had some success with vision therapy, but she has a physical vision issue and is on an IEP at school. It was very expensive (around $5K) but she believes that it has helped. It wasn't a cure, but helped minimize her daughter's struggle and strain. Sorry I don't have more information for you on what her specific issue was.

It was suggested that we look into this for my oldest son, who has Irlen syndrome, ADHD and learning disabilities. The $5K price tag for the place that was recommended (by a school staffer) was far too high for us to consider it for more than a moment. He was plagued with vision issues through adolescence but nothing showed up on vision tests. I finally had a comprehensive (and very expensive) series of tests done by a children's hospital and even they couldn't find anything. That doctor then, just for kicks, had him try on a few different levels of drugstore reading glasses and voila! The lowest power cheapie glasses did the trick and were able to ease some of the strain and tracking issues he had, making it easier to read and write without his eyes and writing traveling off the page or in weird directions.

If your previous searches have yielded mostly negative results doesn't that sort of indicate that it doesn't really work?

no information about the situation, just a lot of warding off.
well, alrighty then.
khairete
S.

Why don't you just google?

Maybe if your post were more informative vs negative you'd get better responses.

You do know how to use Google, right?
Searching on your title
"Vision Therapy. Looking for success stories about tracking and convergence.",
I found sites that were about Vision Therapy Success Stories.
If I can find them - so can you.

Sorry but I have no experience with those sort of vision problems but our son got car sick for awhile as a toddler on long car trips and he out grew it in a few years.
Good luck to you and yours.

I've done a couple of different types of vision therapy but their goals were both to retrain the brain to process what the eyes were seeing in a new way.

Odd looking glasses. Think of Odd Looking Glasses as being similar to those that Nicolas Cage wore in the first National Treasure movie, where he has the glasses they found behind the brick and he has to wear them and flip the lenses up and down and side to side to see what is written in secret on the back of the government document. Those odd looking glasses. I will refer to glasses and this pair of eye therapy glasses is what I mean.

One of the types was a hand book where there were shapes and figures and things with parts missing. Like on an IQ test. Then the kiddo had to look at them and fix them while wearing different lenses in the odd looking glasses. As the lenses were flipped back and forth and changed the image on the paper would look differently. They had to do several pages each day. Vision therapy.

My grandson was diagnosed as blind in one eye because his brain had stopped accepting information from that one eye. His vision was so bad in it that his brain couldn't understand it so it stopped doing it.

The eye doc put him in glasses to try and help the eyesight but also started the vision therapy. He did a lot of the same things as the story above, the figures and stuff, but he also did color pages over the workbook sheet. Like yellow and red and pink and blue I think. It's been so many years ago. The colored sheets worked with the different colored lenses on the glasses. Like if he was looking through pink lenses in the glasses and the colored sheet over the workbook was blue then he changed the glasses to yellow, it would engage a different part of his brain with the same figures on the workbook sheet. It was retraining his brain to receive information.

He would spend 30 minutes each evening doing this. By the time he was finished his vision was fine, no more glasses at all, and he was fixed. Worked out very well for him.

Another friend had a reading problem, not dyslexia but the words would jiggle or seem to move, and she got pink lenses in her regular eye glasses, true rose colored glasses...lol and she can read anything just fine how.