My new online Vision Skill Building Program - Integrative Vision Skills has been launched.  Check it out!

http://integrativevisionskills.com

Another summer is coming to it's end and boy has it flown by!  Back to school time is here.  This is a great time to get your children's vision evaluated to make sure that they are visually ready for the new school year.  It's also important to remember to "keep an eye" on your child's academic performance early in the school year.  Often, vision problems become evident with the challenges of a new grade level.  An undetected visionproblem can often be a contribuiting factor to academic difficulties.  A Behavioral Vision Evaluation can detect these vision problems and Vision Therapy can offer help by improving deficient visual skills. Hope you have a great school year!

Dr. K 

Much is being made of he Arizona Cardinal's star wide receiver, Larry Fitzgerald.  He is being compared to the greats of the game, such as Jerry Rice.  What I find most interesting about Larry Fitzgerald is the fact that as a child he received Vision Therapy from his grandfather, Dr. Robert Johnson.  He received VT because of struggles in school, but the therapy reaped other benefits as well.  Mainly, Vision Therapy gives Larry an edge when it comes to sports.  The rest is history.

 Many parents tell me that in addition to academic struggles, their children struggle with sports.  "Can Vision Therapy help with sports?" they ask.  The answer is YES, YES, YES!

Here is a link to NPR's Morning Edition.  It tell's Larry Fitgerald's story along with a short interview with his grandfather, Dr. Johnson.

 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100049694

A new research paper on Convergence Insufficiency was published in the October 2008 issue of Archives of Ophthalmology.  This paper is important because it clearly shows the effectiveness of Vision Therapy in treating Convergence Insufficiency.  It showed that office based VT is a far more effective treatment than pencil pushups, which are often prescribed by eye doctors for the patient to do at home. 

This was a multisite study that included Optometric Educational Institutions such as the State University of New York College of Optometry and the Pennsylvania College of Optometry as well as the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Often, Convergence Insufficiency gets disregarded by doctors as having an impact on the learning process.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Convergence Insufficiency can often mask itself as ADD/ADHD or as a reading disability.  Proper diagnosis is critical because, as this study shows, Vision Therapy effectively treats the problem.

A parent recently voiced concerns to me about her 1st grade son reversing the letters "b" and "d" when he writes.  This is a common issue and revolves around the concept of learning readiness skills.  When I speak of readiness skills, I do not mean IQ.  I mean the sum of all our sensory and cognitive skill sets

The truth is that what we ask our children to do in Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades is not in line with what they are ready for neurologically and devolopmentally.  In other words, readiness skills provide the infrastructure to allow for efficient learning and reading.  If I asked you to drive to Europe, you'd look at me like I was nuts.  You'd say "how can I DRIVE to Europe?  There's no bridge to get me there"  Well, it's the same for letter reversals.  If a child doesn't have the neurological infrastructure in place they will reverse  letters and numbers.  In fact, we don't expect letter reversals to drop out until around age 7 1/2 to age 8.  As time goes by they should become less frequent.