Gradual return to non-urgent care- COVID-19 Update
The College of Optometrists has given us the go-ahead to gradually return to non-urgent care. As always health and safety of our staff and patients is our highest priority. Our COVID-19 policy includes the following steps.
REACH YOUR FULL POTENTIAL WITH VISION THERAPY AND REHABILITATION
London Visual Development Centre is a clinic that provides vision therapy, neuro-visual rehabilitation, and sports vision for children and adults with vision problems that interfere with school performance and everyday life. This includes cross, wandering, or lazy eyes, as well as neuro-optometric rehabilitation for brain injuries such as concussions. We also provide sports vision training for athletes who are looking to gain an edge through visual performance.
Located upstairs from Highbury Huron Optometry, we have many success stories helping our patients work through vision problems so that they can be their best. Dr. Khamis is very interested in vision therapy and is dedicated to helping people with vision issues.
VISION THERAPY
Vision therapy is a doctor prescribed set of vision treatment procedures that cannot be corrected by glasses or contact lenses. It is done in-office and supplemented by home therapies. Vision therapy is comparable to physical therapy for the eyes where vision disorders are corrected to improve patients' visual function and performance. Vision therapy can be described as “training the brain” as it looks to provide permanent life-long changes to achieve clear comfortable binocular vision.
Children can have difficulty in school performance if they have problems with things such as eye-tracking, eye teaming, and eye focusing, and this can make school and reading extremely difficult and can result in poor school performance. At the London Vision Development Centre, we have the hi-tech equipment to provide individual reading analysis on each of our patients and help treat the above condition. Vision therapy also helps with lazy, crossed or wandering eyes. 80% of what we comprehend and see relies on our vision and therefore vision therapy not only helps children but is effective in adults as well.
NEURO-VISUAL REHABILITATION
Neuro-optometric rehabilitation is a subset of vision therapy that deals with visual disorders that are a result of concussions, brain injuries, development delays or other neurological disorders.
An evaluation will involve in-depth testing which will evaluate how well your vision functions, and to what degree it is impacting your daily life and activities, including reading, playing sports, driving, balance and movement (tying shoes, filling up a glass of water, etc).
Neuro-optometric visual evaluation is unique because in addition to the traditional eye exam and basic binocular vision skills, and eye health, we do performance testing to see how the visual process is interacting with other sensory feedback mechanisms.
After a brain injury, visual symptoms can range from being very subtle to dramatic. The very subtle visual symptoms may be the most frustrating because they require very specialized testing to detect, so the patient often feels like no one believes them or can tell what they are going through.
SPORTS VISION
Have you ever wanted to improve your batting average, lower your golf score, improve your save percentage, or just play your favourite sport better?
Sports vision is the practice of examining and managing the visual needs of a patient. It includes:
Providing appropriate correction
Assessment and remediation of functional vision inefficiencies
Performance enhancing vision training
One of our main goals in sports vision is to slow the game around you by speeding up your visual processing time.
Vision provides the athlete information about where and when to perform, where to go, how to react; things that cannot be trained by lifting weights at the gym. 80% of the information we get around us is from the eyes (visual).
Starting with a vision performance evaluation we then go on to create individual vision performance enhancing plans focusing on things such as eye-hand coordination, depth perception, eye movements, decision making, peripheral vision and eye-body awareness. We have worked with many athletes across many sports from hockey, baseball, football and golf to olympic skeet shooting and high jump.
Did you know? A major league batter has approximately 400 ms between the release of the pitch and the time the ball arrives at the plate.
The swing takes approximately 150 ms to complete and the batter has approximately 250 ms to process the visual information from the pitch to determine the appropriate response. We focus on improving that visual information processing speed.
VISION PROBLEMS THAT INTERFERE WITH SCHOOL/ADHD
Did you know? 60% of children with learning problems have visual problems (AOA).
Increases with kids with special needs!
Vision problems can make it more difficult for children to read, learn, remain on task and succeed in school. It is important for parents to be fully informed about their children’s vision.
1 in 10 children has a vision problem significant enough to impact learning (5 million in the US alone)
Typical vision screenings miss at least 50% of vision problems
Children with vision problems can be misdiagnosed with ADD/ADHD
For more visit the College of Optometrist in Vision Development.
PROBLEMS FOCUSING EYES
For kids in school, problems with focusing means they will get tired when reading, words will start to get blurry the longer they read, they won’t be able to read for very long or have trouble copying things from the smart board. Print can initially go from being clear to looking like this start looking like this:
This can also lead to headaches and eye strain making reading and school work very difficult.
TRACKING PROBLEMS
When we read our eyes follow along print. This is called tracking.
Children who struggle with tracking can lose their place when reading and their eyes can jump around can sometimes even skip lines. This can jumble up text and scramble up words making it very difficult to comprehend what they read. At the London Vision Development Centre we use the latest technology and have an instrument called the Readalyzer that can let us know exactly where the child’s eyes are pointing when reading as well as provide a demonstration to the parents afterwards where the child’s eyes were jumping when reading.
EYE TEAMING
Eye teaming can create double vision, especially if reading small print for a large period of time. In order to keep single vision, one must point their eyes at the same point on a page. If there is an eye teaming problem than as the eyes tire the ability of the eyes to “team” breaks down and the eyes end up aiming at different parts of a page resulting in the following
Not all children with eye teaming issues see double, most will stop reading when their eyes become tired and things split into two. They take vision breaks, to avoid close work – daydreaming, talking in class, going to the bathroom, getting a drink. Because they are off task and these children often get suspected of having ADD/ADHD when the real issue is their vision.
THE MYTH OF 20/20
Many people think if you have 20/20 you have perfect vision but this is not true. 20/20 vision means you can see the size of the letter you are supposed to at 20 feet. If your child’s vision isn’t sharp enough to pass this eye test then glasses or contacts will be prescribed.
However clear vision is just one of the visual skills needed for success in school. In addition to seeing clearly, children need to be able to focus up close for a long period of time, as eyes have to work a lot harder to read than they do at distance, and school work requires very special visual skills. 80% of what we learn is processed visually. Children with poor visual skills struggle in school, especially with the ability to read and pay attention. One out of every four children has a vision problem that hurts their ability to learn, read and remain on task.
Contact us today to learn more.