Recently I had the pleasure of presenting a CE lecture to primary care ODs about a vision related problem that receives little attention from the media yet plagues the quality of life of millions of people. It affects children and adults with an increase in symptoms in adults.
Even after practicing for 30 years in the optometric specialty of developmental vision, working with and helping thousands of children in vision therapy, I’m always touched by the children who make their way to a level of success in school and academics in spite of the burden of an unaddressed visual deficiency.
Last week I witnessed the astonished look on a father’s face when his 7 year old little girl (we’ll call Jenny) struggled with some routine chair-side vision tests. His surprise was not during the measurement of her ability to read the eye chart.
It used to be thought that having 20/20 eyesight, and having healthy eyes, was sufficient to be visually prepared for success in this world. But what we know today is that the visual skills necessary for learning go far beyond the ability to see 20/20 and having healthy eyes.
Individuals with unstable focusing or difficulty in coordinating vision with other senses can experience headaches and other uncomfortable side effects from viewing 3-D movies.
This checklist of symptoms of visual problems observed at school, at home, and at work will help your optometrist understand how the child/adult performs visually in his daily activities. You can print this out to take with you when you visit your doctor.
According to Optometric Clinical Practice Guidelines published by the American Optometric Association, the prevalence of visual efficiency problems ranges between 15 to 20 percent of the population. At least 20 percent of children with learning disabilities have problems in visual processing.
Vision is learned and constantly undergoes change and development. Many of these children with learning related visual problems have 20/20 distance eyesight but cannot sustain prolonged near visual work without visual stress or avoidance.
In 1862, a man named Snellen devised a testing system to determine people’s eyesight. He asked people to stand at 20 feet and through experimentation discovered the smallest sized letter that most people with good eyesight could see. He called this a size 20 letter and the vision was recorded as 20/20.