There are three treatment alternatives available to the behavioural optometrist and often these are combined in a vision care
programme.
Compensatory Lenses
These merely help the person to see more clearly if the patient does not wish to do further vision care.
Treatment Lenses
Special lenses are prescribed that reduce the stresses of the near-centred tasks, such as working on video display terminals or reading, to reduce the forces which contribute to vision problems. Lens prescriptions may be modified to guide the vision to a better mode of operation. Yoked prisms are also used where indicated. Lenses are tools available to alter human behaviour beneficially and immediately allow patients to alter their perception of the world around them and change how they function in their environment, reducing visual stress and give them a tool to help them perform their visual tasks. Glasses become a useful appliance similar to using a good pen to aid handwriting or football boots instead of plimsolls for football to use when working in today's demanding visual environment, which is filled with sustained near point visual demands done indoors with artificial lighting and within restricted rooms.
Vision Training
Here
the optometrist provides a treatment programme to develop those abilities that
either were not present or were poorly developed in the patient's overall
profile of visual abilities. Vision training is a step-by-step,
development-based series of activities and procedures that the patient practices
over time to facilitate the development of a more efficient and comprehensive
visual process. Vision training takes 6-12 months to complete, with weekly or
fortnightly sessions of 40-50 minute with the optometrist combined with home
vision training by the patient.
Some pictures showing a few Vision Training
exercises.
