Anyone out there that does vision therapy?

Teomima

Tue, Jul 03 2018, 4:29 pm

I was an optometric vision therapist for eleven years, in Jerusalem.

Basically, you get trained in-office by a COVD certified developmental optometrist. You can get COVT certification but only after having worked in the field a certain number of hours. Some developmental optometrists prefer to hire optometrists to train as vision therapists, others will hire someone with an unrelated background but whom seems suitable for the position. This was the situation in my case.

Feel free to ask me anything. Happy to help if I can.

amother

Royalblue

Wed, Jul 04 2018, 8:18 am

Teomima wrote:

Thank you so much.

If a developmental optometrist would train me and I would work under them would I need to get certified or could I just work under their guidance?

I already work for a developmental optometrist but not with patients only in the business department but I would like to increase my pay and hours so I would like to present this concept to her and see what she says. If she isn't interested I have another dr. in the same field who I will approach.
So before I go to either of them I would like to get all facts and learn about VT as much as possible.
Which brings me to my next question
It there any book or videos I could use to learn VT?
Any thing that is used for VT that I could buy and practice on my kids?

Teomima

Wed, Jul 04 2018, 4:16 pm

amother wrote:

I never bothered getting certified, for several reasons: I had no interest in working in the field in any other office than where I was working, and I had incredible job security as is, even without the certification. It wouldn't have meant much of a pay increase, and I knew eventually I would be leaving the field entirely. My employers would have liked me to get certified but didn't require it. In fact, only one therapist in the entire office was certified.

All my training came on location. My employer supplied me with loads of reading material and he would teach me, though the majority of my learning was from a couple of months of observation of other therapists at work, then them essentially conducting a course of treatment on me so I learned all the exercises from personal experience. Plus they would observe me as I slowly began seeing patients of my own (after roughly two months of full time learning and observation) and give me feedback/constructive criticism accordingly.

There is a LOT of reading material out there but much of it isn't readily available to the layperson. Your office's developmental optometrist should have plenty of books, journals, and other publications in the subject. Perhaps ask to borrow some reading material "out of curiosity" (of you really feel you can't approach her yet about the idea of her training you). You can certainly practice basic exercises on your children, though you'd be limited by not having full access to all the equipment and/or not yet fully understanding the concepts behind certain exercises. But basics such as gross pursuits and saccades, ocular calisthenics, and brock string can be done easily at home and with minimal equipment, though these are only a very small selection of exercises.

Have you spoken with the other vision therapists in your office? What was their training and how were they hired? That might help you get an idea of your employer would be open to the notion of training you to be a vision therapist.

amother

Silver

Wed, Jul 04 2018, 8:57 pm

pecan wrote:

Also felt that vision therapy is a waste of time and overpromoted. Research has shown that vision therapy does not help kids with dyslexia. Interestingly enough, strengthening auditory perception improves reading. No time to look up sources, but I saw the studies in school from the dyslexia institute.

Vision therapy was extremely helpful for my DS. He was originally diagnosed with dyslexia, he no longer has that.

It only works for certain conditions. My son had convergence insufficiency, and vision therapy is very helpful for that.

Many people have this problem and don't even realize it, because they did not have any problems learning to read, but reading gives them headaches. If this is you or your child, you may want to look into vision therapy.

amother

Royalblue

Thu, Jul 05 2018, 7:06 pm

Teomima wrote:

There is no one in the office that does VT. That's why I would like to introduce it to my boss and see if I could do it because I want to increase my hours and need to make more money.

Do you think that there are videos on YouTube that I might be able to practice from?
If I don't need a degree or certificate then it will be much easier for me.
Thanks so much.

Teomima

Thu, Jul 05 2018, 7:31 pm

amother wrote:

When you say there's no one in your office that does VT, you mean even your boss doesn't? That you want to introduce an entirely new field of practice into a regular optometry office? Or that your boss is the only one doing VT, without a staff of therapists? Because if it's the former, I highly doubt it would be possible. Even licensed optometrists only get minimal training in VT during their education, they still need more advanced training by a developmental optometrist before being ready to work in the field. There's really no way to study eventing fully independently.

There may be videos but again, you're going to be limited by the lack of: in-depth understanding of the exercises, the physiological functions you're addressing, and access to the necessary tools and equipment. There's a lot more to it than just looking at someone's eyes. You can search YouTube, look up books on Amazon, etc, but I don't have any specific recommendations for you. Really the necessary training must come from a more experienced vision therapist/developmental optometrist.