Vision Therapy Rehabilitation in California

Vision therapy is an often overlooked component of recovery from a serious injury or medical condition. Our ability to see is a complex process that relies on the eyes, the muscles surrounding the eyes, the brain, and the nerves that connect them all together. Changing how any of these parts function can damage our ability to see what is around us. At Sierra Care we offer vision therapy to patients in our rehabilitation programs who are struggling with reading, writing, balance, and perceiving the world around them.

Close-knit Healthcare Teams

When you choose Sierra Care for your rehabilitation and subacute care needs, you are choosing a close-knit team who works together to ensure that your recovery is as effective and efficient as possible. Close communication between our teams of nurses, doctors, therapists, and care managers eliminates the frustration many patients feel when managing complex medical issues that involve multiple follow-up visits. We have multiple well-equipped, modern, and beautiful facilities to create a perfect backdrop for your recovery.

What Medical Conditions Lead to Vision Changes?

Vision is the most complex of our five senses and involves much more than just the eyes. Vision requires that the eyes, eye muscles, brain, inner ear, and nerves are all functioning correctly. If any of these pieces are not functioning perfectly, our vision can be negatively affected. Some of the conditions that can lead to vision changes are:

• Any severe medical illness
• Diabetes
• Hypertension
• Traumatic brain injury
• Stroke (cerebrovascular accident)
• Heart attack (myocardial infarction)
• Brain tumors
• Ear infections
• Trauma to the face

Other conditions directly affect the visual system. Many patients with these conditions will still have difficulty with vision even after medical treatment is completed. Vision therapy can be very effective for these patients. The most common of these vision-affecting conditions are:

• Optic neuritis
• Optic nerve Neuropathy
• Oculomotor and trochlear nerve neuropathy
• Temporal arteritis

What is Vision Therapy?

Vision therapy is a set of exercises, drills, and guided activities that help the eyes, brain, nerves, and inner ear receive and process sensory information more efficiently and effectively. Optometrists, occupational therapists, and physical therapists can all provide certain elements of visual therapy and generally work together. The end goal of visual therapy is to improve patients’ comfort in navigating their environment, comprehension of written text, writing, typing, and any other work or activity-specific visual skills an individual patient may need.

What conditions are treated with vision therapy?

Vision therapy can be helpful for patients with any vision-related issues. However, there are some specific conditions that vision therapy is known to improve:

• Convergence insufficiency (difficulty with close vision)
• Amblyopia (weakness of one eye)
• Strabismus (incorrect eye alignment)
• Vision processing issues (difficulty visually identifying and following objects)
• Difficulty with visual multitasking (reading and walking etc)

These conditions can occur independently or as a result of any severe illness or injury. Before beginning vision therapy, it is critical to ensure that medical conditions and injuries directly affecting the eyes have been treated. At Sierra Care, we review patients’ medical histories and refer cases to ophthalmology and optometry to ensure that medical and surgical treatments are available to our patients alongside vision therapy.

What exercises do vision therapists use?

Vision therapy exercises focus on strengthening the eye, head, and neck muscles. However, many exercises and treatments used by visual therapists use special equipment that teaches the brain to interpret visual information more efficiently.

• Prisms: A prism is a triangle-shaped glasses lens that alters the path light takes into the eye. Prisms will reduce the diplopia (double vision) that results from strabismus and amblyopia. They are also used to slowly strengthen and retrain the muscles of the eyes.
• Filters: A filter is a colored piece made of plastic or glass that alters the color of the light entering the eye. Filters can help with light sensitivity, color vision changes, partial vision loss, and alter how the brain responds to visual signals, improving balance and coordination.
• Eye patches: An eye patch, also called an occluder, is used to either partially or completely block one of the eyes. Occluders allow strengthening and training of only one of the eyes or to focus on training one specific area of the visual field.
• Balance boards and balls: A piece of equipment shared with physical therapy. Balance boards can be used to place a patient on an unstable surface, testing the visual reflexes that allow us to navigate our environment. Assessing these reflexes can be a component of therapy or a way of monitoring a patient’s progression through their therapy.
• Electronic gaze targets: A gaze target gives patients something to rapidly focus on as a part of an exercise. Electronic targets can move in specific patterns that help to train weak muscles and promote balance and coordination while multitasking.