Conditions we treat

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Dyslexia & Dyspraxia

Are you concerned that your young child may not be learning, communicating or relating socially as well as other children of the same age?

Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty that can cause problems with reading, writing and spelling. It's a specific learning difficulty, which means it causes problems with certain abilities used for learning, such as reading and writing. Unlike a learning disability, intelligence isn't affected.

Every child struggles with learning at times, but learning difficulties such as dyslexia do not come and go and they persist over time. While dyslexia is most often formally identified in school-age children, signs of dyslexia can frequently be detected in pre-school children.

Amblyopia (lazy eye)

Amblyopia

Vision is a learned experience. A child is born with a pair of eyes but not a visual world. If it is learned, then it can be relearned. When an eye fails to develop properly, the ability to see clearly is not developed. Perhaps it points in the wrong direction (squint) or is a different dimension (long-sighted in one eye only when the brain favour the better eye). Traditionally the this will have been patched in childhood under the care of an Orthoptist usually based at a hospital.

Auditory Processing

Auditory processing disorder (APD) is a hearing problem where the brain is unable to process sounds in the normal way.

It can affect people of all ages, but often starts in childhood.

Symptoms of auditory processing disorder

APD can affect people in many different ways. A child with APD may appear to have a hearing impairment, but this isn't usually the case and testing often shows their hearing is normal.

It can affect your ability to:

understand speech – particularly if there's background noise, more than one person speaking, the person is speaking quickly, or the sound quality is poor
distinguish similar sounds from one another – such as "shoulder versus soldier" or "cold versus called"
concentrate when there's background noise – this can lead to difficulty understanding and remembering instructions, as well as difficulty speaking clearly and problems with reading and spelling
enjoy music

Many people with APD find it becomes less of an issue over time as they develop the skills to deal with it.

Although children may need extra help and support at school, they can be as successful as their classmates.

Multi -sensory integration

Multisensory integration is the study of how information from the different sensory modalities, such as sight, sound, touch, smell, self-motion and taste, may be integrated by the nervous system.

Bilateral coordination

Bilateral coordination refers to the ability to coordinate both sides of the body at the same time in a controlled and organized manner; for example, stabilizing paper with one hand while writing/ cutting with the other.

Gross motor control

Gross motor skills are involved in movement and coordination of the arms, legs, and other large body parts and movements. Fine motor skills are involved in smaller movements that occur in the wrists, hands, fingers, and the feet and toes.

Eye movements

Eye movement includes the voluntary or involuntary movement of the eyes, helping in acquiring, fixating and tracking visual stimuli. A special type of eye movement, rapid eye movement, occurs during REM sleep. The eyes are the visual organs of the human body, and move using a system of six muscles.

Saccades

A saccade (French for jerk) is a quick, simultaneous movement of both eyes between two or more phases of fixation in the same direction. In contrast, in smooth pursuit movements, the eyes move smoothly instead of in jumps.

Scanning

Scanning is to look at all parts of (something) carefully in order to detect some feature.

Tracking

Eye tracking is the ability to track a moving target and the ability to switch fixation from one target to another. Well developed eye tracking is crucial to making accurate reading eye movements. Children with poor eye tracking control are often slow readers, have poor fluency, miss and skip words and lines, use their finger as a marker, and often report that words appear to move on the page when reading.

Smooth pursuit movements

Smooth pursuit movements are tracking movements of the eyes designed to keep a moving stimulus on the fovea. Such movements are under voluntary control in the sense that the observer can choose whether or not to track a moving stimulus.

Strabismus

Strabismus is the medical term of a squint, a condition where the eyes point in different directions. One eye may turn inwards, outwards, upwards or downwards while the other eye looks forward. Squints are common and affect about one in 20 children. They usually develop before a child is five years old, but can appear later, and adults can also be treated for the condition.

Squint may develop following a stroke which results in double vision. This often heals naturally but it can be aided with exercises and Vision Therapy. We use Virtual Reality and other programs to establish angles of turn in all directions of gaze to bring the eyes together again, reducing the need for surgery.

Retained reflexes

Retained reflexes are reflex actions originating in the central nervous system that are exhibited by normal infants, but not neurologically intact adults, in response to particular stimuli. These reflexes are suppressed by the development of the frontal lobes as a child transitions normally into child development. If they are retained and not integrated so that they become under conscious control, then it may interfere with child development

Education support

study skills

Access to learning

legal obligations

Convergence insufficiency

Convergence insufficiency is a sensory and neuromuscular anomaly of the binocular vision system, characterised by a reduced ability of the two eyes to turn towards each other, or sustain convergence giving one single image

Multi tasking

Multitasking is an apparent human ability to perform more than one task, or activity, at the same time. An example of multitasking is taking phone calls while typing an email and reading a book. Multitasking is the process of rapidly shifting attention between tasks. If one becomes proficient at two tasks it is possible to rapidly shift attention between the tasks and perform the tasks well.

Space and time

Space and time – where conventional optometry is concerned with what letter do you see? In life we need to be aware of WHERE things are and WHEN things happen. Driving is a good example of needing a sense of space and time.

See sickness syndrome

SEE Sickness Syndrome (also known as Neuro-ocular-vestibular Dysfunction) The SSS is condition in which a person is hyper-sensitivity to visual motion and eye movement. This leads to symptoms of moderate to severe motion sickness combined with photophobia. The severity and frequency of the different symptoms in the SSS patients can vary widely. Most SSS patients have life long histories of car sickness which occurs almost exclusively in the daytime. (Less motion is observed at the sides of the road at night).

Headache, dizziness, nausea, fatigue, and photophobia are some of the common symptoms of motion sickness and the SEE sick syndrome (SSS). Most optometrists, other professionals and the public are still unaware of it. Diagnosed by Roderic W Gillilan OD

PTSD

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an illness that you might get after a serious and frightening experience, including:

a natural disaster like an earthquake or flood,
war,
terrorist attacks,
serious accidents,
violence against you.

The illness makes you re-live the event, which causes distress and difficulty in your day-to-day life. Your symptoms may become worse if you see, hear or smell something that reminds you of the trauma.

Contact

ruth@develpmental.vision for more information