Visual Inefficiency Explained: Symptoms, Causes, and Vision Therapy
Eye Teaming Problems
To see the world with clarity, your eyes must work well together. If they aren’t coordinated, your brain will be confused by the visual information it receives. Convergence insufficiency and convergence excess are common causes of eye teaming problems. The former makes it challenging for the eyes to unite and focus inward when you bring an object close to your nose, whereas the latter makes it difficult for the eyes to align outward, causing trouble with distance vision.
Symptoms of eye teaming problems include:
- Hazy or double vision
- Tired or uncomfortable eyes
- Difficulty reading (speed and/or comprehension)
- Skipping lines and losing place when reading
- Dyslexia symptoms
- Eye squinting or rubbing
- Headaches and Migraines
- Dizziness
- Balance problems
- Difficulty with focus/attention (ADHD symptoms)
- Uneven sizing/spacing when writing
- Poor hand-eye coordination
- Difficulty driving at night
- Symptoms in busy places (ie: grocery store)
Eye Tracking Problems
Your eyes’ ability to move smoothly in unison is described as eye tracking. This visual skill allows us to swiftly check our surroundings and decide on a course of action. When the eye movements become sluggish and inaccurate, this could be a sign of an eye tracking problem. Fixation dysfunction, saccadic deficiency, and pursuit deficiency are three main types of eye-tracking problems.
Common symptoms of poor eye tracking skills are:
- Skipping lines when reading because of the eyes’ inability to move from one line to the next
- Losing your place while reading
- Mistakes such as substituting or skipping words while reading
- Poor hand-eye coordination
- Difficulty with spelling
Focusing Problems
The eyes effortlessly adapt their focus whenever we shift our gaze from one object to another. This ensures that we see every object as clear and sharp. When the ciliary muscle (which controls accommodating focus) struggles to relax or tighten, this leads to focusing problems.
Focusing problems can lead to:
- Headaches during or after reading
- Blurry vision when shifting focus
- Watery eyes
- Difficulty reading
- Frequent eye rubbing
- Holding objects close to the face in order to view them
How a Vision Therapist Can Help
A vision therapist can help you develop essential visual skills by strengthening the brain-eye connection.
A vision therapy program is customized for your unique vision needs and offers exercises, lenses, prisms, and filters, which are used regularly to enhance visual skills over time.
Don’t let vision problems hold you back any longer. Schedule a functional vision exam with Opto-mization in Victoria or Nanaimo today.
How We Can Help
If you or a loved one is experiencing any symptoms of double vision, dizziness or feeling off-balance, contact us for a consultation. Even if you’ve been told that your symptoms are stress-related, seasonal, or will fade on their own, having a functional visual evaluation can help rule out vision as the root cause or contributing factor to your symptoms.
It’s also important to note that not every optometrist is trained in this specialized field. Only a neuro-optometrist should assess and treat a post-TBI patient with neuro-optometric rehabilitation therapy.
