Llarning Disability Testing and Cure - Have you Tried Vision Therapy?
As a parent who has paid his dues working hard to help this child cope with learning or behavior disorders, I know how it can feel to be handed choices of treatment that you can never understand properly, and that no one has the time to explain. It feels like there is little you can do short of just standing by and watching as your child's struggles, and teachers secretly seem to blame the child for his troubles. Getting help usually starts with expensive and time-intensive learning disability testing that the public school system may or may not pay for, all kinds of therapies, specialized tuition and often, drugs do.
Many parents seem to be quite mistrustful of the whole setup of tests and medicines and rules and therapies. The way some parents view the whole vaccination system with suspicion is something the government does to needlessly force compliance on the citizenry. There is deep-rooted suspicion to do with the whole organized learning disability testing and treatment business. Parents would use the word "organized" to describe these activities the way you would say "organized crime". A big reason for this much mistrust could be how it doesn't really always feel pleasant being chewed up by the hospital grind. You often feel you're just on a huge merry-go-round getting the runaround to get answers, and doctors aren't all that clear about what to do themselves. Doctors often seem overly eager to label a child as autistic or ADHD-afflicted or just with a vague "with issues" label; and they seem to usually just base all of this on some kind of personal skills and interpretation. It is nothing they can actually prove to you, and you wonder if ten years down the line, you're just going to be reading in the papers that the doctors had wrong all along.
How could you put your children on mood disorder medicine like lithium or Ritalin based on such vague and experimental scientific understanding in good conscience as a parent? I was fortunate enough to run into Dr. Stanley Appelbaum, a doctor whose method of therapy seems to come from the same kind of frustration that all parents feel. But you'd be surprised to hear what kind of appellation he goes by - he is a behavioral optometrist - or vision therapist if you will. Typically, vision therapy is just supposed to take your vision-related troubles like bad posture, straining and craning, and so on. These new developments are claimed to help with treating learning disabilities, ADHD, and trouble with an uncoordinated child who has trouble in sports. Children like these seem to have a low threshold for frustrating occurrences in life, like a bus that is late or a game that is hard to learn. Learning disability testing often labels children ADHD or something else by mistake, the doctor feels. While vision therapy can't really cure hard-core cases of ADHD or dyslexia, the fact that most minor problems are misdiagnosed as the more serious real diseases, means that going to vision therapist can often help.
They have some pretty unconventional-looking equipment to help your child with. They have things that look like the old ViewMaster children's toy, and something called a Visagraph this helps doctors track exactly how your child's eyes move to follow an object in motion. This is the way they do their learning disability testing. You'll see children at visual therapy frantically trying to use the graph correctly, or trying to accurately follow suspended balls and balloons, sometimes trying to catch them, sometimes trying to dodge them. And sometimes they play certain specialized video games.
This isn't some kind of flaky New Age therapy. The American Optometric Association, finds that more than half of all children that the psychotherapists do their learning disability testing on (defined by other doctors as problem children), really only suffered vision problems. If your child like mine, and often loses his line when reading, has trouble copying from the chalk board or from a book to a notebook, skips words when trying to read and has terrible handwriting or ability at sports, chances are, vision therapy will help. The lack of information even among learned doctors visit the problem. Any normal psychiatrist, is bound to have trouble recalling having ever heard of such a thing. Yet like my son, hundreds have been helped by Dr. Appelbaum's treatments. Just having the doctor train my son to get his eyes to see completely straight and moved in lockstep from side to side, subtly helped him with his confidence in sports, and with his attention. He's doing very well at baseball now. No clumsiness at all.