Has Your Child Had Vision Therapy?

my daughter is 5 and was diagnosed with lazy eye in May. She left the appt. with a prescription for bifocals. :(

We started therapy for her, learned some things we can do at home to help. This helps keep the need for in office therapy down to maybe 1x a month.

Also our insurance (Aetna) covers 32 visits. The dr. was having the kids (both needed therapy) come for an hour each. Turns out he considered 30 mins 1 session, so I actually using 2 sessions and 2 copays ($30 instead of 15 a visit). We changed it down to 1 30 min session each. Yes it will take longer, but it will be easier on the checkbook.

ask if you can do therapy at home if the issue is money.

my daughter has exotropia, a form of strobismus. we were able to do therapy competely at home. it was a mix of a computer program and prisms. she was in K or 1 when we started.

yes, it's been successful in that our goal was to avoid surgery and we have avoided surgery. but she has very intermittent wandering and fabulous vision, so we started from a pretty good place.

good luck

I can't say as to how the therapy should or should not work but I do think that if the glasses are for up close work only then they should only be worn then. They should not be worn all day at all. They are used at the computer, reading a book, writing an a journal, etc...they do not do anything for them when it comes to daily activities. They could actually hurt more to wear them if they are not doing the up close work.

The vision therapy that we did with my grandson was a pair of glasses like Nicholas Cage found in the National Treasure movie. They had lenses that flipped up and down, around from one eye to the other, all sorts of pages were to be read with the lenses changing to teach their eyes to interpret what they are reading differently. They are re-training the brain to receive the material the eye is seeing and sending to the brain.

That is the only eye therapy we have any experience with.

Unless the doc says this child is disabled and is not able to function in a normal classroom setting the school should not have any part of this. It would fall to you to pay for this I believe. I could certainly be wrong though. I am under the impression that unless there is a diagnosed life long disability diagnosis the school doesn't even have to help in any way.

I hope I am wrong though...good luck finding out from the insurance how to go about getting help to pay for this.

All our insurance that I know about pays for it just like they would any other vision care for kids. It's covered on their insurance.

I don't personally have any children with amblyopia, but I am a trained screener for the condition, and have helped screen over 3000 children over the course of the last 6 years. I would absolutely recommend starting the vision therapy as soon as possible, as amblyopia is an incredibly serious condition, that if not treated and corrected by age 6, leads to blindness in the child's weaker eye. This also is not generally a condition that when found later in life (after age 4), is corrected in just 4 months. If they are recommending vision therapy, most likely the condition is pretty severe. I absolutely understand the difficulty in funding something like that, but hopefully they will be able to either find a way to help you get funding for it, or be able to teach you things you can do at home with your child, to cut down on the number of times you need to take him into a therapist.

Good luck to you and your son - I hope all works out for the best.

My son has esotropia and amblyopia, diagnosed around age 2. He had surgery and wore a patch for years. We did vision therapy for 6 months when he was about 7 years old. I can't say that it helped much.

I am now 35 and was diagnosed with lazy eye when I was around 5. I remember wearing the eye patch for a while but I do not remember having to go through therapy. Ultimately I ended up having a surgery to correct the problem. The surgery didn't work immediately and at one point I was even wearing bifocals. However, by the time I hit high school, I didn't need glasses at all and it worked wonderfully. Now, as I age my other eye is crossing but it is corrected as long as I wear a contact in that eye or glasses. (I know, it is strange that I only wear 1 contact). I don't know if they still do the surgery but I thought you may want to hear a success story. I am very pleased with the results of how the eye doctors handled my eyes. I hope that you will be able to help your son out :)

I had a lazy eye as a toddler. The dr told my parents to hold my head while the other held a flashlight against my head and had it shine against the wall. This made me look at the flashlight which strengthened my eye. This was over 40 years ago so I am sure techniques have improved. I don't know if this will work for your son since he's older but it could be worth a try. Good luck to all of you!!