NY Times Article on Vision Therapy

[Anonymous]

PP, the first link is broken. the second two, while interesting, are not exactly from impartial sources. I'm on the fence about VT, but wonder why, if it's so effective, there are very few, if any, reliable studies.

Keep the links coming, though. I think several of us are interested in the topic. I would call myself a sceptic, but I am open to new ideas.

[Anonymous]

My son was referred to a developmental optometrist and I was looking for information on previous threads. Has your child been evaluated for vision therapy? Was it helpful? Any recommendations of a particular doctor?

[Anonymous]

We're happy with Dr. Stanley Applebaum in Bethesda. We were very impressed with the initial evaluation and parent meeting to explain everything. Vision therapy is run by his son who is also an optometrist and another optometrist but they basically supervise a number of assistants who do the actual exercises with the kids. I think the drs do spend a little time with the kids during each VT appointment, though. I don't talk to a dr after every appointment but definitely feel that they "know" my dc and they spend enough time explaining the home exercises to us. The office staff is great and it is very easy to schedule (and change the schedule). I was a little wary about the "group" aspect of VT but each child seems to have an assistant (or the dr) working with him/her at all time. It is a bit of a factory and there are tons of people (kids and adults) coming in or out but I guess that happens when you're a popular practice. Our dc's teachers have reported some improvement but he is going to be doing it for awhile before we see major benefits. My dc did get glasses (basically bifocals but only the bottom has a prescription) and the teachers noticed a difference once the glasses arrived. I don't know anyone else in the area but I'd recommend them.

[Anonymous]

Has anyone checked out Dr. Wachs? I would really like to find a new eye doctor. DC has exotropia, an eye that turns out as well as some sensory/attention issues. We previously saw the doctor from this article, Dr. Applebaum, and he definitely falls in the snake oil salesman category. All he seems to care about is selling his product. He can hardly talk about anything else. I felt like when he looked at me he saw dollar signs (or a target on my forehead). I would STRONGLY encourage anyone thinking about going here to reconsider.

To start off with, you will never be able to get him on the phone. He is never in the office, always "at a lecture". If perchance you can catch him on a day he's working, you will have to wait hours to see him. Sometimes DC would have hours of testing, other times like 10 minutes worth. The little girls that work there seem like they are always lying about where he is or when he'll be able to see you.

On top of that, I know that the doctor couldn't pick my child out of a line up. We were one of the only non-White/Jewish families in the waiting room. I always felt like he spoke down to me and assumed that I wouldn't pay. I hope this was not because of our ethnicity but had an eerie feeling that it was. We quit going to this practice because I could tell that DC was becoming uncomfortable when he would have to see Dr. Applebaum at the many re-evals that were scheduled (as an attempt to squeeze more money out of us no doubt).

That said, I do feel that vision therapy was helping DC. He was concentrating better and having fewer meltdowns. We have never left a doctor before but it NEEDED to happen. I really want to pursue VT somewhere else but don't know where. We live in MoCo but would be willing to travel as far as necessary. PLEASE HELP!

[Anonymous]

23:06 here. I checked out the other threads, thanks. I think I am going to try scheduling appointments with either Wachs or Kraskin. Has anyone had experience with Applebaum and then seen either of these two? I just want to make sure that I'm not signing on for more of the same thing...

[Anonymous]

Dr. Appelbaum has helped my child tremendously. I did consider Wachs and Kraskin when I was choosing a doctor. I found out Wachs is no longer practicing, and Kraskin was a father/son practice in which the father is now gone. I wanted experience so I went with Appelbaum.

I homeschool, so we do therapy in the early afternoon. My DC gets lots of attention from Dr. Friedman, and the same 2 or 3 assistants have been working with my son for the last 9 months. I asked what the qualifications of the assistants were before we began treatment, since Dr. Appelbaum told me there was always a doctor in the room during therapy sessions. The assistants are 3rd or 4th year pre-med U of MD students. That would make them 20-21 years old. I have not noticed a huge turn around. The University of Maryland is a reputable institution with a competitive program. The doctor does all of the programming for the session, he oversees the assistants and is always available to answer my questions. I would say this to the previous poster who thinks the assistants are "little girls" but said the therapy is working: Be grateful it's working. Many people don't know about vision therapy, and as an adult that has struggled with a visual disturbances my whole life, I just wish I had the opportunity to do VT as a child. Hopefully your child will thank you for the financial sacrifice someday, but your DC is lucky to have VT and you are lucky you have the resouces to provide it. If VT worked for your child, do your part and spread the word about VT. There is a group of parents called PAVE (Parents active for vision education, or something like that) that can answer many questions about vision therapy http://pavevision.org/

[Anonymous]

I thought Applebaum was a true snake-oil salesman. Unable to answer any serious questions, unable to provide research which supported VT, unable to give a timetable for improvement which would show that VT helped more than simple maturity.

[Anonymous]

My child went through Vision therapy with Dr. Appelbaum in his Bethesda office. I found his program to be very individually designed for my child based on the severity his vision problem, his motivation and readiness, and the number of therapy sessions per week we were able to attend. Talking with several parents in the reception room, I found out that Vision Therapy programs might range in duration from 3 months to 2 years. Unlike some other forms of therapy, you will not hear of an individual being in vision therapy for years without goals being met. Vision therapy was very effective for my son.

My son has had a long term solution to his visual problems. It has now been over a year since we finished vision therapy with Dr. Appelbaum and I highly recommend him and the Vision Therapy he provides, because it really helped my child with his concentration and behavior. He is doing his homework faster and his memory has improved. It used to take several hours to complete his homework. Now he stays seated and finishes in about 30-45 minutes. I found Dr. Appelbaum and all the staff to be very helpful, always answering my questions promptly, the same doctor and assistant worked with my child the entire time, and the entire experience was very positive. The money spent was actually less than I was spending on all the tutoring he was doing that didn't work. For parents considering vision therapy, go to www.visionhelp.com for more information.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Dr. Appelbaum has helped my child tremendously. I did consider Wachs and Kraskin when I was choosing a doctor. I found out Wachs is no longer practicing, and Kraskin was a father/son practice in which the father is now gone. I wanted experience so I went with Appelbaum.

I homeschool, so we do therapy in the early afternoon. My DC gets lots of attention from Dr. Friedman, and the same 2 or 3 assistants have been working with my son for the last 9 months. I asked what the qualifications of the assistants were before we began treatment, since Dr. Appelbaum told me there was always a doctor in the room during therapy sessions. The assistants are 3rd or 4th year pre-med U of MD students. That would make them 20-21 years old. I have not noticed a huge turn around. The University of Maryland is a reputable institution with a competitive program. The doctor does all of the programming for the session, he oversees the assistants and is always available to answer my questions. I would say this to the previous poster who thinks the assistants are "little girls" but said the therapy is working: Be grateful it's working. Many people don't know about vision therapy, and as an adult that has struggled with a visual disturbances my whole life, I just wish I had the opportunity to do VT as a child. Hopefully your child will thank you for the financial sacrifice someday, but your DC is lucky to have VT and you are lucky you have the resouces to provide it. If VT worked for your child, do your part and spread the word about VT. There is a group of parents called PAVE (Parents active for vision education, or something like that) that can answer many questions about vision therapy http://pavevision.org/

Hi 23:06 again, I did find that Wachs was no longer in practice. That's a little weird given that this article only came out a few months ago. I AM grateful that the therapy helped my child to open up. I'm just not sure that a play group or other type of therapy wouldn't have had the same effects. Is there any proof that VT works?

As for the assistants, when I went to Applebaum's a whole bunch of them left, all at once. They were swiftly replaced by another group of pretty young women. True the University of Maryland has some good programs, but are these girls learning about vision therapy there? If they are pre-med they probably are not. Being pre-med does not mean that you are studying medicine, they could be journalism or business majors for all we know. Let's face it 20-21 year olds are not grown-ups. They are often more concerned with parties than work. It sounds like VT is not their career, it's that job they did to put themselves through college. I would rather my children be seen by someone who is dedicated to helping my child, not to getting into a good school. Does anyone know if these girls undergo any sort of formal training program?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: For parents considering vision therapy, go to www.visionhelp.com for more information.

I keep finding this link on various threads but this just leads me back to Applebaum and a bunch of other doctors who are nowhere near my house. www.covd.org was more helpful for me.

[Anonymous]

I am a physician and work every day to provide my patients with the best and most evidence based evaluations and therapies. At age 6, my gifted son still could not read and was diagnosed with orthographic dyslexia. I was told he would never read or write well and that there was no way to remediate his problems. After an evaluation and series of vision therapy sessions, he is now reading years beyond grade level. There were no other variables that were changed other then starting the vision therapy and he somehow no longer has "dyslexia". I believe that the previous comments do a disservice to this issue and displays a lack of understanding of science. Just because there is no current evidence to support a treatment does not mean that the treatment does not work. It just means that the therapy has not yet been adequately studied to make that determination. Instead of the ophthalmologists and others dismissing this, they should partner with the developmental optometrists to study the efficacy of the intervention. The time and effort and money that our family spent was the most important of my life. I found my developmental optometrist by going to www.covd.org

[Anonymous]

DC came to Dr. Appelbaum's Bethesda office at the recommendation of our family eye doctor. Dr. Appelbaum noticed that Sara had convergence insufficiency. She has really struggled for the past few years with issues in reading, headaches, poor handwriting, attention span, copy-work, car sickness, fear of heights, and clumsiness. It really affected her self-esteem. In 1st grade, her doctor diagnosed her with ADHD, but medications have really not helped. Our eyes were so opened when we came to see Dr. Appelbaum for testing! After filling out the questionnaires and observing DC's testing, things started to make sense. We no longer believe that DC's problems have anything to do with ADHD, but that she needed vision therapy. Since being in therapy, we have noticed huge changes in DC. She is reading and comprehending above grade level, and is doing a lot more reading just for fun. Her handwriting and ability to copy have improved a lot. Her “clumsiness” has almost disappeared, and we now have a daughter who loves to cartwheel, flip, show us new dance moves, and play baseball! She no longer says “I can’t” without trying things first, including climbing stairs to go on rides at amusement parks. I think most importantly, my daughter"s self esteem has improved. DC sang a solo at church – something she never would have considered six months ago. We are so grateful to Dr. Appelbaum and his wonderful staff for all they have done for DC. They not only “did therapy” with her, they helped her believe in herself by encouraging her. The changes in her vision, and her self image, will last a lifetime. We are extremely thankful to our family eye doctor for pointing us in the right direction!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Has anyone checked out Dr. Wachs? I would really like to find a new eye doctor. DC has exotropia, an eye that turns out as well as some sensory/attention issues. We previously saw the doctor from this article, Dr. Applebaum, and he definitely falls in the snake oil salesman category. All he seems to care about is selling his product. He can hardly talk about anything else. I felt like when he looked at me he saw dollar signs (or a target on my forehead). I would STRONGLY encourage anyone thinking about going here to reconsider.

To start off with, you will never be able to get him on the phone. He is never in the office, always "at a lecture". If perchance you can catch him on a day he's working, you will have to wait hours to see him. Sometimes DC would have hours of testing, other times like 10 minutes worth. The little girls that work there seem like they are always lying about where he is or when he'll be able to see you.

On top of that, I know that the doctor couldn't pick my child out of a line up. We were one of the only non-White/Jewish families in the waiting room. I always felt like he spoke down to me and assumed that I wouldn't pay. I hope this was not because of our ethnicity but had an eerie feeling that it was. We quit going to this practice because I could tell that DC was becoming uncomfortable when he would have to see Dr. Applebaum at the many re-evals that were scheduled (as an attempt to squeeze more money out of us no doubt).

That said, I do feel that vision therapy was helping DC. He was concentrating better and having fewer meltdowns. We have never left a doctor before but it NEEDED to happen. I really want to pursue VT somewhere else but don't know where. We live in MoCo but would be willing to travel as far as necessary. PLEASE HELP!

Unfortunately it seems like Appelbaum is the only game in town as far as vision therapy. I was really hopeful about the idea of vision therapy but my DD did not mesh well with the Dr. present in the therapy room. She was fine with Dr. Appelbaum at the initial evaluation but I sensed a bit of discomfort when she worked with the Dr. in charge of the actual therapy sessions. There are always several assistants present but they seem to mostly deal with the smaller or more difficult attention-seeking patients and the Dr. is left to handle the stragglers. We stopped going because I felt a certain coldness from him. He always seemed as though he was coming off of a difficult day and his mind was elsewhere. I always felt as though he didn't recognize me or DD even though we were in his waiting room. Then, one day we arrived an hour early and he immediately approached me and informed me that we made a mistake with the time and seemed very put off by it. That was the last straw. It was hard enough to get DD to the grueling sessions to begin with and for her to be told that she was not wanted at that time really pushed me over the edge. We tried a few Saturday sessions (there is a younger, friendlier doc at those sessions) but once a week was just not enough to correct her vision issues. We desperately want to start therapy again but not at this office. If you find anything please let this PP know.

[Anonymous]

DD is my second child to go through a vision therapy program with Dr. Appelbaum. When DD started struggling in reading (after the phonics stage), my first thought was to get her vision tested. She was 20/20, but sure enough had a tracking problem that was holding her back in reading. After completing the program she is at grade level in reading and her confidence is way up! She has all the visual skills she needs now to be successful in school. Most of all, she used to hate to read and now enjoys reading. I don't understand the previous comments about Dr. Appelbaum's staff. I have always found the doctors and the staff to be very helpful, warm, and friendly. DD didn't really want to go to school, but she always looked forward to coming to the vision therapy sessions, because as she has said to me "everyone was so nice and it was fun."