Visual therapy for ADHD ???

[Anonymous]

Has anyone heard of visual therapy for ADHD? Pediatrician recommended Dr Robert Jacobs (optometrist and vision therapy) for alternative to meds for ADHD son. Any thoughts?

[Anonymous]

If you search this forum, you will see a lot of disdain for visual therapy.

For ADHD, I would try behavioral therapy and/or OT for behavioral regulation.

[Anonymous]

I don't think there are any studies demonstrating the efficacy of VT for ADHD. There is one proven effective use of VT, but it's not for ADHD. If there is evidence to the contrary, hopefully someone will point us to it. I'd much rather my DD do VT than take meds but I think it would be. Waste of time

[Anonymous]

Run, don't walk away from anyone offering this to you. Its a HUGE waste of money.

[Anonymous]

OP here. Thanks for responses.

[Anonymous]

Vision therapy can be very useful for certain vision problems. There are some claims that some children who have been diagnosed with ADHD actually have vision problems and once those problems are remediated, the appearance of ADHD goes away, but I am unaware of any studies backing up those claims. There are also claims that some children with dyslexia really just need vision therapy to sort them out. It's unfortunate because it makes vision therapy seem very "woo" when there are actually some problems it can legitimately address.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Vision therapy can be very useful for certain vision problems. There are some claims that some children who have been diagnosed with ADHD actually have vision problems and once those problems are remediated, the appearance of ADHD goes away, but I am unaware of any studies backing up those claims. There are also claims that some children with dyslexia really just need vision therapy to sort them out. It's unfortunate because it makes vision therapy seem very "woo" when there are actually some problems it can legitimately address.

Hmmmm. This makes a certain amount of sense. My DC doesn't wear glasses and no indication of vision problems. Could I be missing something? Do these "vision" docs go a little deeper?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Vision therapy can be very useful for certain vision problems. There are some claims that some children who have been diagnosed with ADHD actually have vision problems and once those problems are remediated, the appearance of ADHD goes away, but I am unaware of any studies backing up those claims. There are also claims that some children with dyslexia really just need vision therapy to sort them out. It's unfortunate because it makes vision therapy seem very "woo" when there are actually some problems it can legitimately address.

Hmmmm. This makes a certain amount of sense. My DC doesn't wear glasses and no indication of vision problems. Could I be missing something? Do these "vision" docs go a little deeper?

You could be missing something, but if your child has no indication of vision problems I'd think things were fine. My child (with convergence problems - one of the issues that is successfully addressed by vision therapy) complained of the letters/words on the pages of her books jumping around. She was assessed and her eyes didn't track properly, so as she got tired her eyes would sort of wander and that would cause the jumping. Vision therapy was essentially intensive training for her brain and the muscles of her eyes to teach them to track together. In addition to fixing her convergence problem, her behavior improved at school because she was better able to access the information in the manner it was being presented (text), and her academic performance improved likewise. Her symptoms - poor handwriting, terrible spelling, struggling reading - were similar to symptoms of dyslexia. This is why careful evaluation is important. I suspect it's also why you get people suggesting vision therapy for ADHD and dyslexia, because there are some overlap of symptoms that different problems cause.

[Anonymous]

There is disdain for vision therapy here, but not from us. We did it and it was hugely helpful.

Two points. One is that vision and eyesight are not the same. Our child had eyes that focused well but which weren't working together. It perplexed us for quite a while. Scored well on eye charts but put DC in various environments and they couldn't find their way to the exit or pick us out of a crowd. The eyes just weren't coordinating.

Second point: in our case what looked like attention problems were actually vision problems. Our child didn't know how to focus or what to focus on, so when the gymnastics teacher was demonstrating a skill DC would wander off to look at a gadget left lying on a nearby table. To adult observation it appeared DC couldn't hold attention. It turned out that DC's attentional issues were just fine but that they couldn't figure out what to focus on, especially anything involving any distance or depth perception.

Without VT I'm betting our child might have been diagnosed with ADHD. Now our child is regarded as having exceptionally good focus, attention and self-discipline.

[Anonymous]

I also looked down on VT, but after my dyslexic DC complained about not being able to read books without pictures, regardless of reading level, and constantly skipped lines when reading, I figured I'd give it a try. I really wanted to make sure I was covering all the bases. And it really helped. I think so much of ALL the "therapies'" efficacies are just regular old growth and development, but this was such a short period of time that we did VT that I can't chalk it up to just normal progression. I would go to someone highly recommended; we have a local guy who is evidently no good, but I found someone a bit further away and he was amazing with DC.

[Anonymous]

How old were your children who had success with VT? Did you go into the office or use at home computer program?

[Anonymous]

9 yo DS. Home program. Saw huge positive changes, but we had specific concerns and something to measure it by.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:9 yo DS. Home program. Saw huge positive changes, but we had specific concerns and something to measure it by.

my daughter has visual processing issues or visual motor coordination issues what home program did you use?

[Anonymous]

It was recommended for my DS 10 and I thought it might work, but my pediatrician said there is no evidence of it working. When we started my DS on ADHD meds, all the "visual" things went away...... hard to know exactly what that means except these things are all interrelated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How old were your children who had success with VT? Did you go into the office or use at home computer program?

10 y.o. daughter, in office therapy 2x/week.

Vision Therapy is hard work and often boring. My child was not pleased to be doing it and was resistant to homework. Doing it in the office meant it wasn't a fight with me and doing it twice a week meant we didn't need to make her do V.T. homework which was beneficial. There were other kids to play games with in the office, in between the one-on-one she got from the therapist. It was more expensive than an in-home program or a 1x/week + homework option, but I believe it worked best for us.

Research tends to suggest that in office therapy is more effective than in-home programs. I am sure some of that is due to situations like ours, where my daughter was more compliant with the therapist than she would be with me.