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[quote=Anonymous][quote]Vision therapy is a service being sold as opposed to a medical treatment. Before paying a lot of money for it consult a pediatric ophthalmologist.[/quote]

I vehemently disagree with this statement!  One of my biggest parenting "regrets" is I didn't understand earlier how limited an ophthalmologist exam is.  We had been dutifully taking our DD to a Washingtonian best type pediatric ophthalmologist from when she was an infant and we had strabismus concerns.  OT's had mentioned developmental optometry even when she was a toddler but it never rose to the top of the priority list.   In 2nd grade yet another OT eval noted possibility of concern with eye movement - nothing definitive just a "might want to look at".  I took her to the ophthalmologist who put it in writing that there was not a problem.  For whatever reason I still didn't feel right about it and made an appointment for developmental exam.  All the optometrists recommended by the OTs had waiting lists and were in traffic prone locations so I made an appointment with Dr Borsuk totally based on his location near I-270.  It was amazing - even from the other side of the room I could tell that my daughter's eyes were not moving in sync with each other when he asked her to move her eyes while spelling her name backwards (simple cognitive task).  I've since learned that the ophthalmologist only checks what they eyes themselves are able to do in "perfect" office conditions - even when parents specifically point out school problems.  In hindsight, it makes sense that her eyes might be impacted by the fine motor integration problems the OTs noted but we would not have found that out if I'd stuck with the pediatric ophthalmologist.

Vision therapy was a pain in the neck for me as it was 9 months of twice a week therapy but it was incredibly effective.  Unfortunately not all the therapy was covered by insurance but that is largely because we switched insurance half way through to one that offered better OT coverage. Given that we knew there was an end in sight for the vision therapy it made sense to switch for better OT coverage.  (n.b. OT has no end in sight because there are so many areas to work on - not because it isn't effective)[/quote]

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