User talk:Cmccrodan

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There's an interesting and difficult problem for the Vision therapy page. The AAPOS has an educational document about vision therapy. This page is pretty weak. Here's a quote:

“Orthoptic vision therapy” so called by optometrists are a series of exercises usually weekly over several months performed in the optometric office.

I was a professor of Optometry for 10 years and I never once heard the term "orthoptic vision therapy." It's as though the AAPOS is saying that any vision therapy treatment for which there is evidence is ophthalmology, and the rest is endorsed by the profession of optometry.

In fact, the effort to do the research that demonstrated efficacy of treatment for convergence insufficiency came from optometrists (Scheiman, Kulp, Cotter, etc), not from ophthalmologists, much less the AAPOS. CI was treated for decades before it had good formal demonstrations of efficacy, both by orthoptists and by vision therapists.

Optometrists do have a problem, I grant. There is no Board Certification process for vision therapy, so quacks can call themselves vision therapists. But this nuance is missing from both the AAPOS page and the Vision Therapy article. And it is certainly correct to say we need additional research to determine efficacy of VT treatments. Some of them will be proven effective and some will not.