Vision Therapy

[whiteduck]

All,

Anyone know if Vision Therapy or Behavioural Optometry can assist those of us with KC.
I get relatively good visual acuity with RGPs but never feel particularly confident with my vision.

I can see that it could at least help improve uncorrected vision... any real experiences?

All the best
Ian

[Andrew MacLean]

Dear Whiteduck

The problem with trying to improve the vision of people with KC using strategies like behavioural optometry is basically that KC is a progressive malformation of the cornea. This progressive malformation causes increasingly severe distortion of the image being formed on the retina at the back of the eye, and this in turn leads to the messages being transmitted to the occipital lobe of the brain being confused. Hence our poor eyesight.

I have no view on whether behavioural optometry can have any impact on the the sight of people with 'normal' corneas, but I am afraid that I can't see how it can improve the sight of those whose corneas have become 'abmormal' through KC.

I'd be interested to hear of any actual experiences.

Andrew

[rosemary johnson]

I've never heard of vision therapy, nor behavioural optometry.
Would be interested to know what they involve, how they (claimto) work, etc.
I think it is probably true that many of us with KC can make more sense of the world than the distorted pictures coming down our optics nerves would normally suggest possible - because our brains have adapted with great skill to making sense of what vision we do have, and learning coping strategies for getting about and doing our normal activities.
These may be tricks to make sense of distorted vision, or other work-arounds (for example, how many other people count all the steps at the stations they normally travel to, so they know there's one more and don't fall off the last one?)
I'm quite sure we must all put great amounts of brain-energy into this, and would have so much more energy to do the interesting things in life if we didn't have to work so hard to try and see the world.
Whether there are techniques one can learn - called vision therapy or anything else - that can help this, I don't know. It might be interesting to find out.
Because KC is progressive, I'm sure we cope so well because we have all got used to our increasingly distorted vision gradually, and cope so well because we have learned to deal with it stage by stage.
I'm quite convinced that if you took someone "off the Clapham omnibus" who'd always had good sight, and suddenly gave them the vision of someone with advanced KC, they wouldn't be able to cope at all!
Rosemry

[Hilary Johnson]

Is it anything like the Bates Method? I read a book about that once. The theory behind it is that the muscles that move the eye in its socket also contribute to focussing, and you can do exercises to train them to do the job better. I thought that was a very interesting idea, though I wasn't convinced there was evidence to back it up. It particularly claims to work for astigmatism. It then goes off into psychobabble about astigmatism being related to having a distored world view psychologically, which I was unconvinced by.

Hilary

[rosemary johnson]

Astigmatism being related to a distorted world view psychologically does indeed sound like psychobabble.
A distorted view of what the world should look like from being used to astigmatism, that's something else.
I've been so used to seeing all the multiple KC ghost images displaced horizontally that I guess I've got used to the verticals being clearer than the horizontals.
SO now I've got an (increasingly) astigmatic grafted eye, I find I'm holding the paper I'm reading (or focusing the binoculars) closer to the distance wher ethe verticals are sharo than where the horizontals are.
Cos the owrld looks more "normal" like that.
the brief post graft period when both were sharp at once (at about 3.5") was very surreal indeed.
I wonder how many people aren't getting as good correction as they could do, becuae they are so used to the world being sharper one wat than the other they don't know how to tell what's wrong or what it should be. Or waht "Better with first .... or second" really means.
If you see what I mean.....
Rosemary

[GarethB]

Don't think it would help with KC but perhaps developing the eye muscles post graft would help.

When I had my grafts 20 years ago, 'Magic eye' pictures were all the rage. At first glance they are a mass of colour, but focus beyond the surface of the image and you get a 3D picture. My surgeon gave me a boox of these and tested me on them at successive consultations. After a couple of years I no longer needed glasses. I had to work my eye to see things properly uncorrected but never got eye strain which he put down to the extra developed eye muscles form the pictures.

At that time, my only expectation post graft was to be able to see things with corrected vision, being able to bin the glasses was just an added bonus.