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Visual Perceptual Disorder: What Is This And How Is It Treated? - Dr. Gong

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Dr. Gong describes visual perceptual issues and explains how this is treated.

Dr. Gong:
We have many patients in my practice here in Phoenix, Arizona that have many visual perceptual complaints and what visual perceptual issues are, can you gain meaning from what you look at?

This can affect how adults and children, how they read, how they learn, just how they gain meaning from what they look at.

Some of the symptoms of visual perceptual issues are, can you understand what you read? Can you remember what you just read? Can you stay on the line?

Do you get headaches after you read? Do you have blurred vision after you read? Can you not recognize the same word in the next sentence? There’s many different symptoms of visual perceptual issues.

How we help patients with visual perceptual impairments is first of all we’d like to diagnose exactly what the issue is.

We have tests available that adults and children can take so that we can find out what area is weak so that we can make that stronger. We work on those skills.

Vision is more than just seeing 20:20. It’s how the eyes work together as a team, how you change focus from near to far, how you accurately aim your eyes.

Can you sustain attention at near and far, can you follow a line of reading or do you skip around and re-read, things like that.

There’s so much more to vision than just 20:20 so half the battle is just diagnosing, doing the right testing to find out what a child or adult is doing, whether you are just using one eye or both eyes.

The more we find out about a patient the more we can work with it. We try to educate our patients.

We do very well in this practice here in Phoenix, Arizona because we really stress home therapy which is teaching you what to do at home and then also doing office therapy and doing it one-on-one.

There’s so many resources out there that are available but if we get down to treating it with not only eye exercises but we have lenses that you look through in prism which aligns the eyes a little bit better.

We have sophisticated equipment that can track how your eyes are working together and track your progress so that we can have that documented.

We have a lot of 3-D things that we can send home with patients as well as doing things here, but a lot of these things helps not only the patient know what their eyes are doing but in the future being able to correct it and keep it corrected for the rest of their life.

One story that we had, we had a child that was referred in by the teacher from a school that we work with often and the child could not remember what she read and she had a very poor what we call visual memory, can’t remember what she just saw.

And we worked with that and made some great strides. Also visual figure round, she couldn’t tell a central figure from the background. All the words above and below bothered here.

Once we worked with that she could read without having to cover up everything and it was a lot easier for her to take her AIMS testing and you know how important that is here in Arizona. We try to get our kids to do well in school and anything that we can do to help to make that easier for them.

About Dr. Aleta Gong, O.D., F.A.A.O., F.C.O.V.D.:
Dr. Aleta Gong, O.D., F.A.A.O., F.C.O.V.D., is a graduate of the University of California San Diego and the Southern California College of Optometry. She is a Board Certified Fellow of the American Academy of Optometry and of the College of Optometrists in Vision Development. She has had extensive training at several hospitals and has been trained in specialty contacts, ocular disease, and vision therapy.

She is an active member of the American Optometric Association, and is past president of the Arizona Optometric Association. She also has been one of two state directors for the Special Olympics Opening Eyes Program since 2001.

Presently, she is the state liaison for the nurse’s vision screening program for Arizona. She was a state board proctor for the Arizona licensing board from 1993 to 2001. Dr. Gong has been chosen to be a C.O.P.E. reviewer for national lectures. Dr. Gong also started the InfantSEE® program for Arizona.

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