Vision therapy or prism glasses?

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Hi there,

Anyone have experience with visual therapy or using prism glasses to improve visual perception and visual problems, positive or negative?

In Temple Grandin's presentation on youtube she does describe many characteristics of children who have visual perception problems and ways to reduce or eliminate these problems, one of her suggestions being to see a behavioral optometrist to do visual therapy or try prism glasses. She recommends a book by Melvin Kaplan.

I have not read it yet but I was thinking of ordering it.

DS does have alot of these sensory issues that optometrists would consider to be visual perception problems because they say he has problems with his "ambient" vision.

Knowing this is an alternative method, however I have heard that some people have had success with this so it's hard to leave alone.

Thanks!
Caroline

I wrote a bit about the book in another thread. I bought it to find out what he is doing and to do some tests and experiments on my own. One of his most important tests to find out whether there are problems with ambient vision is the Van Orden Star. I printed out the test sheet, bought two pairs of reading glasses that together have 5 dioptrics, put them on and positioned my head 20 cm in front of the sheet, which was attached to the wall. I took one pencil in each hand. The test consists of drawing lines to connect points on the test sheet. The pattern you draw tells you something about your ambient vision. From evaluating my pattern I found that prism lenses would probably not help me, so I did not go any further with this. I might some day order prism glasses to try them out anyway, though.

Kaplan writes a lot about his success stories, but I find his explanations about the scientific background unconvincing. However, I don't think there is much harm to be done in trying it out the therapy or at least doing the tests. Even if you choose not to, I think you will find the book interesting.

I got Melvin Kaplin's book, "Seeing Through New Eyes", from my local library. It was an interesting read, but I don't know enough about this kind of thing to make any judgement on it. He does relate a number of success stories though, and it may well be worth a try. I know someone from another autism forum who was a patient of his before his involvement in autism and she thought quite highly of him.

My son has now got coloured lenses, green, which he says have improved his sense of smell, and which have meant that he can now climb on high playground equipment and slide down chutes where previously he would only get so far and then have to climb, rather than slide down. My son wore clear lenses before and the glasses were always being taken off, chewed and lost, whereas with the green lenses he tends to wear them more than he did before.

I was put onto the coloured lenses by my local Autism Resource Centre. A couple of women there got them. One found that the coloured lenses solved her problems with depth perception and the other woman, who always had problems with facial recognition, can now see whole faces, whereas before she could only focus on one facial feature at a time, and faces seemed distorted.