4 Reasons You Should Try Vision Therapy BEFORE Strabismus Surgery

Hi, my name is Melissa Daniels and I have strabismus

Strabismus is when your eyes don't point in the same direction, like this

I have been working for the last four years on getting my eyes to not only look straight

but also to work together. And that has involved a lot of different things

Today, I want to discuss two different things, surgery and vision therapy

and I want to give you four reasons that I recommend trying vision therapy before going

for the surgery. I have tried both surgery and vision therapy, so that is where I'm coming from

I have a lot of free resources and other resources that you can use to help you decide

what might be better for you, vision therapy or surgery. If you want me to help you find vision

therapy, all of that information can be found at learn.strabismissolutions.com. And there's so much

out there. So a lot of people think that if you have strabismus, it's kind of hopeless

You just need to know there are so many options. So let's get into my four reasons why I believe

you should always try vision therapy before going for the surgery. First is probably pretty obvious

what if the vision therapy works and you don't end up needing to have the surgery at all

My husband's a physical therapist and the number of times that he's had patients that

have been recommended for surgery and then they come into physical therapy and they actually fix

the problem and don't end up needing surgery at all. So many times that is what happens

So avoiding surgery is a huge deal. I mean just the risks of undergoing anesthesia especially for

for little kids, the recovery, the redness of your eyes, scar tissue, nerve damage, your eyelid

Like there's just so many things that are risks with surgery and it just not fun right Like it uncomfortable So if you can avoid that by doing the therapy first it definitely ideal so just like you would do physical therapy before having a knee surgery

you should do eye therapy before having an eye surgery because maybe it'll work

the second reason i think you should do vision therapy first is that there are certain risks

with surgery um and i kind of talked about that already but some specific risks are that

if your eyes are made straight, your surgeon does a great job, put your eyes in a straight position

but your brain isn't on board with that, your brain can do a lot of crazy stuff to get rid of

the double vision that will make vision therapy more complicated down the road. For example

when I had my surgeries when I was little, my eyes were really straight, but I didn't want the

double vision. My brain was like no double vision. And so it actually moved on my eyes up. So instead

was having a horizontal deviation I then had a vertical and a horizontal deviation which is makes

vision therapy a lot more complicated just treating a horizontal is a lot easier than a vertical

and there's also something called cyclotorsion and that's when it's not up or up and down or

side to side but it's twisted and that is nearly impossible to fix you can't get prisms that are

gonna not impossible to fix but like with vision therapy it makes it so much more challenging

because you can't fix that with prisms. It just makes it very, very complicated

Is it possible? Yes, but it complicates things a lot. And so to avoid those kinds of problems

definitely going with the vision therapy first can avoid that. And that takes us into my reason number three

that I would do vision therapy first. And that's that the success rates

will increase drastically if stereopsis is present. And what I mean by that is if your brain knows

how to use your eyes together, then this is what happened for me. I my eyes were like this before I had surgery I through vision therapy I learned how to make my eyes straight I could bring that eye in I could see and when I brought my eyes straight

I could see with depth. Now it wasn't perfect stereo, wasn't perfect depth perception

but I had some stereo there. So that when the surgeon made my eyes completely straight

so I didn't have to force it straight, it was okay staying there

because it knew what to do with those images. Now I still had some hypertropia from clear from childhood

but my brain didn't do anything too crazy because it was like, oh, now I can see with better stereo

And it's like motivating for my brain to keep my eyes straight

because my brain can use them together. So that's why vision therapy beforehand can be so powerful

because if you can teach your brain using prisms and different things, how to use your eyes together

and let's say that your angle is so high, it's just not, you're not getting out of the way

with vision therapy, then you can have the surgery and help get those eyes closer to being straight

and your brain won't reject that position, hopefully, right? All of this is like hopefully

it's increasing success rates, right? Instead of having a 65% success rate with surgery

it's gonna be more like an 85% success rate, which is a huge difference

Are there still people who aren't, it's not going to work for it. Yes, it's strabismus, right? It's just the worst, but we will overcome

Okay. And then the last reason that I would say to try vision therapy before surgery is that if you

ask any optometrist who practices vision therapy, they've seen so many different strabismus patients

and a lot of them have had surgery prior and a lot of them haven't had surgery prior, right

They've got both cases. And what you hear from every single one across the board

is that the vision therapy is much easier for those who haven had surgery yet There no scar tissue buildup There no weird stuff happening with the nerves and the muscles aren you know they just it like a little bit more of a clean slate

to start with. It's still possible after surgery, but they just all say it's easier before. If you

can get a patient before they've had any surgery, success rates are a lot higher for vision therapy

so all of that being said I think you can see that it's worth a try there's not a lot of risks

with vision therapy right if you do it on your own yes you can risk getting terrible double vision

and all sorts of crazy stuff but if you're doing it with a vision therapy office they are going to

carefully go in an order that will help you you're not going to get those negative side effects like

permanent double vision and all the things that people will scare you with. They're going to do things in a different order that's going to get rid of that part of the risk

So it's very, it's risk-free. It is expensive. And that's one thing that a lot of people say is

well, my insurance covers surgery and it doesn't cover vision therapy. So that makes it obvious

And I get that. I totally understand. But if you have the means, I highly recommend even just going

in for a consultation with a vision therapy office, you will be able to learn so much about

your eyes and how they're working and get a better feel for what your success rates might look like

for surgery. It's not going to do any harm just to go in for that consultation. It opened my eyes

completely to a whole world I hadn't been aware of. So give it a try. Let me know how it goes in

the comments. If you want help finding a vision therapy office, you can fill out a form if you go

to strabismusolutions.com slash findvt or if you go to that website I mentioned earlier learn.strabismus

solutions.com and scroll down there is a link there as well so let's get you set up start with

the the least risky option and then proceed from there you got this