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Vertical Prism Rotations: Vision Therapy Exercise for Strabismus or Lazy Eye
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Jan 3, 2023
Mastering Peripheral: https://learn.strabismussolutions.com Find Vision Therapy https://strabismussolutions.com/findvt/ In this series on Strabismus to Stereopsis I am sharing my favorite vision therapy exercises that have made an impact on my success in vision therapy. This specific exercise helped with my DVD (slight vertical strabismus). While it isn't super noticeable to the naked eye, it causes major issues for my visual system. Be sure to suggest any that might work well for you to your optometrist to see if it could be a good fit for your diagnosis.
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0:00
Hi, my name is Melissa Daniels and I have stravismus and for the last several years I have been working on making my eyes become straight and teaching my brain to use my eyes together so that I can have stereopsis or 3D vision or depth perception or whatever you want to call it
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And part of this process has been doing a lot of vision therapy and different eye exercises
0:30
and this whole series of videos is all about some of the more complicated exercises that i've done
0:35
in vision therapy so that you can kind of get a feel for what vision therapy has to offer it's so
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much more than patching and the brock string there is a lot of science that goes into it and it is
0:47
needed to help fix a severe case of strabismus right you're not going to fix that on your own
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with just patching and a brock string, I promise you. Then that's my disclaimer
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Definitely work with an optometrist that can help you get a whole plan
1:04
that will help you get your eyes straight working together without causing double vision and other issues, right
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This is not intended for some like at-home therapy session. This is just to give people an idea
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of what vision therapy can be like and some of the exercises that I've done
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So part of my problem is that when I was born, I had a severe esotropia of like 55 diopters
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right? And I went really, really far in. And so I had multiple surgeries as a little kid
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And one of the outcomes of that surgery was something called dissociated vertical, now
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I can't remember what it's called. DVD is the abbreviation. It means that my eyes weren't up and down straight anymore, right
1:49
They were more straight horizontally, but vertically, there's just a little tiny bit
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And throughout different surgeries and vision therapy, I still have that slight vertical
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difference in my eyes. And if you, you know, want to pause and like zoom in and look at my eyes, you'll see that
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there is a vertical difference. And this makes getting my eyes to have perfect stereopsis really challenging
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And so working on that vertical strabismus has been something that we've been doing in the office
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for the last few months. Trying to get that vertical, even though it only three diopters it actually can really cause a lot of issues And so even though I have great I would say big stereo where I have good depth perception
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and I can see so much more depth than I could before, I still don't have that like central
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perfect stereo, stereopsis. So when I'm doing those stereo acuity tests, I don't do awesome on those
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Okay. So this is an exercise that I've been doing with my vision therapist
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and what you do is you have these vertical targets that you put up and I
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will put that on the screen so you can see it. This exercise is meant to be done
3:04
with red and green glasses or red and blue glasses, whichever. So the idea is
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that both eyes can see the white squares, one eye can see the purple square, and
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one eye can see the green squares. So if both of your eyes are working you should
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see a line of six squares in a row, right? And if you're suppressing some of those
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will disappear depending on which eye you're suppressing. Now, this is not an exercise I'm
3:30
necessarily doing for suppression. It's more about, like I was saying before, the vertical. And so
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for me, because one of my eyes goes up higher than the other, instead of having this perfect line
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wow, my hands are not equal. There we go. The perfect line of boxes, I actually see something
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more like this where one of the box that or two of the boxes are actually higher than the rest
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and that is because my eyes are not vertically aligned and so what we do is I look at those
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targets I do different really cool tricks with my peripheral I am obsessed with peripheral because
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it changes everything make sure to check out my mastering peripheral course at learn.strabismus
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solutions.com as a side note but anyways I use my peripheral techniques that I teach in that class
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open up my vision. I do different things, whatever I'm doing, the skills that I've learned in vision
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therapy to try to get those level. Now, what we do is once I was able to start getting them level
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with, you know, the red and green glasses, I was able to see all six and they were level
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we started adding in prism. So this is a prism, but it's really slight. It's only a one
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So it's slightly smaller up here and slightly bigger down here. Usually prism you you see it's a little bit more
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drastic. I'll show you one that's kind of more dramatic. You can see these
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It hard to see it in the camera Oh that because I pointing the wrong way Okay Wow I just killing it today See how there like a huge slant So that a prism It basically bends the light one way or the other
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And so what I do is, while I'm looking at these vertical targets, I put this in front of my eye
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and when I'm pointing it this way, this kind of helps a little bit. And then I slowly turn the prism like this
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And as I do that, it actually makes it a little bit easier, right
5:29
to keep them vertically aligned. So I have it in here, this one helps align my eyes
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helps me align my eyes, then I slowly move it down. And I think I said it wrong
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I said you come in here and then move up. You actually come in here first so that you're helping your brain align
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Then you slowly turn it like so until the one is going the other direction
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and you don't have that vertical help anymore, right? You can also start here and go up or turn it the other direction
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Anyway, so you're doing all these different things to make it more difficult to keep that vertical alignment
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This is one that I, the first time I did it, I did it for about three minutes and I was physically, I didn't throw up, but I was down for like the day
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I feel like even the next day I was just kind of a mess. I couldn't, like my brain was just like thrown for a loop
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And I was trying to explain to my husband why I felt so horrible
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And I was like, I have this exercise and I didn't, I wasn't holding the prism
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I literally did exactly what I'm doing now. I said, you put it up at your eye and then you turn it down
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And as I did this with my hand, without the prism, I started dry heat. Like it was giving me such like this physical response
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and every time that happens in my vision therapy it's happened over the years I know it's a good
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exercise I know that it's doing something to my brain so even though I feel horrible I know that
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something good is happening within my brain and so just this simple turning and trying to keep it
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aligned the next level of this is that you jump it in and then jump it out and so it's like aligned
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and then you move it and then it's not aligned and then you reline. And then you put it in and then it's unaligned
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and you have to, you're constantly adjusting for that prism and turning it up the other direction
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so that it's more difficult and then less difficult. So you doing all these different variations trying to teach your brain to be a little bit more flexible trying to teach your brain to automatically adjust the eyes so that they
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vertically aligned. This is really good, especially when it's such a small angle
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I will say that after doing this for a couple, probably a month, my optometrist noticed a huge
7:56
change in the alignment of my eyes. Now, I haven't been doing it for a while. I've kind of taken a
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break for about a month and I can feel the difference that my vertical alignment isn't as
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good as it was. So I'm starting this one up against, like get my eyes back to being vertically aligned
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This is a fantastic exercise. So if you are in vision therapy and you have a vertical misalignment
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maybe similar to me, you have the DVD where you had surgeries and your brain adjusted vertically
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to try to keep that double vision at bay. This would be one that you could suggest to your
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optometrist. You know, you can't do it at home because you don't have the prism unless your
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optometrist loans it to you. But definitely give it a try. My word of advice is start with like one
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minute at a time and then maybe slowly build up to five minutes. It can be really challenging
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Another thing that is a tip to help if it's really hard, find a distance where you can do it. So for
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me, I had to start like 12 inches away from my monitor. And now that I can do that, I'm working
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on backing up. So, you know, starting up close or further back, find that zone where you're able to
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do it and then try to extend that. Another is just you've got to learn how to use peripheral vision
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When you engage your peripheral vision, that is giving your brain the cue to use both eyes
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together and in a safe place, right? Peripheral is a safe place to use both eyes together. So
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engaging your peripheral and then that kind of slowly works in towards your central and so
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learning to use peripheral is so important so do all those annoying and somewhat boring peripheral
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exercises that your optometrist is giving you or do my mastering peripheral course where you can
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like learn some like you know I don't know what what what level they are mastery level peripheral
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techniques they will make all the difference in your therapy I'm promising
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you so good luck with this let me know if you try it and if it also makes you
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want to die and throw up and also kind of excited that maybe your brain is
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changing because they kind of go together we'll see you in the next video
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