VISUAL INTEGRATION THERAPY

Yes. Visual integration therapy is extremely safe. Different eye movements are controlled by different parts of the brain, and visual integration therapy is designed to challenge these parts of the brain directly. When these parts of the brain start to fatigue, we can usually see a breakdown in your eye movements before the involved brain regions become fatigued to the point where they begin to provoke any symptoms. Your therapist will be carefully observing your eye movements for signs of fatigue during every exercise, and will always stop your exercises at the appropriate moment.

The visual integration exercises you will perform are different in every case. Your exercises will be prescribed based on the data from your neurodiagnostic testing, and will be unique to your specific presentation. They usually involve some form of gaze stabilization exercise, which involves fixating your eyes on a specific target or series of targets as you move your head at a prescribed speed. They may involve pursuing targets moving on a screen while the visual background is stationary or moving. They may involve performing saccades to targets in specific directions, or anti-saccades in the opposite direction of targets as they appear. They may involve vergence exercises where you perform an eye movement as you are translated to or away from a target. They may involve optokinetic stimulation, a specific form of ocular following reflex where you look at stripes or other targets moving in particular directions. 

As these are visual integration exercises, your specific tasks often involve integrating more than one type of eye movement at the same time. Often the key to helping your brain learn to properly perform an eye movement is coupling it with another type of movement. The patterns of eye movement coupling that help facilitate your recovery will be determined based on your neurodiagnostic testing data, and we analyze your data with the goal of revealing these coupling patterns. 

As you begin to recover your function and improve at your exercises, we progress by integrating your exercises with other types of stimulation. We will usually combine your eye exercises with vestibular challenges, photobiomodulation, targeted electrical neuromodulation, and specific physical exercises as you progress through your NeuroRescue Program.

To use traumatic brain injury as an example, TBI survivors often seek vision therapy to help them address problems with visual focus, double vision, light sensitivity, headaches and fatigue during reading. This is often very helpful. However, the visual symptoms that develop from traumatic brain injuries are very commonly not problems with the eyes themselves. They are instead the result of neurological injuries, and need to be treated as such to be properly and thoroughly addressed. 

Some of the most common problems seen in brain injuries involve the ability to move the eyes quickly, smoothly, accurately, and in unison. Even more fundamentally, one of the most basic functions that is commonly damaged is the ability to hold the eyes still. These problems are not based on damage to the eyes. They are problems with the neurological systems and pathways that move the eyes. 

A failure to activate a particular eye muscle properly during a movement can be a problem with the muscle itself, a problem with the nerve driving the muscle, or more commonly, a problem with one or more of the many different neurological reflexes that activate the nerve. These can involve inputs from different parts of the inner ear, several different parts of the brainstem, the frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, and many other parts of the brain. All of these different regions and reflexes will create different versions of the same problem, and all of them need to be rehabilitated differently for maximum effect. 

The comprehensive neurological examination and neurodiagnostics involved in the NeuroRescue Program allow us to determine exactly which parts of the system need to be rehabilitated, both prior to and during eye movement therapy. This allows us to have much faster gains through therapy, and resolve issues that do not respond well or fully to traditional vision therapy. 

In cases where vision therapy remains necessary, we refer to and work with the best vision therapy professionals in our community to combine our therapies for maximum benefit. We find that traditional vision therapy progresses much faster after completing your NeuroRescue Program.

No. Not at all.