If Vision Therapy were an alternative treatment, what exactly is it an alternative to?
Nothing annoys me more than someone calling developmental or behavioral optometry ‘alternative medicine’. What exactly is it an alternative to? Cutting into peoples eye muscles leaving them with an even greater challeng e to overcome? Too often poor eye control is blamed on the muscles surrounding the eyes and surgery is advised to alter the length of the muscles. The cause of strabismus however is at the cortical level (in the brain) and cutting the eye muscles is rarely of benefit other than in rare cases of paralysis or partial paralysis of muscles. In too many cases surgery leaves the patient even further from a cure because of the extra physical trauma that has to be overcome adding to the initial brain problem. Sometimes surgery can help someone to come closer to eye alignment but Optometric Vision Therapy, also called visual rehabilitation, is the ONLY way to really cure strabismus at the cortical level and acquire healthy stereo vision through practice. Whether you had surgery or not, visual rehabilitation is necessary to effectively treat binocular vision problems. As I posted earlier: strabismus is less of a problem to be cured, than to be controlled.
Spreading information that indicates otherwise is unethical and nothing short of assault. If someone claims something of this sort out of ignorance, it’s negligence. If they know better and still don’t act accordingly, it’s criminal negligence and they don’t deserve to call themselves doctors.