This is an essay written by Ben Westerman, a graduate of The Vision Therapy Center. Read this and you’ll really understand what it’s like to have a functional vision problem. Please, share this with your friends.  Congratulations to Ben on an amazing achievement!

We’ve written quite a bit about amblyopia, or lazy eye, over the last several years. In the course of blogging repeatedly on the topic, we’ve created some exceptional posts that have generated a lot of traffic. Here are our top 10 posts in terms of website views and social media shares.

Every parent fears a report card filled with bad grades.  It’s why we push our kids to study harder, work longer, and put in a ton of effort to improve their scores. So why don’t we reciprocate and make sure functional vision problems aren’t the source of bad grades?

Meet Nicholas. In second grade, he was spending 2-3 hours on homework.  But surprisingly enough to his mother, it wasn’t a case of too much homework - it was convergence insufficiency.  In this success story video, she describes her son’s incredible turnaround as a result of vision therapy.  

Besides the cosmetic appearance, there are a number of other reasons why parents become stressed about strabismus. Let’s take a closer look the typical short-term and long-term issues involving strabismus, as well as how you can help your child overcome the problem.

Sometimes I think we've become immune to statistics. Every day we’re bombarded with so many stats that I think we tend to gloss over them.  That’s how I felt about the statistic “12 percent of fireworks-related injuries involve the eyes.”

The Vision Therapy Center’s recent volunteer efforts at another Wisconsin Special Olympics games highlights the importance of detecting vision problems among people with special needs.  Here are five facts about how this population is affected by functional vision problems.

When we redesigned our website, we decided to devote the home page to describing “functional vision problems.” We think the addition of the word “functional” can help people distinguish the types of vision problems that exist, and open the door to understanding vision therapy.

We’ve kept a close eye on the use of computer games to help treat amblyopia, or lazy eye, as it’s commonly called.  A company that builds these games recently went bankrupt. The reason appears to be tied less to a poor business model and more to a lack of understanding the short and long-term outcomes of amblyopia treatment.