Has this ever happened to you? You’re walking through your hallway in a straight line, but somehow you veer into the wall or even bump into the door frame when you round the corner. Or maybe you pour yourself a cup of coffee, but miss the cup altogether. Perhaps you’ve even had to give up reading because the words or sentences “wobble” out of line.

You might be experiencing what’s known as an undetected vision problem. The problem comes with an assortment of fancy names, such as convergence insufficiency, binocularity problems, visual midline shift syndrome, traumatic brain injury, and impaired peripheral vision.

Whitehall Boca offers the only area-wide rehabilitation program to treat undetected vision problems, and it does so with one of the world’s most renowned neuro-optometrists, Dr. Larry Lampert. Think of him as the Dick Tracy of vision mysteries. He is one of only 511 optometrists certified worldwide in vision development and vision therapy by the College of Optometrists in Vision Development.

Dr. Lampert specializes in stroke and head injury cases, in which undetected vision problems can be particularly troublesome.

“In strokes, you have a lot of visual field loss,” explains Dr. Lampert. “Head injury and strokes you have a lot of binocular vision problems and usually an increase in exophoria, meaning that as the eyes turn in to read, there’s a natural position they want to be in, and that may not be perfectly aligned with the words on the page. The eyes may have drifted out, so that one eye is pointing a half inch from the other eye. You then have to use forces in your brain, eyes, nerves and muscles to converge to overcome that.”

Undetected vision problems occur more often than you might think, and they are known to contribute to serious falls and other injuries. However, they are very rarely detected in routine eye exams — and you can still have them even if you have 20/20 vision and your eye doctor tells you you’re fine.

“There’s more to vision than meets the eye chart,” says Dr. Lampert. “Basically, these problems are not detected on the eye chart or in prescribing glasses or doing glaucoma tests or looking for cataracts. The basic training is not there, so we can’t expect doctors to know what they don’t know. There’s a large area where there’s not been a lot of exposure yet.”

Dr. Lampert, originally from Philadelphia, has worked with players from the New York Yankees, Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians, Miami Dolphins, Japanese Baseball League, PGA and LPGA golfers, USTA tennis players and world-class international athletes during the 1996 Olympics.
 

“I can remember an LPGA golfer I worked with who had binocularity problems,” says Dr. Lampert. “He’d say, ‘I look at the hole, I look at the ball, I look back at the hole, and the hole just moved six inches.’ It was because of a binocularity problem that developed over time.”

When Dr. Lampert began working with Whitehall, he found that of all the patients he saw who had been admitted for falls, all but one had binocular vision impairments. Those occur when the eyes don’t work as a team. He said that recent studies have shown that more than 35 percent of the entire elderly population experience binocular vision problems, many of whom experience falls as a result.

After identifying Whitehall patients with undetected vision problems, Dr. Lampert works with lead Physical Therapist Robyn Budine and Occupational Therapist Julieth Sargent to develop techniques designed to help those patients learn skills to correct their problems. Neither identifying the problems nor treating them requires medication or causes pain.

“It’s a neat area,” says Dr. Lampert, who believes he was drawn to the field because he always enjoyed learning how things work. “As a kid I took motorcycle engines apart, fixed cars, rebuilt master cylinders, so I kind of have that ‘how do you fix it’ curiosity in me, which is part of why I like this field. It’s always interesting and always growing, and I’m always learning.”

Recognition and understanding of undetected vision problems is catching on, Dr. Lampert believes. He points to the U.S. Army, which in February 2011 introduced functional vision testing for returning soldiers with traumatic brain injury.

“The exposure is starting to come now,” Dr. Lampert says. Meanwhile, his advice for everyone? “Even if you feel like something’s wrong and you’ve been told by an eye doctor who’s well-meaning, but just doesn’t have the background, that nothing’s wrong, then seek another opinion from someone who knows more about functional vision rehabilitation.”

 

 

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Whitehall Boca Raton, 7300 Del Prado South, Boca Raton, FL 33433
Phone: (561) 392-3000; Fax: (561) 392-6031