SENSORY MOTOR EXAM
Basis Visual Skills

During the exam, the doctor will determine how clearly patients are seeing, how well their eyes focus, how their eyes team and work together, how their eyes track, the quality of their depth perception, and how their visual information is gathered and processed.

Who Needs this Exam?
This type of exam is recommended when patients are experiencing eye discomfort, headaches, reading and/or learning problems that may be linked to vision, and patients with strabismus (eye turn) or lazy eye (one eye does not see as well despite of any diseases). This exam is also recommended when a child or teen is not doing well in school or an adult is experiencing vision difficulty following a problem like a stroke or other accidents/health conditions. Many people are surprised to learn that problems with vision can affect so many daily activities. This can be particularly troublesome for children in school, adults whose job requires a significant amount of near work, athletes whose good performance depends upon the quality of their vision and those who have experienced a brain injury.

Duration of the exam and Referrals
The exam normally takes one hour. We often see patients referred to us by other optometrists, occupational therapists, teachers, former patients and parents, psychologists and other professionals. However, you do not need a referral to make an appointment here.

Prescribing Glasses
We often prescribe glasses specifically for near point activities such as for reading, writing, computer use, and indoor tasks. Many people are not wearing the correct prescription for near, they often wear a distance prescription for long hours of near work, which can result in eye pains, headaches, body aches, increase in nearsightedness and astigmatism just to name a few.

Lens Therapy Program
This is a program unique to our office that allows us to follow our patients throughout the year after we have prescribed a pair of glasses. Patients that we feel might have a prescription change during the year is put under this program. Under this program, patients will return to the office every few months for follow up visits. There is no active therapy involved in this program with our therapists. All follow up visits or any prescription changes needed during the year will be fully covered.

Vision Therapy Program
The techniques learned during the sessions are practiced at home during the week. The activities are done in a spacious room where more than one patient/therapist is in there at the same time. We can accomodate special circumstances where patients need to be in an individual room with one therapist only. Patients will recieve progress evaluations with the doctor every 2-3 months. At these visits, patients and therapists will go over the patient's progress, any questions and concerns, and decide on what needs to be done to further the improvement of the patient. We use very simple tools such as paper, pencil, chalkboard, trampolines, reading charts, penlight, and flashlights to make the environment as natural as possible. By doing this, patients can easily translate what they have learned in the therapy room into the real world. We recommend patients come to the therapy sessions with a parent, guardian, sibling, or friend who will be doing the therapy with the patient at home. If you live far away, we can make special arrangements, please discuss this with our doctors.

Teaching Institute
Our office is celebrating its 30 years in practice. We regularly hosts optometrists from all over the world to share with them our work and philosophies. Students from Southern College of Optometry and Pacific University College of Optometry spend time during their last year of school at our office learning patient care and vision therapy. Interns work with our patients in and out of the therapy room under supervision. We welcome other health care professionals such as physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, and teachers to observe at our office. We want to share our knowledge so that more and more patients can benefit from vision therapy and lead a more satisfactory life.