First off let me say: I do not understand the relevance of this headline to the article it accompanies, and don’t particularly appreciate its implications or sentiment.
But onto the meat of the piece, which is actually about Behavioral Optometry, a small branch of medicine that attempts to treat common childhood learning issues such as ADHD, dyslexia, and autism through visual therapy. These doctors believe that a lot of kids are misdiagnosed, and their issues with reading and communicating actually boil down to eye problems, trouble with visual tracking, and other non-psychological optics issues.
There’s a lot going on in this article. Lots of hand-wringing about over-medicated kids, and the converse hand-wringing from parents who don’t want their kids diagnosed with a learning disability. There’s the medical community’s typical knee-jerk response to malign nontraditional forms of treatment, and there’s an actual dearth of scientific evidence for the efficacy of these treatments.
As long as the behavioral optometrists are working from anecdotes, allow me to throw in a few of my own:
- My personal academic achievement improved significantly when I finally got glasses, as did my hand-eye coordination and frequent headaches.
- Dotcom was wearing glasses with the lenses reversed, leaving the wrong prescription in each eye, for like two years. She got new specs recently and I feel like she’s a different person, and certainly less sickly.
- I have been reading a lot about EMDR treatment (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) as a tool for psychotherapy. In a nutshell, the doctor uses stereo headphones or flashing lights or small hand-held vibrators to rapidly, repeatedly stimulate one eye and the associated brain hemisphere and then the other. Nobody seems to be able to offer a good explanation for why it speeds up the psychoanalysis process of memory recall and catharsis so well, but according to nearly all its practitioners, it does. EMDR is similarly snubbed by the mainstream medical community.
What I’m getting at, basically, is that it doesn’t seem like rocket science that vision issues would be intimately tied to psychological issues. Furthermore, the article seems to completely ignore the possibility that there’s a feedback loop between visual and psychological issues: our brains are extremely plastic, so it needn’t be mutually exclusive to say “Kids with learning disabilities have characteristic patterns on neurological scans” and “Behavioral therapy can help reprogram troubled kids.” The body/brain divide paradigm perpetuated by this article is silly, and ignores a whole pile of research and common sense what says chosen behaviors and thought patterns have the potential to change brain chemistry.
And then there’s this quote, which is a half-hearted nod to something significant and maybe similar to what I’m talking about:
Some doctors suspect that what really lies behind parent and optometrists’ reports of vision therapy’s success is something called the Hawthorne effect — the fact that many problems, and mental-health problems in particular, tend to get better when they receive intensive positive attention of pretty much any kind. Working with a warm and caring specialist, getting extra parental attention, concentrating on skills that can be improved (even if it’s just a matter of performing better on repetitive tests) is self-reinforcing. Under these conditions, you can certainly see great “vision” results in kids who, physicians say, didn’t have anything wrong with their eyes in the first place.
Treating these kids with vision therapy can hardly hurt, bank accounts notwithstanding. And until we can remove the stigma from psychological disorders, one could argue that treating them for a physically-rooted ailment is less harmful to their self-image than the alternative. But really, talking about these treatments as if they exist in separate worlds makes no sense. It’s one kid, with one brain and one body and one challenge to conquer.
Finally, I would like to assert that articles like this prove that it is utter bullshit that vision insurance is a separate entity from health insurance. Same with dental. I know, I know, sour grapes, Dinah. But it’s all my body and I want to be able to take care of it.
