Posted by Irene Newhouse

In Reply to: dislexia vs binocular deficiencies posted by Ali

It is true that there are things that can go wrong with your eyes that
are not correctable with glasses or surgery. It is also true these
conditions can affect your learning because they make looking at things
difficult.

For instance, our daughter has an eye movement disorder. She has great
trouble keeping her eyes in one place horizontally. Her optometrist,
who has training in pediatric optometry & a vision therapy certificate
from SUNY Albany [I think Albany, SUNY for sure] diagnosed this. She
said last year the problem was even worse than the eye strain a normal
person would feel when trying to read a book while sitting in the back of
a truck going over a road full of potholes.

This condition has made learning to read difficult for our daughter, but
it is not the same as dyslexia, which involves problems with the
processing of visual information, not problems with the way the eyes
work. [And although our daughter is not classically dyslexic in that she
reverses letters & numbers less than other children her age, she does
have some sort of processing problems, as yet undiagnosed, that give her
difficulty in decoding words phonetically].

Since her eyes didn't track together either, she had surgery last summer,
which resulted in a sharp improvement about 2 months later [that's how
long it took to learn not to see double after the surgery], but she still
needs exercises to work on her horizontal tracking, which is still deficient.

I am amblyopic myself. I learned to read with no problems...

Your child may have dyslexia, your child may have vision disorders, your
child may have both. Dyslexia will be unaffected by treatments aimed at
correcting vision disorders, and you should steer clear of practioners
who claim treating vision disorders 'cures' dyslexia. Note that our
daughter's pediatric optometrist has never come close to such a suggestion.

Best of luck!
Irene Newhouse

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