The Essential Playbook How to Maximize Outcomes in Optometric Vision Therapy

This resource gives optometric teams ways to communicate with patients of all ages, including their parents, family, spouses, educators, advocates, and referral sources. The first chapter arranges conditions to create awareness of the complexity and significance of the visual process through demonstrations. The second chapter helps doctors and their teams communicate so that patients and families understand throughout the visual examination what the tests reveal. The Essential Playbook highlights how to weave a patient’s concerns expressed in the symptom checklist and questionnaire with specific tests to show the significance and validate visual challenges. After the assessment and recommendations, goals for the patient, the family, and the doctor are created as hope for what is possible has been sparked. With an understanding of the condition, the patients’ and families’ questions change from if the person needs vision therapy to when can we get started and why haven’t I heard of this before? The goal of the demonstrations is for all involved to gain an understanding of how vision impacts those they love and how the eyes, brain, and body are connected. Equipped with new awareness, their personal experience empowers advocacy. If challenged by doubters, they know 20/20 eyesight is not enough and is only a minute piece of vision and visual processing. The next chapters set the environment for success in vision therapy including; the importance of setting goals, how to stimulate a growth mindset, how to lead Socratic questioning to guide high-level thinking, tips on behaviors such as impulsivity, perfectionism, and dealing with the person that declares everything is boring, learning who’s in control, avoiding splinter skills, not rushing the process, documentation and creating time to celebrate the milestones along the journey. These chapters provide an overview of visual thinking through central/peripheral integration, oculomotor, accommodative, and binocular systems, laterality, directionality, visualization, and visual memory. The appendix offers a visual report, handouts for home support activities, equipment, and references.