blackcat - I've pm'd you about the test.

sallymom - the psychologist was still using the WISC-IV because there were no extended norms for WISC-V yet (at that time anyway). her Woodcock-Johnson III reading scores were pretty low relative to the VCI and GAI, and that fact presumably wouldn't have necessarily changed even with a different IQ test (but who knows for sure). also, aeh looked for me and said that they weren't WAY out of line relative to the VCI ... but given that VCI itself may have been something of an underestimate for the reasons described before, the fact that that the difference between reading achievement and VCI didn't quite reach statistical significance isn't completely reassuring.

all: to be clear.... most people seem to lump VT all into the same category. however, there's a joint statement by American Academy of Pediatrics and the big ophthalmology organization that accepts VT as proven for convergence insufficiency. how they define that, I don't know - I believe a lot of medical folks think that the optometrists overdiagnose that as well. but anyway, if someone has a CI diagnosis, I don't think you can automatically say that using VT is unproven. with other diagnoses, though, it's different, and the medical people do in fact say that VT for these other diagnoses is unproven. Of course, everything that is now proven was at some point unproven. Apparently many sincere DOs, and intelligent parents, do feel that they see a difference that is attributable to the VT. But of course, there may be many more who don't see a difference (and the truth is, people who didn't get results are less likely to speak up - no one likes ruining someone else's hopes; I have a feeling that the "yays" are going to be way overrepresented on boards like these). And yes, even for those who do, most are going to be hard pressed to attribute it to the VT. In most cases where someone felt that there was a dramatic change, it took a pretty long time AND the child was undergoing other therapy or other changes at the same time. Still, I've heard enough stories, as have people like Linda Silverman and our psychologist, to think it was worth checking into, if not necessarily actually deciding to do the very difficult (not to mention expensive) therapy.

The biggest problem I see now is that the diagnosis that isn't now in question - convergence EXCESS - is not the one that the medical people agree could call for VT, and not the one that most children of parents who swear by VT had. (Some of those kids had both tracking problem diagnosis and convergence insufficiency, but it's less clear which one mattered in terms of the VT making a difference in the child's life. And, as I said, it appears to me that the DO either misinterpreted the tracking test, or recorded a typo that made a huge difference in the way it should be interpreted. So while possible tracking issue was one I was in fact thinking of when I sought out a DO for an evaluation - esp since her score on the cancellation structured was lower than her score on cancellation unstructured - I don't think we now even have a legitimate tracking problem diagnosis.

blackcat- not sure why a severe convergence insufficiency problem wouldn't cause some reading problems, at least if I understand what that is. Is it possible your child had learned to ignore input from one of his eyes? Also, I have read that many profoundly gifted kids with big convergence insufficiency problem still read many years above grade level, but they had other symptoms, read less than they did after treatment, etc. But I don't really know enough to have informed opinions here, just speculating.

I do appreciate everyone's sharing opinions and experiences with me.

To clarify for anyone who hasn't read more of my posts: my DD2 does have some issues - it's not like everything is perfect and I'm getting concerned ONLY over some test results. They're not terrible, esp last year (5th grade). But she is slow in real life at times, she does get stressed at times, she has occasional headaches and gets tired at times. Her reading level as measured by WJ-III is a little low, she makes occasional "careless" errors (reads questions wrong, skips a question). Her handwriting is messy (poor spacing between words esp). She used to resist writing, she used to resist reading aloud. She seems to read weird (really fast, saying that she reads at least a line at a time, maybe more). She possibly hasn't made as rapid progress in terms of choosing to read difficult material as I might have expected (but who knows really - I don't have many to compare with here).

Could these be caused by other things, including being EG / asynchrony (not related to vision) and/or just be typical 11-year-old behavior? Or something completely different, like dyslexia. Or just normal behavior (how many careless errors too many careless errors, how many headaches does the average 11-year-old get, etc.). Yeah, sure could.

This is what makes the decision hard. This and the concern that we might be missing a "window" (with vision, dyslexia, something else, who knows). If I didn't believe that there were windows, I would probably just wait and see if we have a "good" year again next year. I am leaning toward doing that again anyway - we have a lot of very difficult things coming up next year in some other ways, and not necessarily time to add another very difficult thing onto our plates.

My thought was that if we could expect to see an unmistakeable change more rapidly - say 4 to 6 weeks - we would maybe try to power through. But that doesn't seem to be the case. The long, expensive, very very troublesome therapy (both in-office and daily at home), when I can't find even one person who believes her kid was successfully treated for convergence excess, seems like too much, just in terms of costs and probable benefits.