Originally Posted by LaurieBeth
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.

All I can tell you is that he was able to compensate very well. He claimed he had double vision when his eye was not patched, and when it was patched, we were patching the normal one. The impaired one barely tracked at all, and for a while it was severely crossed inward and you could barely even see his pupil. So how was he able to read with an eye that didn't track, I have no idea but I listened to him read aloud, and he was fluent. Without the patch, I think he just looked at one of the images or closed one eye. . He claimed to have headaches, but I think that was because he fractured his skull. But who knows. It's hard to figure out what is really going on with a 5 year old, But you don't want to try something based on anecdotal evidence from just a few parents. I don't want to be a debbie downer about VT. Maybe it does work for some kids. We all want to try anything with our kids that might work. But VT is very controversial and sometimes it seems that anyone who gets evaluated by a dev. optometrist walks away with some sort of diagnosis and a prescription for vision therapy. Does anyone have normal vision? I hardly ever hear anyone say "we went to a dev. optometrist, and didn't find any problems." I am guessing many kids are referred to therapy even if they are not one of the few that it would help. Another thing that I want to mention is that DS's OT was not particularly surprised at the fact that he is reading fluently, even with eyes that appear to track independently from each other, because the eyes do not really track with reading even w/ people with normal vision. They jump from place to place.