Arizona Vision
Therapy Center
Visualize a
healthier future.
Therapeutic Lenses (Brain-Based Optix, NeuroLens, Enchroma)
Therapeutic lenses are special lenses that shift or filter light as it enters the brain through the eyes. This shift allows the brain to better handle the light. It also helps better match perception of visual targets to reality (for example, a person can think that a visual target is farther than it actually is, which can cause difficulty picking things up or parking. The lenses help to make their actions more accurate by shifting that perception to match the visual target). They’re prescribed to passively resolve certain visual symptoms that interfere with daily activities. They can also be used to enhance active vision therapy or to help treat patients who are unable to go through the regular vision therapy program due to cognitive difficulties or problems complying with the home support requirements.
How Therapeutic Lenses Can Help You
Therapeutic lenses, when used wisely, can passively provide many of the benefits of vision
therapy when a person is not in the therapy room. When these prisms are worn in a pair of
glasses, they have the ability to engage the visual attention of a person. They also provide
feedback on problems with visual aiming and spatial organization.
Another amazing result of wearing the glasses is that they can stimulate changes in the brain
to help improve visual, auditory, postural, balance and coordination function. We have also
found these lenses to be extremely useful in breaking down patterns that have developed
over time to cope with visual conditions so that we can instill new and more efficient patterns
of vision.
Who Would Benefit from Therapeutic Lenses?
Most Ages: We typically prescribe these lenses for infants as young as 6 months and adults as old as 100. We use the concept that the brain is plastic (able to learn new things) at any age.
Traumatic Brain Injury: People struggling with the effects of traumatic brain injury such as problems navigating through space, feeling clumsy, reaching for objects and knocking them over, balance issues and motion sickness.
Athletes: Problems in sports such as always swinging for the baseball too early or too late, throwing the ball too far to the right or left, tripping for “no reason” and other general coordination problems.
Autistic Children and Adults: Visual issues in people on the autistic spectrum such as problems making eye contact, problems getting “visually stuck” in one location and problems coordinating their vision with their other senses.
People With Certain Physical Issues: Balance, gait and postural issues that were not resolved with a typical vestibular therapy program.
Types of Therapeutic Lenses
Therapeutic Lenses include:
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ï‚·Yoked Prisms
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ï‚·Non-Yoked Prisms
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ï‚·Micro-Prisms
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Tints
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ï‚·Occlusion (Binasal Occlusion or Nasal Occlusion on one side)
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ï‚·Specialized powers to include microsphere and microcyl
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ï‚·Enchroma lenses that help a person perceive colors more easily
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ï‚·NeuroLens lenses that help with trigeminal dysphoria (pain, strain, headaches, dizziness, and/or dry eye symptoms when using the eyes)
Enchroma
Lenses for Colorblindness
While the average person can see in color, there are still a group of individuals who struggle with color. We call this struggle “color-blind." Around 8% of men and 0.5% of women are color-blind which doesn’t actually mean that they see everything black and white.
These colorful circles with numbers are a common and simple way to quickly check for color-blindness.
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Just like everything else, there’s a spectrum of severity to color-blindness. Some are affected by Protanomaly or Protanopia, meaning that the individual has a red-weakness, is missing some red cones, or is completely red-blind. Those with either a green- weakness or green-blindness are affected by Deuteranomaly or Deuteranopia. Those with red/green blindness are linked to the x-chromosome, which is why color-blindness affects men more often than women. However, blue-weakness (Tritanomaly) or blue-blindness (Tritanopia) equally affect both genders.
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The U.S. Military often scouts color-blind individuals to become snipers, as the camouflage often used by militaries can easily be seen by those affected by color-blindness.
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Color-blindness doesn’t have a truly negative effect on the lives of those who deal with it, as it really only affects the ability to see color and nothing else. However, imagine not being ableto see true-colors, see rainbows fully, or know what your favorite color actually looks like. Life
might seem pretty dull without being able to see color. Luckily, special type of lenses named Enchroma were invented to help correct color deficiencies.
Enchroma lenses are prescribed in office at Arizona Vision Therapy Center.
NeuroLens:
Lenses for Trigeminal Dysphoria and Computer Vision Syndrome
Frequently, when working for long periods of time with a small misalignment of the eyes, a
person can have symptoms called Trigeminal Dysphoria or Computer Vision Syndrome.
These symptoms include headaches, eye strain, eye fatigue, dizziness and dry, scratchy eyes. NeuroLens help decrease the stress that is caused by this misalignment with specialized prisms.
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With their contoured prism design, NeuroLenses provide more prism where it is needed most, correcting eye misalignment naturally and providing comfortable vision.
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