Samantha's Reading Ability Improving

This is the seventh in a series of articles about 10-year-old Samantha, who was diagnosed with convergence insufficiency (the inability of her eyes to work together). Previously she had been treated for ADD, until her pediatrician found that crossing her eyes caused Samantha pain. That’s when she sent her to the Visual Health and Learning Center.

During her October 10 checkup with Dr. Chi, Samantha made him smile and her mother cry.
After several tests to see if Sami’s eyes were working better together, Dr. Chi smiled and said, “You’re doing really well. Really, really well. This is what I wanted to see the last time you were here.”
Sarah, Sami’s mother, blinked back tears when Dr. Chi asked Sami what her favorite subject in school is, and Sami answered, “Reading.” Getting Sami to read was a battle until she went through 6 months of vision therapy at the Visual Health and Learning Center. Now, as a fifth grader, she has completed four Sunshine State Young Readers Award Books. Her test scores range from 90 to 100 percent on the Accelerated Reader test that measures comprehension of the stories.
During the tests, Sami sat facing Dr. Chi. First she read increasingly smaller letters on a computer screen across the room. Then he held his hand up for the “how many fingers do you see?” test. From looking through lenses to see which ones made her vision clearer, she went on to looking through prisms to see when they created double vision. Sami also read rows of random numbers while being timed.
When the testing was complete, Dr. Chi told Sami, “Keep practicing relaxation.” He also told her to keep wearing her syntonic glasses for 15 minutes a day. The glasses are a specific wave length of green, prescribed for patients who strain their eyes by trying too hard. As Sami’s vision has progressed, the wave length has been changed. Sami also has reading glasses which relieve stress on her eyes.
According to an article in BrainWorld magazine, “It is thought that by applying certain frequencies of light by way of the eyes, balance can be restored in the regulatory centers of the body’s nervous system, specifically the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. This balance is known as syntony. Dr. Harry Riley Spitler developed the clinical science, which he called syntonics* in the 1920s.”
Sami doesn’t know the glasses she’s wearing are syntonic glasses. She only knows that reading is getting so much easier after months of therapy that it has become her favorite subject. And that’s a definite improvement for everyone involved.