How a trip to the optician changed little Sophia’s life
SOPHIA OSBORNE’S SCHOOLWORK WAS SUFFERING DUE TO HER CONTINUOUS HEADACHES UNTIL SHE WENT TO SEE A BEHAVIOURAL OPTOMETRIST
For months nine-year-old Sophia Osborne suffered from constant headaches after school every day.
The little girl was in so much pain her school work began to suffer and mum Sarah described it as ‘really worrying’ when Sophia would come home every day and sit in her bedroom because they were so intense. Because of her age, Sophia’s parents admit they were unsure if she was really suffering or if she’d learned the phrase ‘I’ve got a headache’ from adults.
Doctors thought that nine-year-old Sophia could be suffering from dehydration and may need her eyes tested, but nothing helped until a teacher suggested taking her to see a behavioural optometrist after success with another student. So Sophia’s mum booked her in at Peter Jackson Opticians, who offer the services they were looking for.
“We had never heard of anything like this before,” said mum Sarah.
“We were open to trying anything because it was affecting her quite badly with her concentration at school; she wasn’t really making much progress. But what it’s done for her has been well worth seeking out the help. “They did a reading and eye check to make sure it wasn’t just her sight that was a problem and then we did quite an in-depth assessment on her, where they were getting her to do different things. We went right back from when she was a baby and looked at her development from there.
“We looked at how she walked and crawled and anything to do with her movements. Then he made her do lots of different things like reading with different coloured backgrounds and exercises using pencil grips to see how she holds her pencil.
“I’ve never noticed but she finds it hard to scrunch up paper because the movement in her hand is so tight, but that’s something the optometrist picked up on doing the full assessment.”
Sarah said after her monthly visits to the optometrist, Sophia would carry out the activities he suggested at home every night. “Seeing her doing it from the beginning to now, there is such a massive difference in her and it has really progressed her in school,” she said.
“After a few sessions, we started to see her working memory getting better. We only have to go back once a year now to get her coloured lenses changed. “You can tell when it’s time for them to be changed because she will start saying she has got headaches again. She can see perfectly well but it’s just a block out of extra light but she is starting to wear them less and less. “In year two she was ‘low expected’ in her reading and writing and now she is working ‘as expected’ in her reading.”
Vision is what is seen and where in space it sits or moves and how to react to it. Vision is a learned thought process that involves recognition through various stages of development and experiences.
Good sight and poor vision may be evident in children who struggle academically with tasks such as reading and copying from the board.
Maz Gulamhusein, the behavioural optometrist at Peter Jackson Opticians who treated Sophia, explained why what he does is so important. He said: “It’s very different to being a normal optometrist. when you’re a normal optometrist you check whether someone can read the chart and see from a distance - so checking the eyesight.
“We look at it from a vision perspective.
In a class being able to see a letter on the whiteboard doesn’t mean you can read what’s written on the whiteboard, it just means you can see that letter but you can’t make it into a word and you can’t track along.
“What we do is get the child to come in and
do a comprehensive question and answer with the parents and send them a six-page questionnaire before we get started, to gather all the information on how the child was conceived, what was pregnancy like, was the child breastfed, what was early development like, was there any trauma at birth or in the early years just to know what could have been a causative factor and experience at the time.” The assessment takes between 90 and
120 minutes. Before the appointment, you will receive a pre-examination questionnaire to be completed and returned before the appointment.
The questionnaire gives the optometrist an in-depth knowledge of the development of the child or adult as well as the struggles they are experiencing. This may influence the way in which the assessment is carried out. During the appointment, the history and symptoms that are being experienced will be discussed in more detail, before a number of examination techniques are carried out.
These will assess the following, primitive reflexes, bilateral integration, laterality and directionality, eye movements and binocular vision, short term memory, age-based literacy/handwriting and eye-tracking precision colour overlay.
Sarah says getting the much-needed answers to Sophia’s headaches has been a huge relief and she is overjoyed seeing her daughter flourish and progress in her school work. She added: “Getting any answers was hard work. Everyone was dismissing that there was anything there. When we went to Peter Jackson Opticians the report we got back was quite an in-depth report so it was nice to finally get to the bottom of what was going on. It was a relief to find the root cause and know that we can help her and make life just that little bit easier for her.
“To see her wanting to go to school, enjoying it and picking up a book that she would never normally choose and ask to read - which she would’ve never done before - it’s been worth every penny.”