My Life in Behavioural Optometry

I was born and raised on the Gold Coast at a time when the Gold Coast was a relaxed and quiet holiday place. During high school I became blurry in the distance and developed an interest in vision and optometry.

My Professional Journey

My Uncle was my mentor as a child and the reason I became an Optometrist.

The Joys of Independence

When I first decided to study Optometry, one of the great attractions was the ability to be my own boss.

By Paula Peachey

The Federal Government ‘Get Up and Grow’ guidelines provide advice on healthy child rearing.  The guidelines address both childhood obesity and the number of children with neuro-developmental deficits.   National attention was achieved with the recommendation that:
“Children should be banned from watching Television until they turn TWO!”

Behavioural Optometry is an expanded area of optometric practice. Behavioural optometrists have a holistic approach to the treatment of vision and vision information processing problems. Functional visual efficiency is known to influence visual status. The way that you interpret what you see does not depend solely on how clear your eyesight is.

The human visual system is our most dynamic sense. At birth, many of the components of the visual system are in place, such as the eyes, optic nerve and brain, but it is after birth that growth, development, co-ordination and fine tuning of the system occur. The visual system requires light, movement and change in environment to make these developmental processes occur.

Vision therapy (also referred to as visual training) is a program aimed at remedying and enhancing an individual’s visual abilities. Its function is to:

• Treat existing visual problems such as amblyopia (lazy eye), eye alignment problems, eye coordination problems, poorly sustained near focus, inadequate eye-hand coordination and immature perceptual development
• Enhance the efficiency and comfort of visual function
• Help prevent some visual problems

Learning is accomplished through complex and inter-related processes. Your eyes and the visual system grow and develop from the brain, making vision a fundamental factor in thinking and learning. There is currently much concern in the community regarding the level of literacy skills, probably because advances in information technology have increased the demands placed on people to wade through the plethora of written information presented to them each day. As such it is important that the issues regarding vision and learning are well understood by the community, schools and health professionals. In this way optometry can be of help.

It is perfectly natural as a parent to feel anxious and a little upset by the fact that your child has a turned eye. One of your concerns will be that your child doesn't look nice with a turned eye. You may have noticed that your child doesn't perform certain visual and eye-hand tasks as well as expected because of the eye turn. You may also be getting lots of so called "helpful" advice from your friends and relatives as to what you should be doing about the turned eye.

Since vision systems are in many parts of the brain, it is possible for any insult to the brain to lead to significant effects on a person's ability to read, drive, walk and work. A vision problem can also restrict a person's ability to benefit as much as possible from rehabilitation services.

Accommodative dysfunction simply means a focussing problem, particularly at near. This is not so much an eyesight (or clarity) difficulty as a problem in maintaining accurate, comfortable focus particularly with near work.

Convergence insufficiency is a condition in which the individual has difficulty keeping both eyes turned in to point in the same position when they are doing close work eg. reading, writing, computer work.