What Your Symptoms Are Telling You About Your Vision — with Dr. Benjamin Winters

In this episode of Healing Our Sight, Denise speaks with Dr. Benjamin Winters about how symptom awareness can help uncover hidden vision problems and guide the recovery process.

Dr. Winters explains how symptoms like headaches, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, and visual discomfort are often connected to how the visual system is functioning—even when standard eye exams appear normal. He shares how tools like symptom surveys can help patients and practitioners identify patterns, track progress, and better understand what’s really going on.

The conversation also explores Dr. Winters’ broader work, including his Emergent approach, the tools and training he provides, and how these support both patients and practitioners in achieving more effective outcomes.

Denise and Dr. Winters discuss the importance of awareness, listening to your own experience, and using practical tools to support the vision therapy journey.

This episode is especially helpful for individuals navigating vision therapy, parents seeking answers for their children, and anyone experiencing unexplained visual symptoms.

Resources & Links:

Symptom Surveys:
Convergence Insufficiency Symptom Survey: https://www.hopecliniconline.com/online-vision-screening

Quality of Life Survey: https://www.covd.org/page/QOLSurvey

YouTube Video Mentioned:
https://youtu.be/EDRfCfnZFNo?si=FjJNcwlMQYjh41-u

Website:
 https://hopecliniconline.com

Connect with Denise Allen:

Website: https://healingmysight.com

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/healingoursight

Click the link above to message me directly. It comes to me as FAN MAIL! How great is that? Just click on the place that says, "If you liked this episode CLICK HERE:"

Transcript

Denise: Welcome to the Healing Our Sight podcast. I'm your host, Denise Allen. Today my guest is Dr. Benjamin Winters, and I'm so happy to share his. His story and what he's doing in the world with. With all of you today. Dr. Winters has a passion for developmental optometry, and he saw some real needs in the vision therapy community. So, he's been working on creating a team and providing solutions to the needs. And we're going to get right into what all of those solutions are and how that has formed your life's work. Okay, Dr. Winters?

Dr. Winters: All right. Absolutely. Yeah.

Denise: Tell us a little bit about what drew you into developmental optometry and vision therapy.

Dr. Winters: That's a funny story in and of itself. I remember I was in undergrad. I knew I wanted to go to optometry school. I'm from the Northwest, and really, we only have one school, optometry school here in Northwest, and that's specific. And I remember a friend of mine asked me so if I was going to Pacific, and I said, no, I hear that they do vision therapy, and I really don't want to have anything to do with vision therapy. I hear that's a big emphasis to them. And so, I headed off to Memphis, Tennessee Southern College of Optometry. And in my first year of optometry school, we had a developmental optometrist come and speak to us. And she just talked about the amazing work that she was doing with children and changing their lives. And I thought, that just sounds so interesting. I want to learn more about that. And the more I've learned about developmental optometry and vision therapy, the more I've just fallen in love with it. So, yeah, that was how I got exposed and got introduced to vision therapy.

Denise: Okay, that is awesome. Was there a patient early on in your career that shaped how you continued your work?

Dr. Winters: So many. So many patients. I've got so many stories there. One patient in particular, I saw him at Costco. This was when I first started my career. I was still working at Costco to pay the bills as an optometrist there. And he came in as a patient and just for a regular eye exam. And come once we got into the history, found out that he had had three different eye surgeries to help better correct the eyes. Going in for a fourth surgery. And he's just getting an updated prescription, getting ready, getting a check on things before he went into surgery. And I told him, I said, well, you know, we have. I have a vision therapy clinic that we're going to. be starting. And I said, would you want to come and give that a try before you go and try another surgery? And he said that he would. And so, he was a young man, straight A student. But it wasn't until I got into doing vision therapy with him and got to know him better, where he felt comfortable. To tell me that he never felt comfortable looking someone in the eyes. And he was kind of a more reserved kid, but always just kind of looked off the side. And I just remember the very first moment that we were able to get his eyes to straighten to work. Doing a technique called polymer. You wear these polarized glasses, and if one eye is not working with the other one, you'll see it black. And so, it really gives a lot of good feedback on whether or not you're using the two eyes together. And he's. We were doing some stuff and working with him. All of a sudden, he got his eyes straight. They're both. Both working. And he saw both. I said, do you feel that? Do you feel that? And he's like, yeah, I got it. And so, we run out, out to go talk to his mom and tell her. And you're telling her. And, you know, we look over and his eyes are beautifully straight. And I said, hey, can you feel that? Are you seeing that your eyes are straight? He's like, so dialed in. He's like, I do. I feel it. And yeah, he did really good.

Denise: That's awesome. I love that.

Dr. Winters: Oh, wow.

Denise: So, the way you've approached what you're doing is not just in the office though, right? You want to tell our listeners what you do besides just vision therapy in the office?

Dr. Winters: Yeah, sure. I've had quite the journey in my career. We started a vision therapy only clinic in a little town called Yakima, Washington, and grew it. And we actually helped train some other doctors and helped them start a couple of clinics here in Washington state as well. Somewhere along there, I just thought, you know, the equipment that we have in vision therapy, I wish it looked a little bit more professional. Some of the things that we used looked like it came from a craft store, right? And so, I was like, I want something to look a little bit more like medical equipment. And my brother was a manufacturing engineer working at a big blender company. And I said, hey, do you think we could make some cool vision therapy equipment? He said, well, let's just try. And he got his 3D printer out. And I remember that everybody, this was during, like Christmas break, and all the family was upset because just he and I were sitting there tinkering with this 3D printer and making this equipment. And so that was kind of how this thing got started. And one thing led to another and pretty soon we had a full line of vision therapy equipment. And, and now we sell it all over the United States and Canada primarily, but yeah, all over the world. And, and that's been just really, really a lot of fun. Um, in that journey we found out that there was a big need for, for training for vision therapists. A lot of the training that’s out there is really geared towards doctors. And really there wasn't a great course. There was a few, but not an easily accessible course to take someone that knows nothing about vision or anything off the street that you're wanting to train them to become a vision therapist. And so, we decided that we should create an online training program. At the time we had my clinic that was growing, we had the two other clinics that we had started. So, we were training vision therapists like crazy. So, we had kind of got it down to a science on how to do it. And so, we ended up creating a real professional. One of the members of my team actually had for much of his career developed corporate training courses. And so, he was able to help us put together a real professional training course. And so that was something that we started offering as well as this online training. And that's now you've got graduates of that course from 22 countries or something like that. So that's been really fun to see that.

Denise: That's amazing. Yeah.

Dr. Winters: And then somewhere in there we decided or my, my background is, is business. It's kind of funny because most optometrists are doctors who then are forced to do business because they own a practice. So, I'm kind of a different duck in that. I started with business owned and a company, a couple companies before I started optometry school. But so, business was something that I have always enjoyed. And I just realized that there are so many very caring, wonderful, absolutely talented developmental optometrists in the world that are terrible at business. And I really felt like if you were really going to make a big impact and make take vision therapy to the world like all of us developmental optometrists want to do, we needed to be better at business and so started doing some practice management consulting and helping doctors. And that's been so fun to go around. I recently was working with, just last week actually I went and worked with a clinic and the doctor let me know that just a few months ago she had turned to her Husband and said, I don't think I want to do this anymore. Like, I love vision therapy, I love to do, but this is just too much. It's too much to try to handle them to figure this out. Especially while doing primary care optometry. I'm just, I'm done. And she just, the next day went into clinic and like next three patients all just really needed vision therapy and thanked her that she had this, this clinic that was offering that. And she really felt that was a sign from God that no, she needed to continue to do this. And shortly thereafter she brought me on. And so that's so such a fun story because if I can help her, or as I was helping her to kind of organize thing and put systems in place so that it isn't so overwhelming, then she can focus on what she loves to do. Right, which is to offer revision therapy. Exactly. So. So those are kind of the main three things. I had stopped because this company is called Emergent. It gotten so busy, I had decided, you know what? I'm going to sell my other vision therapy clinic. I'm just going to focus on this for a while, which I've done. And about a year ago, just as I was thinking, you know, Emergent, it's starting to kind of get to the point where I think we've got things running pretty smoothly. A really great colleague of mine, he's in a Seattle area, Ted Kadet. He was 82 years old and you'd never know him, he's so full of life. But tragically, he passed away kind of suddenly and left these three clinics that he had, and they were just kind of gonna go away. And so, I decided, no, this is kind of a perfect time for me to maybe jump back into patient care. And Seattle is a two-and-a-half-hour drive for me, but so far, we're making that work. So, I go over and I'm back in patient care again, seeing patients two days a week and just absolutely loving. I had forgotten how much I miss doing patient care and working with people. So that was probably way more than you wanted to hear, but that’s my story.

Denise: No, that is not way more than I want to hear. It's amazing. And I think that it's nice to recognize what was missing in your life because I think that unless you have that personal touch with people, that you don't always see what a difference it's making on the same level. Right. You can, you can provide all of the equipment and training and consulting, but unless you're seeing the actual results

Dr. Winters: you, you.

Denise: It, it's a different feeling, right?

Dr. Winters: Absolutely. Yeah. You know, absolutely. Absolutely it is. And that's been just a really rewarding part of my career is, is making I, I would say friends. I feel like I become friends with all the people that I've worked with, and it's been just such an amazing, rewarding part of my career.

Denise: Yeah. And you've seen a lot of different practices and, and what, what's working and what's not working in, in the practice itself. Right. So, I think you have a different perspective than most of my guests have had based on that. What do you think the key components are to making vision therapy effective for people?

Dr. Winters: So, when I go into a clinic, that's, you know, that's the interesting thing. I'm very rarely having to help them with the vision therapy offering, the actual offering of the services. There are things that we're wanting to do to try to help, like enhance some of the training for the vision therapist, make sure they're getting the most out of it. But by and large, the optometrists I work with are so passionate and caring about the work that they do that they're getting amazing results. That has not been the issue more. It's just the day-to-day type stuff like managing all the employees, having systems in place so when someone calls, you're able to follow up with that person, make sure that they're getting taken care of. Making sure that you have your vision therapy structured in a way that you as a doctor still have good touch points and keeping track of your vision therapists and things like that. That, that's where I try to come in and help with is kind of the business, the minutiae side that, that's kind of systematized and taken care of so that they can continue to focus on the work that we all love to do. So, so that's, that's the part that I really enjoy is that I'm not having to make sure that doctors are being good doctors. In our field, that's not really a thing. You don't do vision therapy unless you have a passion for it and are going to put your heart into it. It's too hard otherwise. And so, yeah, I love that part of our field and our little community that we have.

Denise: Yeah, sometimes on the patient side of things, it doesn't feel that way. I've noticed when I've been on these strabismus support groups, you know, that's where you get the people who maybe don't know about vision therapy, or they think they've tried vision therapy and it didn't work, or their doctor told them they did vision therapy, but they maybe weren't really qualified as a vision therapist. And so, I think it gives vision therapy a little bit of a bad rap from that point of view. But what should people be looking for when they go in to get vision therapy?

Dr. Winters: You know, that's a really good point because the group that I'm talking about, I mean, by the time they're going to hire a consultant to come in and help with their vision therapy program, they're dedicated and they're serious about vision therapy. You have to realize that every optometrist has to take a couple of classes in vision therapy. It's part of our national boards to become an optometrist. So, every optometrist knows about vision therapy. It's very similar. I remember I had a colleague that was very close to my practice who was an orthodontist, and he said, orthodontists, what happens is you get dentists who are like, you know, I want to make a little extra money. I'm going to start doing some braces. And so, they start doing braces and it's like, oh, it's working pretty good. And then they get a couple of hard patients and then they're like, I don't know what to do. And then pretty soon they're not doing it anymore. And I think we see that same thing in vision therapy and optometry. A lot is people want to be able to help. They see these patients come in. But to offer a full-blown vision therapy program is very different than doing a little bit of like, or I should say very different than like primary care where you're prescribing glasses and seeing patients once a year. That business model is so different that then what happens is they'll say, okay, I see this person has convergence insufficiency, which is a real common thing that we find in vision therapy. And they'll prescribe like pencil push-ups or they'll prescribe a couple little activities to try to do. We actually have good research showing that pencil pushups are no better than placebo. So of course they're not going to find. And who's going to be compliant with doing this, you know, for however long that they tell them to do it for.

Denise: Right.

Dr. Winters: So that's why I think you're right that patients have not always a vague experience. They're being told that they're being given vision therapy and it's really not a full-blown vision therapy program. One of the best ways to know if you're in a good vision therapy program is to make sure that you're actually being seen by a fellow in. We used to call it COVD, but a fellow in OVDRA. Right, right. And you can go to the OVDRA website, ovdra.org, and go to locate a doctor and they'll show you the ones that are fellows. And that's probably the best way to be able to see that. You gotta have again, a lot of passion, commitment to get that fellowship.

Denise: Absolutely. And when I'm on those groups, I often will tell people you need to see a qualified developmental optometrist and I will give them that website address to go find the qualified person because I think that they don't understand. Most people don't understand that there's a huge difference.

Dr. Winters: I could make one more point on that, Denise. The other thing you mentioned are people that have gone and considered surgery. So, they're talking to ophthalmologists. I work very closely with (them). This is not a knock on ophthalmologists. I love worked very closely with ophthalmologists. I had a pediatric ophthalmologist, one that does surgery that came and saw patients in my office. So this is not a knock on them. But for instance, that pediatric ophthalmologist recognized that this was not his specialty, which makes sense. This is typically not the area of specialty of medicine. If you think on physical therapy, speech therapy, these are not medical doctors that are performing these types of services. Right. They're more focused on the health and making sure the diseases aren't there and also surgery. So, the function part is really our domain and that's something that we hope in the future more and more collaboration is going to happen between us and ophthalmology, similar to what has happened in physical therapy. But these kinds of things take time.

Denise: So, I wish they took less time. Yeah. I mean, because I had a whole lifetime of going to the ophthalmologist and the optometrist and having them either tell me that I was fine or oh, well, we're not going to test that anymore because you can't do it, you know, and that doesn't change anything for a patient.

Dr. Winters: Way too many people being told there's no other options. Right.

Denise: Yeah.

Dr. Winters: I love your story, by the way, Denise, because I think it's such a, a perfect model for how vision therapy and surgeons should work together. Right. It's the same model that we find in orthopedics, you injure your knee, what are you going to do first? You're going to do physical therapy to see if we can get it better. And if we hit that plateau and it's not getting better to the point that we want it to be, we send a surgery, the surgery happens, come back, do more physical therapy. I have no idea why that's not the model for vision when these are so much more precise instruments. Right. These organs that we call the eyes are really an extension of the brain. They're very, very complicated. And so just changing a muscle and moving it 2 millimeters and hoping that that's going to then solve it and get the eyes to perfectly be aligned all the time. Yeah, it takes more than that. And I really hope. I was just talking to that pediatric ophthalmologist friend of mine very recently, just like, what can we do? This should be the model.

Denise: The problem that I see in this whole thing is we haven't really got the ophthalmologists on board because the vision therapy doctors recognize it and they're sending their patients over.

Dr. Winters: Right.

Denise: The ophthalmologist is not saying, make sure you go to vision therapy after. They're just doing their job. Right. And they're also not referring people initially to vision therapy so that they can try that first and have the surgery. Be the last resort.

Dr. Winters: Yes, yes. Like any good surgeon will tell you, the best surgery is no surgery. Right. There's just inherent risks involved with surgery, but absolutely last resort. I've had plenty of cases just like yours. That's why he came to my office to see patients, is we get to a point where we plateau. People would ask, well, how long do we need to do vision therapy before we do surgery? I say, well, we keep going. As long as you're improving, we're going to keep going. When you plateau and we're not able to get any further, that's when we say, start having that conversation about surgery. And that was exactly what happened in your situation. Right. Had plateaued, started to have that conversation, and eventually that happened and then kept going from there. The other thing I want to bring up is a really good example of that. I had this child that came in, I wanted to do vision therapy with them. The parent decided, no, I'm just going to go ahead and do surgery. I said, absolutely, go for it. And they went and did the surgery, came back, and perfect result. You were talking about how many seconds of arc stereo. That's like a measurement of depth perception, which is a real good measure if the two eyes are working together. And he had 20, which is, like, the best. Okay. The best that you can get is 20. And I was like, wow, that was a really good surgery. And so, I had kind of talked about how we would need to do vision therapy afterwards. And mom says, see, I don't think we're gonna need to do it. And I was like, okay, keep a close eye on him. And sure enough, like, two months later came back, I started to wander again. All those numbers that were perfect before were all gone.

Denise: Yeah.

Dr. Winters: And so, to me, that's such a beautiful illustration that. Yeah, even if the surgery is perfect, which in this case it was, that doesn't mean that the brain has learned how to use the two eyes together correctly. And so, we were able to do vision therapy with him, get him to where the eyes were coordinating together well. And I just feel like that's why I think this model of working together would work so well and hopefully is where we're headed.

Denise: Yeah, I hope that's where we're headed. There are so many people on these strabismus support groups that have had multiple surgeries, and either they don't recognize that vision therapy would be important, or they just don't even know it exists, because nobody ever says anything about it. I mean, if the doctor never mentions it, or they discount it and say you don't need it, then the patient is going to listen to that most often.

Dr. Winters: Yeah. Yeah, of course. Of course they are. So, I hope. I think that vision therapy kind of sprung up during a time when optometry and ophthalmology were really butting heads. I don't think we see that as much anymore. And I'm really hopeful that this collaboration is going to really start to take off.

Denise: Yeah, I do, too. Are there ever situations where patients really don't need vision therapy? I mean, because we've talked about, oh, it's the best model to have both. Right. But there's so many times that someone says, well, I had perfect results with my surgery. And I go, and how do you know that? And how long is that going to last?

Dr. Winters: You know, you mentioned something earlier of people that have had multiple surgeries and they've done research that every additional surgery, like, doubles the chance that you're going to need even another surgery after that. And so, to me, basically, we're just proving the fact that surgery is not working. You're proving the fact that your brain doesn't know how to use the two eyes together. Right. So just Getting the eyes in the same ballpark of alignment doesn't mean that they're gonna know how to work together. So, are there patients out there that don't need vision therapy? It depends on what your goals are. Right. And I think certainly if you have had a surgery and you're able to have good alignment and maintain that, then great. You know, I'm all about that. I would say the same about if someone had a knee surgery and didn't do physical therapy afterwards, and they're like, But I don't see anyone out there saying, oh, well, he didn't have to do physical therapy. Why should I have to do physical therapy where they could. All of us think you should have done physical therapy. You're lucky that you're okay.

Denise: Right.

Dr. Winters: Like, that's kind of the result that we should be saying, right? Like the same thing. Like, awesome. I'm so glad that it works out. But why? Why leave it up to chance like that?

Denise: Yeah, exactly. I love that so much. What do you think patients aren't understanding? Because we. We can talk ourselves blue in the face about this. Right. But there's still a disconnect.

Dr. Winters: I always, you know, I get a lot of mom guilt in my office when I find a child and show them how much they're struggling with eye tracking or struggling so much with whatever happens to be moms are like, oh, my gosh, I should have found this sooner. And I always tell moms, that's not on you. That's on us. That's on us as a profession. We need to do a better job of getting this information out there. That's something that I've devoted my career to, is trying to take vision therapy to the world. And I think we need to be better at using. There's some really great tools out there as far as symptom surveys. There's the one that OVDRA has. It's the COVBD Quality of Life Symptom Survey. There's one that was developed by a big, big research that was done called the Convergence Insufficiency Symptom Survey. That one also is great. These are just really quick things that people can fill out in less than five minutes that can give them a really good understanding of whether or not they would probably need vision therapy or not. So that's, I think, very much underutilized tool. Because even if you go to the eye doctor, the thing that you hear all the time, right, I've got 20. 20. The doctor said I was fine. Yeah, yeah, but you didn't Tell them that you're experiencing words doubling on the page. You didn't tell them that your eyes are tired and hurt every time. So, they don't know to even look for that. They're checking predominantly, do you have any eye disease? And did I get you the right prescription? Right. So, they're not necessarily looking at the function side. And so, what these checklists do is they really help to really quickly be able to say, yep, it's working or it's not working. There's a lot of different places you can go online to be able to do that. For instance, my most clinics now have like a symptom survey online. So, you can go to my website. Hopefully it's online.com to there's a symptom survey in there that you can take.

Denise: Okay. And we'll put that in the show notes, too.

Dr. Winters: Okay, great.

Denise: Yeah, I. And I think sometimes there's symptoms that people don't connect to their eyes, that they're. They don't even think about mentioning in a. In a visit.

Dr. Winters: Absolutely. No, absolutely, that's true. You know, if you're struggling with headaches, how many other things are there out there that could cause headaches? Right?

Denise: Yeah.

Dr. Winters: And so, so many times I talk to people and they're like, yeah, I kept trying to drink more because I thought I was dehydrated. And come to find out they're just struggling really bad. And they're like, oh, yeah. And by the way, the string doubles every once in a while. Well, that's probably because your eyes aren't working together and you're working so hard and trying to keep your eyes working together that that's causing a problem. But no, sometimes it's not as blatant as this thing's doubling on you. Right. Sometimes it's just a little bit of blur. Sometimes people are able to keep things clear and single, but it's just so much work. Right. For them to do that. So, yes, it's always important to get your eyes checked regularly. Make sure that you're telling the doctor all the different symptoms that you're going through. If possible, go see someone that is a fellow of OVDRA. So those are the things I would recommend.

Denise: Awesome. Can you give us another example of a patient whose life changed because of vision therapy in a way that surprised even you?

Dr. Winters: There's this one, a patient that always will have a soft place in my heart. She came and saw me when she was in the seventh grade. Mom brought her in. Mom is a nurse practitioner. And, you know, sometimes you just get that feeling that this is a good mom. Like, you know, she really cares for this child, do everything she can for her. And anyway, I did my assessment, definitely found there were some big vision issues going on. The child happened to be really struggling in school as a result of these vision issues. Her eye tracking was very poor. She also had what we call convergence insufficiency, a hard time pulling eyes in together. So, all of that effort was taking away from her ability to learn. And so, I found out later, the mom came and told me. She said, you know, when we left her office, my daughter said, see, mom, I told you, I'm not stupid. Well, mom had never said anything of that sort to her daughter. But that's the message that her daughter was feeling. You know, she was struggling. And so that's what she had taken from that. It was so rewarding to be able to work with her. We worked with her for several months. We got her eyes working together again. Big success story. I was really fortunate to run into her when she was a senior in high school. I happened to be doing a little lecture at one of the schools and bumped into her, and she told me that she was a straight A student and getting ready to go to college. It was so great to see that, you know, who knows what the trajectory of that child would have been had we not found that vision issue and be able to jump in and help. So, yeah, those are the things that make us all very passionate about what we do.

Denise: Yeah, I love that story. Yeah, there are so many like that, and people just don't know. They don't know. So that's why we're doing this.

Dr. Winters: Absolutely.

Denise: What questions do you think patients should ask when they're starting vision therapy? What do they need to know that maybe they're not even hearing from their vision therapy doctor? I've talked to people who've said, I didn't realize that my child was seeing double. I mean, that something even that simple.

Dr. Winters: Yes, definitely. Understanding. I think most docs do a pretty good job, but understanding what your child is going through, I think is really important so that you have a little bit. I mean, I have five kids. So as parents, we are often harder on our kids. We want to see them succeed; we want to push them. But understanding some of the difficulties they're going through, I think is really helpful to parents. Other than that, I would just say that vision therapy is hard. People sometimes don't recognize the work that it takes. You're typically, most are going to go to vision therapy Once or twice a week, there are going to be home activities that you need to do. You know, the world that we live in, we've got some pretty cool technology with kind of gamification and there's some pretty fun games. But still, some of it is just boring and it's tough. And you've got an eight-year-old that you're trying to get to do stuff. And we have prizes that we give and all kinds of incentives, but it's still hard. You get to week 12, 14, and you've been doing this for three months and it's like, gotta keep doing it.

Denise: Yeah.

Dr. Winters: Um, and so just be prepared. That's all really normal. Um, but just keep going. You know, braces, I would say when someone gets braces on by. Yeah, the third or fourth time when you're getting those braces tightened again, you're done. You don't want to do this anymore. The huge benefit that orthodontists have is you can't just take those off yourself. Right. Stay on. So, with vision therapy, we don't have that. And so, I would just say stay the course. Vision therapy often lasts six, eight months or more. Sometimes with a really complicated case. Stay the course. Those improvements will come. And so that's probably the biggest message I'd love parents to know that are going through it right now. 

Denise: Awesome. That is a great message.

Dr. Winters: One of the questions you had posed when we were emailing back and forth about this interview was why does vision therapy make such a big difference in some patients?

Denise: Okay.

Dr. Winters: So, I did want to just take a second and talk about that because I think that that is really important. Sometimes we get patients and I'm always concerned about school. Right. Are they, are they reading better? Is that easier for them? Are they not getting headaches as much? Those kinds of things. But parents are coming back and saying, you know, they can hit the ball. Like I've never seen them hit the ball before, or they're doing so much better in this. Or hey, you know, they're keeping their room clean. I'm like, well, I didn't really work. Okay. Sometimes it's like, why is all of this extra stuff happening? Why are we seeing such a big change? I had a mentor that once did this activity with me, or I was in a lecture that he was getting. And I just love this demonstration. So, I wish we could kind of do this presentation live in front of for everybody. But I'll just try to describe it the best that I can. So, what he did was he put some prism Goggles. And so, these are goggles with prism in them. And the prism, basically what it does is it just shifts everything over a little bit. And so, if you look at like a flat line like this, it's going to look bowed, right? So, you're, you're going to see this bowing. And he said, okay, I'm going to have some come up. They put the glasses on, and he had like a wall edge. I was like, okay, do you see that it's bowed? And the person said, yeah, that's weird. It looks bowed. He said, okay, now go over and I want you to put your hand up and down on that. Whoa. And the patient did, or not the patient, but the person in this, in the class going up and down, they're like, whoa, that feels bogue. So, they. In their head, even though their hand is moving straight up and down to them, it feels like their hands doing this. Yeah, Curving.

Denise: Yeah.

Dr. Winters: And he took that opportunity to say, okay, let's, let's talk about for a second what's actually happening there. He said, first of all, cognitively, we know that that wall is straight. You knew walking in. You saw that beforehand. You know for a fact that it's straight. On top of that, we've got something called proprioception. We've got little sensors in our hand so that if I close my eyes, I still know where my hand is. And if I'm doing this, I know that it's moving up and down. So, you've got those two things. Yet vision is overriding all of that and telling you that it's both. Why is that? Because vision is such a predominant sense. 70% of the processing of sensory information. So, we got ears, tactile, all the sensory information that goes to our brain. 70% of that is vision.

Denise: Right.

Dr. Winters: So, there's a lot of the brain that is attributed to vision and processing of visual information. So, when we affect vision, we really affect that individual to a large degree. And why do we see such changes? To me, that's why is just because the underlying neurology is so invasive that it's going to make a huge impact on that individual.

Denise: Yeah, that is amazing. I think that would be really cool to do live to show that demonstration.

Dr. Winters: It is fun because people are like, whoa, that is really. First of all, putting those big goggles on, everything feels kind of off and weird. And then, yeah, it's just a weird feeling. It's like, wait a second, my hands are going straight up and down. And yet it feels like it's doing this yeah.

Denise: So, is it kind of mimicking what someone would be going through if their vision wasn't working correctly? Is that the purpose of that? Or it's just to show how the brain is changing what you're thinking?

Dr. Winters: We use those prism goggles a lot of times therapeutically doing that kind of thing for patients who have what's called a midline shift. So, patients after, particularly after a head injury, will have what's called a visual midline shift. The newer word for that is egocentric mislocalization. Anyway, basically, where they think things are center are shifted over to the side. Right. And so, with prison glasses, we can kind of realign that. And that's amazing to watch. You'll watch people that are really struggling to just walk, and you put prism glasses on, and it's like magic. All of a sudden, they're able to walk perfectly fine, and they're like, what did you do? It's like, well, I just. I just shifted things back to center for you. Yeah. I had one guy, I said, here, touch this. Just. I had a little stick or something. I want him touch. He's like. It just was totally off. He was, like, leaning on the wall as he was coming in. I put those glasses on, and he was able to walk perfectly straight. He was like, what in the world? But that's what we use those for. The guy that was lecturing took those glasses to make that demonstration. Right?

Denise:  Right. Yeah. I thought, you know, there's probably a lot of ways you could do a demonstration with different glasses, and everybody would have a different perception of whatever was in front of them. That would be kind of fun to see. Everybody kind of shocked that all the people are seeing something different than they are. And that's literally what's happening in our world to people who are struggling. Right. They're all literally seeing the world differently, and we can't see that.

Dr. Winters: They are. There is a great YouTube video out there. It was done by some optometrists in Canada that they went to a group of teachers and simulated a lot of the vision problems that kids go through in class. And it's just really interesting to see how exhausted these teachers are and how frustrated they are and what a huge impact. And they're like, oh, that's why these kids are struggling. Yes, that's why these kids are struggling. It is really hard to try to work with these vision issues going on.

Denise: Yeah, I think that that's a great awareness everyone should have. So maybe we could link that in the show notes, too, for people to Look.

Dr. Winters: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I can get to that. That would be fun.

Denise: That would be fun. Okay, well, I know I need to let you go. So, if you wanted to give one last piece of advice to people, what would that be today?

Dr. Winters: Well, first, Denise, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for having me on. Probably the last piece of advice is, don't take your vision for granted. Don't take for granted that your kid's vision is okay. Go and get it checked. Make sure you're using those symptom surveys that are out there and make sure and get this word out because we need more people. We need more parents to be aware. We need more strabismus or eye cross eye wandering patients know that there's other optimisms out there. And so, it's through things like you're doing, Denise, that this is really going to be taken to the world. 

Denise: Great. I love that advice and thank you so much for sharing today.

Dr. Winters: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks again, Denise.

Denise: You're welcome. Thanks for listening to the Healing Our Sight podcast today. I'd love to connect with you. You can leave a comment by clicking the link in the show notes. I love receiving your messages. You're also invited to join the Healing Our Sight Facebook group. Let me know what resonated with you and how I can better serve you.