Speaker 1: (00:00)
Hi, we're here with Dr. O'Connor, who has been a neurodevelopmental or behavioral optometrist for going on 46 years now, Dr. O'Connor, what is one of the most common visual dysfunctions that you see with your patients?
Speaker 2: (00:16)
Overall, we see so many different things, but the one that to me is, is the most frequent one is something called constriction of kinetic or functional visual fields. It's a little different from when we normally talk about visual fields, which are, as I'm looking straight ahead, I've got all this peripheral information coming in and I can deal with that sometimes due to a number of different factors, stress over time toxicity, different types of traumas, emotional or physical trauma, that field you no longer able to deal with all this information out here it's overwhelming and disorienting and in the brain starts to move and constrict this field to a certain point to protect itself.
And you can no longer use all the information coming in through your eyes in normally happens because of a nervous system being out of balance and because that's an underlying factor, it's how we actually remediate this problem. We use something called syntax or light therapy. We use different colors of light to change the balance of the nervous system.
Speaker 1: (01:32)
Okay, great. What would a patient, if a parent was listening to this, how, what would be a clue that their child or themselves might have a restriction of a constricted feeling?
Speaker 2: (01:45)
Certainly we see things out in space, difficulty knowing depth, perception, being clumsy, difficulty, catching a ball. Other times other things are reading when you're reading problems, especially not being able to find your place when you're reading your, keep your place. When you're reading, you're being able to, look back and forth through a chalkboard and copy things that that's more difficult.
Speaker 1: (02:07)
Okay. And then I know you have a special test. We'll save that for another day and evaluation that you perform, but you could you show us what that would look like once you chart that? Sure.
Speaker 2: (02:19)
So a normal visual field, this is being done with one eye at a time at about nine inches of distance. I'm bringing in a little dot out of this black paper, different colors, and we would like to see it almost as soon as that dot gets on the paper person is looking straight ahead using peripheral vision to find out when the dot comes into actually viewed. This is a normal one. Okay. This is someone that I had in the first visual field. This was a young lady. This was her first functional visual field. And you can see how constricted is way out after doing the light therapy for approximately eight weeks, she came back in and this was her new field. Wow. Actually you can tell up here, actually sell the death before I got on the page. Wow.
Speaker 1: (03:17)
That's amazing. And we have about 20 seconds to wrap up here. Can you tell me what did she notice any change in her symptoms? She
Speaker 2: (03:25)
Noticed huge changes. Number one, she was reading on a whole different level. Number two, her headaches went away, which she hadn't even talked about in the beginning. Her mother noticed a difference in her behaviors. So again, we're actually rebalancing the nervous system. And so we see behavioral things, we see emotional things, we see performance
Speaker 1: (03:47)
Thing, academic things. Okay. And social and probably self-confidence
Speaker 2: (03:54)
Self-confidence is huge. Yeah.
Speaker 1: (03:56)
Well, thank you for your time today, Dr. O'Connor. You're welcome. Thank you. You're welcome.