Rhythm, timing, and the visual process

Speaker: Paul Rousseau

Summary: Join this highly interactive discussion as you bring your experience as an OEPF Clinical Associate or Clinical Curriculum Alumni. Gain insight from fellow Alumni and CA’s. Space and time are so intricately related that Einstein detailed some of those relationships in ways that go beyond my understanding level. But Al Sutton (one of our early pioneers in the field of developmental optometry) brought it together for me in a way that I will never forget. Al showed through a series of activities and their application how the foundation of the visual process has so much to do with the understanding of body in space and time. By applying his work, it becomes apparent that this foundation is critical and is often overlooked in our vision therapy world of lifesaver cards and brock strings. This workshop may represent the first step of a series of workshops that might serve to reintroduce the foundational principles of Skeffington, Getman, and Sutton to our present-day developmental optometry practitioners. I had once labeled this presentation as “Skeffington’s Four Circles–Re-presented”. This work when applied to patients can show how working on the foundation of movement of body in space and time can open up the ‘visual space world’ as Al called it and begin to make effective in roads in the areas of accommodative and binocular vision problems including strabismus and amblyopia and learning problems without once working on a skill that seems to be directly related. The goal of this workshop is to introduce those activities and how to apply them clinically and practically and how to modify them for the level of your patient. Cases will be presented which illustrate the power of these activities and their underlying principles in the treatment of cases of binocular vision, accommodation, strabismus, amblyopia, and vision-related learning cases through pre and post treatment analytical examinations. Finally, novel approaches to clinical thought will be introduced as to the theoretical underpinnings. As Walter Chao, said after hearing this theoretical application of Skeffington principles, “I wish someone would have explained it that way to me 30 years ago.”