These symptoms become worse when the patient is tired, sick, or after intensive visual work. If the binocular vision is severe enough, it can result in
crossed or lazy eyes, interfere with
eye movement control, and cause
focusing dysfunction. Deficiencies in eye teaming ability will cause people to use excess effort to take in and process visual information and will reduce their ability to sustain visual attention. They will also negatively influence the ability to make accurate spatial judgments.
While gross binocular dysfunctions like crossed and lazy eyes will be detected by a general eye doctor, most eye doctors will not evaluate you for the more subtle defects of binocular vision that result in the above symptoms – you need a developmental optometrist like
Dr. Lisa Januskey for that. Many of our patients with these disorders tell us that they’ve had eye exams for over 20 years and were never diagnosed with their binocular vision disorder until they came to our clinic. Others tell us that they thought they had
ADHD or
dyslexia, when it was actually a binocular vision disorder the entire time. The good news is that, if it is a binocular vision disorder, it’s easily addressed with
vision therapy.