By Bonnie Daizell
The Philadelphia Bulletin
December 2, 1979
It looks like play time in the doctor’s office, but actually the patients are going through a series of exercises to help their vision, like: using a ball and rolling pin to improve visual-motor co-ordination; wearing Polaroid glasses in a depth perception exercise, and putting a puzzle together in a visual-touch test.
When you walk into the Elkins Park office of Arthur S. Seiderman, O.D., M.A., you can hardly believe your eyes. It’s no ordinary office, restricted to the usual trappings of eye examinations — like a chart or the half ton of steel that you know will ultimately settle on the bridge of your nose.
Dr. Seiderman has a collection of screening devices. Styrofoam balls dangle from strings hooked to the ceiling. He has multicolor rotating pegboard wheels, boxes of red and green celluloid glasses of the 3-D movie variety and there’s a long white wall onto which images of rabbits hopping in and out of circles are projected through gadgets that resemble old-fashioned stereopticans. Half of one room is taken up by machines that look as though they might have come from a penny arcade.
When Dr. Seiderman’s patients (most of them children who don’t like to read) try their hand — er, eyes — at the “games” and “puzzles,” he accumulates enlightening information. He finds out whether each pair of eye muscles is pulling its own weight. He determines how easily the eyes accommodate (do they rebel when they’re asked to shift focus from primer – to chalkboard and back again?); he learns how well they move along a page of print before tiring. Do the eyes know left from right? Do they cooperate with the hands and feet?
Although all eye specialists do not agree, the crux of Dr. Seiderman’s philosophy is that good vision can be learned by exercising the eyes in a special way. “Vision therapy is not a panacea,” Dr. Seiderman stresses. “In my practice, about 90 percent of my patients are receiving concurrent reading assistance, psychotherapy and/or speech or drug therapy. Optometry does not claim to remedy all learning problems. But we can certainly help sharpen the basic tools of learning —the eyes.” His patients enroll in an eye exercise program which lasts for an average 30 weekly sessions.
“It was like a small miracle in my life,” reports Sister Marguerite Walsh, S.S.J., a teaching nun at St. Patrick’s in Malvern. “in some routine testing by our community psychologist, it was discovered that although I scored very high in verbal testing, I had a lot of trouble with directionality.“ Dr. Seiderman’s examination showed that one of my eyes was completely shutting off, leaving the other to do all the work. That was the reason I had so much trouble with turn signals when I learned to drive — I constantly confused left and right.“ After several months of exercises that included mirror drawing and walking a balance beam, Sister Marguerite reported the eyestrain she had lived with for years was gone.
More typical is Brendan O’Malley, who was labeled “dyslexic” in his early years of schooling when it became apparent he had poor hand-eye-motor coordination. Says Brendan’s mother, Julie (Mrs. Shaun) O’Malley: “We tried all the standard ‘cures’ — tutoring, psychological testing, special sessions with the reading teacher at school. Nothing seemed to make any difference.”
The O’Malleys took Brendan to Dr. Seiderman whose tests revealed a near-point focus inability that sometimes produced double vision or reverse images. Special prisms and six months of vision training helped his reading level jump to grade level. During the next school year, Brendan read 81 books.
John Konvalinka, 45, management consultant, has been flying airplanes since 1955. “With all the eye examinations the Navy gave me, no one ever detected I have a tendency to exotropia (eyes that turn out),” he says. “Nor did anyone ever suggest there might be a relationship – to chronic tiredness and eyesight.” Now, his “critical afternoon tiredness” has disappeared. Even his tennis game is better. He says,
“I’ve learned how to keep my eye on the ball.”
