Neuro-Visual Therapy Program
Presented by: Dr. Joseph Clark
About the Course
NVT in the Clinical Setting – The Carrick Institute’s Neuro-Visual Therapy (NVT) course is designed to help physicians, athletic trainers, athletes, healthcare professionals, and performance coaches understand the relationships between sports performance, concussion and how they relate to the neuro-visual system. Learn NVT applications, time tested in the trenches, to help you solve concussions more effectively.
WHAT IS NEURO- VISUAL THERAPY?
NVT is a clinical application used to improve, enhance and/or develop the visual system, and its connections to other systems, runs more efficiently and automatically.
Patients learn to use their visual abilities in new and more efficient ways by participating in various neuro-visual exercises, many of them performed with little or no equipment. Exercises are designed to bring a set of skills to conscious awareness, practice using those skills to mastery so they become automatic.
The overall goal of NVT is to alleviate the signs and symptoms of visual dysfunction, maximize visual and overall performance, meet the patient’s needs and improve the patient’s quality of life and performance.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
Scholars in this course will learn the three pillars of neuro-visual therapy, including oculomotor performance, eye discipline, and processing ability.
Course Objectives:
- Define a concussion (mTBI).
- List common deficiencies associated with visual disturbances post mTBI.
- List common modalities associated with sports concussion baselines.
- List common tests for sideline assessment.
- Demonstrate use of tests concerning an absence of suspicion of an mTBI.
- Identify deficiencies in a baseline test or mTBI exam.
- List common methods (visual-oriented) for
- Diagnosis of mTBI.
- List rehab strategies based on observed and reported diagnostic deficiencies.
TOPICS COVERED
- The Baseline Exam of a Neuro Visual Exam – Pre-training Baselines for Neuro Visual Training and how to use them
- Neuro visual symptoms that arise after a concussion
- Neuro visual training and rehab techniques
- Testing peripheral vision- low tech vs high tech testing
- Measuring phorias
- Assessing for eye dominance and discussing how it relates to performance
- Training for eye dominance- train your athlete to be more ambidextrous with their eye dominance
- Eye dominance and eye-hand dominance interplay
- Training for improved hand-eye coordination in your athletes
- Quantitative methods to measure Stereopsis
- Saccadic eye movements and progressions for athletes
- Near/Far Eye Training post-concussion
- Neuro-cognitive rehab post-TBI
- Eye-tracking strategies
- Working with athletes experiencing photophobia/photosensitivity
- Visual Memory Assessments
- Assessing for nystagmus in your athletes
- Visual suppression and the use of Strobe Glasses
- Tranoglyphs and Vectograms for assessing and training depth perception and phorias
- Eye discipline with Retinal Retention Training- Why does it matter and how do we assess and train it?
- Reaction testing and training
- Sequential processing tasks post TBI Rehab
- High-performance vision training concerning peripheral vision
- Dynavision and T-scope
- Exertion, exercise and return to play post mTBI
- Creating an exercise prescription post-TBI
- Gaze stabilization assessment and rehabilitation
Neuro-Visual Therapy Program Part 2
Presented by: Dr. Joseph Clark
This program builds upon NVT 1 with advanced assessments and applications for rehabilitation and athletic performance enhancement. Concepts in this program allow clinicians greater insight into creating an individualized neuro-visual approach to concussion and more.
One of the tools that will be introduced in this course is the phoropter. Clinicians will learn what it is, how to use it, and why it is important to the functional neurology practitioner. A concussion can cause or, in most cases, exacerbate binocular vision dysfunction, accommodation difficulties, and vestibular ocular dysfunctions creating VOR impediments. The use of the phoropter will allow you to measure quickly:
- Convergence Insufficiency (CI)
- Divergence Excess
- Convergence Excess
- Vertical muscle imbalance that causes head tilt
- Accommodative (focusing) dysfunction.
- Maddox Rods
- Fusion
- Fusion Break
- Fixation Targets
- Colored Filters
- And More!
