Our eyes are one of the most important parts of our body and it is imperative that we keep them in a healthy state. You must visit your optometrist regularly so as to protect your eyes from any sort of infection or disease. Most of the problems can be treated if they are detected at an early stage.
One of the many eye problems that plague people is that of eye movement or tracking. The condition of eye tracking surfaces when one or both the eyes are not able to move smoothly and accurately from one object to the other. The affected person also faces inability to quickly move across a line.
Eye tracking problems also render a person unable to fix his eyes constantly on a single object. Due to the problems arising because of difficult eye movement, the patient is not able to read, write or copy effortlessly.
Also known as ‘oculomotor dysfunctions’ (OMD), the eye tracking problems are generally found in a child’s vision development at a very early stage. However, they do not become prominent until and unless a child goes to school and faces problems in reading, writing and other activities.
The characteristic symptoms that a child might show are: skipping lines while reading, loss of place, inability to read short words or the beginning and ending of words etc. The dysfunctions in eye movement can often go unnoticed and therefore it is important not to blame the child for poor grades when he starts school. He must be taken to an eye doctor in order to determine whether he suffers from any eye tracking problems.
Children need proper attention and guidance in order to get rid of eye movement problems. If you keep on forcing them to read unclear words, they will try to stay away from reading, writing and copying as much as possible.
When you visit an optometrist, he will conduct a thorough eye check-up to determine the existence of any eye movement problem. Accordingly, the treatment plan will be devised based on individual requirements. Proper diagnosis is important in order to cure the problem.
Vision therapy is the most effective treatment for eye tracking issues. It helps in training the eyes to focus from one object to the other in a correct manner. The eye doctor calls the patient for a number of treatment sessions in order to develop the basic skills required for tracking words and objects in a precise manner.
The aim of these treatment sessions is to boost the self-confidence of the patient apart from reducing exhaustion in the eyes. Gradually, the treatment procedure moves towards more difficult tasks but all this is done keeping in mind the comfort level of the patient.