July 14, 2018 - Traumatic Brain Injury
Hey folks, it’s Dr. Sam and I’m on my morning walk. Thanks for coming along today.
I want to talk about the relationship between concussions and vision problems. When I opened my first practice in the Philadelphia area I had a hard time getting patients so I went to one of the local hospitals and I offered my services to the outpatient clinic for people with traumatic brain injury and who suffered concussions. And these were folks that had difficulties with focusing and depth perception, they had double vision, and they had problems reading. Over a period of about a month of applying my physical therapy exercises to them, they improved greatly and I ended up going on to work with 3 other hospitals helping people manage concussions and their traumatic brain injuries. So I’ve been doing it a long time.
But I wanted to go into the research and see what was actually the link between concussions and vision problems. And there was a study that was published in the Clinical Pediatrics journal. The authors were Dr. Mitch Shaiman and Michael Galloway. And they took 100 adolescents who were diagnosed with concussions and they found that 69 percent of them actually had functional vision issues. That means difficulties with visual tracking, eye focusing, visual coordination, visual memory and those kinds of things. So there is definitely a relationship between getting hit in the head and how that’s going to affect your sensory-motor systems – especially your vision.
The physical therapy exercises work tremendously well it helping people re-educate their eyes into their brain and to overcome the trauma. Because when we have trauma a lot of times our sensory-motor systems actually split into two and we have difficulty integrating or coordinating our sensory systems with our motor systems. So things like color therapy and acupuncture. Taking a look at your nutrition and biochemistry. These are all ancillary supports that I recommend and play an important role in reducing inflammation. But the physical therapy for vision is really potent in terms of helping people get their vision back.
So that’s my message for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. And until next time take good care.