Wendie Trubow, MD, defines dyslexia as difficulty reading and argues that functional vision problems often produce the same symptoms and must be ruled out first. Reading depends on multiple visual and auditory systems like tracking, focusing, and eye-brain communication. When these developmental processes fail, reading becomes very difficult.
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Dyslexia? Yeah. Dyslexia by definition means difficulty reading words. I have yet to find a patient out of tens of thousands of patients where we couldn't improve their reading ability. What that means is dyslexia is an incomplete diagnosis until hidden functional vision problems that cause exact same symptoms and challenges are ruled out first or treated first. It's not like somebody's born with a portion of their brain missing that allows them to read. Right? I mean, as silly as that sounds, I think that's what many people really stand on a mountaintop believing. And reading is something. Again, we're not born with it. It comes through learning from our life experiences. It comes from the development of our tracking system, our conversion system, our focusing system, our visual processing systems, the development of depth perception, the ability to use the eyes as a harmonious team, and the ability for the eye brain connection to be efficient and fluid. And so when the language centers and the visual processing centers and the auditory processing centers are not communicating effectively, or we haven't allowed the airplanes to take off and land in the right places through the developmental milestones and the sequencing that's needed, then reading can become the most daunting task.
