HEALTH MATTERS: Low Vision Therapy provides hope for partial vision loss

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – For many stroke or traumatic brain injury patients, one debilitating side effect is a loss of vision.

But thanks to a unique therapy that focuses on "scanning," patients can adapt their eyesight, filling in the gaps in their vision and relearning how to see.

For months, John Proctor has been living with the neurological side effects of a series of traumatic brain injuries, including a "field cut" to his left side: a blind spot in everything he sees.

"I had a stroke and some other complications from having the shunt placed which was a little over a year ago," John explained. "If someone's over here, if someone leaves the room or something, I'll never know that they left the room."

As an IT expert who was used to reading computer screens, he thought his career was over. Until the Low Vision Therapy program at Baptist Health taught him to rethink the situation.

Occupational therapists like Stephanie Warner are working to fill in the gaps, training John to scan letters, lines, and symbols using his entire field of vision and fill in the breaks in his eyesight.

"This doesn't cure your eyes," said Warner. "This is determining where the deficit is at and then finding a way to compensate for that. If the brain doesn't see that part from the eye, then it just kind of erases it from the ability to use it."

In less than 5 months of work, John has gone from hopeless to hopeful, planning on trying to return to his job at the end of the year with a new way of looking at what he does.

"I'm going to take this momentum and just keep moving forward," John said.