Maybe you’re past the point of asking “What is vision therapy?” and your child (or yourself) has gone through the tests by the developmental optometrist and has shown areas needing vision therapy, and you’re ready to try this. Then the dreaded “cost” issue comes up.

The first question that probably comes to your mind is, “Does my health insurance cover this?” Unfortunately, many health insurance companies refuse to cover vision therapy, especially if the therapy appears to be “non-medical” in what it’s addressing. This can be especially frustrating if your health insurance covers other kinds of therapy.

On top of this, truly effective vision therapy requires a one-on-one therapist with at-home exercises, which can increase the cost versus a computerized vision therapy regimen or completely at-home exercises, which research has shown to be no more effective than a placebo.

So what are you to do? Your child obviously shows signs of vision disorders, and more than likely your son or daughter’s enjoyment of life, school, learning, and even sports has been negatively affected by their struggles with their vision. Yet the sheer cost of vision therapy is enough to make people balk.

Oftentimes, we like to point out to those that are this stage, that vision therapy can be related to braces. Health insurance doesn’t cover all of the cost of braces for most people. And yet people simply put priority on getting their child braces and make it happen financially. Although for some people braces are to address a painful or upcoming issue, many people get braces for purely cosmetic reasons.

Keeping in mind that vision therapy affects multiple facets of your ability to read, retain, and process information, and even in day-to-day life in areas of balance and the ability to measure depth and distance in our three-dimensional world, how much more important is vision therapy compared to a cosmetic reason? We’re not here to say you should pick vision therapy over braces – please, by no means think that – but sometimes we find that people’s priorities for their child’s or even their own are skewed to think that vision therapy is not that important.

We not just trying to sell you on this, either; we perform our jobs eagerly to see our patients’ eyes light up as they realize they no longer see everything doubled up, or words stop blurring, or they can pitch, catch, and bat a baseball, or they stop bumping into corners, or they’re able to sit down and learn when before it was too tiring and caused a headache. The increased confidence, the relief as their struggle to learn is removed, and the smiles are why we do what we do.

Now, this doesn’t remove the obstacle of cost, especially if your health insurance won’t help. We here at Developmental Optometry & Vision Therapy Services know you have a family to feed, a mortgage to pay, cars to maintain, and lives to live. So we’ve developed some ways to help you deal with the cost so that you can more easily enjoy the life-changing benefits of vision therapy, such as offering financial plans with up to 18 months of no-interest.

If you’ve been debating the cost of vision therapy, or if you suspect that you or your child may have vision problems, please call us at the number at the top, or click on the Contact Us button, and we’ll work with you to address your vision needs.