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Eye-Opening Work: Doctor Helps To Get Children's Brains To Communicate With Their Eyes

COLUMBIA, Md. (WJZ) -- A doctor in Columbia says there are children who have been labeled as lazy or hyper or learning deficient who are none of those things.

As Mike Schuh reports, they have a simple problem getting their brain to communicate with their eyes.

After getting two Ds in school, Lindsay Alley's mother brought her to see Dr. Michael Kotlicky. The goal was to see what her brain was doing and what her eyes were seeing.

All her life, Alley couldn't comprehend the words she read.  Her eyes weren't working together.  She saw double and couldn't track a line of words on the page.

She said people called her lazy.

"I just didn't know because I wasn't lazy.  I just didn't know what was wrong," she said.

Alley has a photographic memory and is an A or B student.

Kotlicky says her eye to brain connection was faulty, but the eyes were fine.

Once Lindsay Alley was diagnosed and began therapy, her mom was relieved.

"She just took off from there.  She began reading.  She went from Ds on her AP psychology quizzes after reading the material the night before, and now she got Bs within the 8-week period of time. That was October," said Nancy Alley, mom.

The doctor has a stack of successful reports.

"Reading is so much easier and fun.  School is so much easier to manage," Kotlicky said.

In this case, therapy retrained her brain to work with her eyes.  The therapy has shown remarkable success in others.

"The statistics are 95 percent," said Kotlicky, a developmental optometrist.

No drugs, no surgery, no kidding.

Kotlicky says many learning problems and ADD diagnoses really just require a visit to a vision therapist.

The test to determine if someone needs vision therapy takes about an hour.  Click here for more information.

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