After having countless meetings, integrative discussions and patient co-assessment and co-treatment interventions with Dr. Heidi Wise and Dr. Bob Edwards, I thought I would give an overview of the upcoming Annual PRI Interdisciplinary Integration course being held in April. Dr. Wise, Dr. Edwards and I are excited about interacting together and with you as we cover up-to-the-moment clinical advances and evidence-based successes in improving visual functional integration, using PRI positional and neurological principles. We will discuss and demonstrate how neurological input and output to the eye interacts with vestibular, postural-related autonomic function.
For the PRI Therapist, attending this course will help you assess a patient who is having difficulty in achieving or maintaining neutrality. We will offer an overview of the autonomic system, spatial awareness, binocularity, visual accommodation, orbital orientation, and patterns of postural adaptation resulting from the asymmetrically challenged vestibular system. This is an excellent opportunity to learn how eyewear can help or hinder a PRI intervention. Additionally, patient management strategies to facilitate visual integration will be presented, including PRI program sequencing to maximize integrated outcomes.
For those of you who know me, you know I’ve had a passion for the eye for a long time. The eye is integration. Our balance, our reference centers, our autonomics, our spatial patterns, and our learned behaviors are all reflected and revised by the visual system and visual cortex. This course will address this descending input and cortical interference by identifying ascending treatment intervention limitations and ruling out other system influences.
This course will identify up-to-date clinical information on global-orbital and orbital-global mechanical patterns, frontal plane limitations of the head and neck on the thorax as a result of visual influences on the sagittal and transverse planes, and postural imbalances as a result of visual-vestibular (spatial neglect) challenges. These include influences of un-corrected or corrected astigmatism on orbital position and ocular muscle, and autonomic-accommodation on system extension.
The three days will offer anyone with an interest in vision or the vestibular systems an opportunity to learn how basic cranial, cervical and thoracic mechanics can be influenced not by what we see, but by where we have to put ourselves to see it. Achieving neutrality can be frustrating for a PRI Therapist if neutral vision is restricted. Future PRI Vision-trained optometrists will understand how to use the visual system and ocular kinematics to achieve a balanced, neutral oriented visual system. This futuristic integrated-minded course will offer all participants an opportunity to become active in this PRI Vision process. I’m very excited about it! - Ron Hruska
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