News Articles

Dr. Kelly Knueppel has been gracious enough to share with us a plethora of great ideas for gifts this holiday season.  Please follow the link below where the American Optometric Association has featured her list of games you can use to build you/your child’s visual ability while having fun at the same time. View here…

Nebraska Optometric Association Honors Heartland Eye Consultants Doctors for Serving Our Profession At the recent Nebraska Optometric Association Fall Convention in Kearney, Dr. Will Ferguson, Dr. Holly Ternus, and Dr. Marie Bolin were all recognized for their service to the profession. Dr. Will Ferguson was presented the Dr. Charles Seeger “Young OD of the Year”…

Not all mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBIs) are concussions, but all concussions are mTBIs.  This statement is made with confidence.  The ability to diagnose a concussion can leave practitioners with less confidence.  This is because current technology doesn’t allow doctors to see the micro-damage (stretching and sheering) of brain tissue involved.  Often things such as…

Click on the link below to watch various people, from various practices, from all different places benefitting from vision therapy services! Vision Therapy Videos Vision Therapy and Visual Rehabilitation — as practiced by optometrists — is an effective non-surgical treatment for vision problems related to many conditions, such as vision-related learning disabilities, ADHD, dyslexia, amblyopia…

The College of Optometrists in Vision Development (COVD) and the Neuro Optometric Rehabilitation AssociationTM (NORA) have issued a joint statement to increase the awareness of the prevalence of visual dysfunctions noted after suffering a traumatic brain injury (TBI).  You can find a link to the article here. The statement emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary collaboration…

Eye Turn (Strabismus) Strabismus is the condition in which a person is unable to align both eyes. When both eyes do not point at an object at the same time, it results in the appearance of one eye turning in, out, up, down. This eye turning may be: constant (one eye turns all the time)…

“Lazy Eye” is an often misunderstood condition. The term itself leads to the idea that there is something wrong with the actual eyeball. People think “It can’t see well or it can’t move with the other eye, it must be lazy then!”. However, eye muscles are 60x stronger than necessary. Unless there is another condition…

People are becoming continually more aware of concussions and the long term impact they can have on a person’s life. Approximately 70% of people who suffer a concussion will experience a vision problem as determined in the study “Vision Diagnoses Are Common After Concussion in Adolescents”. Common problems include: Binocular Vision Problem (difficulty using the…

Many people are unfamiliar with what vision therapy is and wonder if it is a ‘new fad.’  The reality is, vision therapy has been an effective clinical treatment administered by optometrists for over 50 years. The problem was that 50 years ago science knew ‘the truth’ about the visual system – it wasn’t changeable after…

Do you notice your child or student struggling with: Learning the alphabet? Remembering what letters or numbers look like? Writing letters or numbers correctly? Recognizing words? Seeing minor differences between words like on/no, clear/clean, it/if Confusing words that begin and end similarly like winter/water, fire/fierce, through/though Recognizing a word that was previously seen on the…

Teachers may give kids tips and tricks to remember like, “If you hold up your left hand your first finger and thumb make an L.” However, if the child has difficulty imagining this, remembering what an L looks like, or even knowing which side the bottom line of the L is on, they will still…

“20/20” simply means that the person can identify a certain sized target at 20 feet that a “normal” person could identify at 20 feet. This is what we call visual acuity or EYESIGHT. An eye chart, usually with various letters or pictures for kids, is used to determine this number. Eyesight is something that takes…

The American Optometric Association provides a great summary of how vision really works day to day in the classroom – click here to read more. It may be working to your advantage, or may be working against you. To begin to understand the gravity of the last sentence it is important to think about what…

Think about your eyes is a great campaign designed to improve the awareness of how important vision is for developing children. Some scientists estimate up to 70% of the brain is either directly related to processing visual information, or 100% associates with visual areas of the brain. Most of the time vision works well and…

  From Harvard Magazine “We tend to think of a traumatic injury as a simple, physical process, like a cut or bruise. But Zafonte, chair of the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School (HMS), says it is more accurate to think of TBI as a disease, because its effects extend well…

  Our patients come to us from all over Nebraska and even from Iowa because vision therapy works. Our patients come to us because they are experiencing signs and symptoms of what could be a visual problem or disorder and in some cases have a diagnosed medical condition. The most important recipe for success is…

Eyes can even get sunburnt in the winter because snow and ice reflect 80% of the sun’s ultraviolet rays, even in overcast weather. Your eyes are most at risk between the hours of 10am and 3pm when UV rays are at their strongest. It is easy to remember to wear your stylish sunglasses during the…

Children with visual impairments or blindness can be challenging to shop for, one must think about toys in a different way. Here we have a number of links to sites to highlight a number of gift ideas for visually impaired or blind children. We have pulled a few of our favorites. For Babies: Lamaze Octotunes…

Vision is a human’s best sense for anticipation (the same is true for a horse). For this Olympian, he and his horse need to know when to jump and how high to jump. A feat not likely to be as successful with their eyes closed. It was extremely important for William Fox-Pitt to retrain his…

If this picture looks familiar come homework time I don’t need to explain to you what it’s like to be in the trenches fighting the homework war. You know it, you live it, you dread it. And most of all, we feel it for the child who is struggling. Luckily there may be a solution…

Seeing is not always believing, and reality may not be what it seems! Check out the illusions that puzzle the human visual system into misinterpreting reality. Enjoy!

A School Vision Screening is Not a Substitute for a Comprehensive Eye Exam A school vision screening, while a highly useful tool in schools, is limited and designed only to check your child’s distance vision. It can tell you how well your child can read a chart that is 20 feet away and it may…

Ruchika Ranasinghe, MD of Sunrise Children’s Hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada has some great insights as to how vision affects learning. Our passion at Heartland Eye Consultants is to maximize people’s visual ability to optimize their performance in daily life. For children, daily life means learning in the classroom. Learning in the classroom means heavy…

Many people are unfamiliar with what vision therapy is and wonder if it is a ‘new fad.’ The reality is, vision therapy has been an effective clinical treatment administered by optometrists for over 50 years. The problem was that 50 years ago science knew ‘the truth’ about the visual system – it wasn’t changeable after…

For an athlete to perform at their best, they must consider optimizing many variables. Hydration, nutrition, sleep, conditioning, strength, agility, just to name a few. One factor that should not be ignored is vision. Athletes rely on vision to lead the execution of body movements. Think how hard it would be to hit a baseball…

CNN reports on a new study from the journal of Pediatrics that suggests that recovery from a brain injury or concussion can take anywhere from days to weeks to years depending on the age of the injured and the severity of the concussion. In conjunction with other symptoms such as headaches, blurred vision and dizziness,…

Everyday there is more and more research developing on the study of brain plasticity and recovery from brain injuries. Hightlight this week: New Treatments for Concussions Based on Recent Brain Research The Diane Rehm Show Thu, June 4 2015 Synopsis Dramatic results in reduction of symptoms and in some case full recovery after new use…

We are starting Brain Injury Awareness Month with reviewing book that is an intimate and personal account of suffering from a concussion. The Ghost in my Brain Clark Elliott Clark had a short blackout as the result of a fairly minor automobile accident. His symptoms were anything but minor. For over a decade he dealt…

March is Brain Injury Awareness Month and ahead of that we have a press release from the College of Optometrists in Vision Development (COVD). The new movie ‘Concussion’ has thrown into the spotlight the real affects of having a child in contact sports like soccer or football and the potential risks of playing contact sports.…

From Becky for This Reading Mama: “If you teach an older struggling reader, you know what a challenge motivation can be. Many of them have said, “I can’t,” for so long when it comes to reading, that the label reluctant reader doesn’t even begin to tell the half of it. By the time a child…

Have you or your child experienced the following symptoms when reading? Short attention span Must read and re-read material to understand it well Get sleepy when reading Covers one eye while reading or exhibits odd postures at desk Frustration, restlessness, low self-esteem Often a visual disorder known as convergence insufficiency is misdiagnosed as ADD or…

When Do I Need to Replace my Pipes? As a homeowner, it is important to know the signs and signals that the pipes in your home need replacing.  The pipes in your house are used every day and also hidden from view so they are easy to overlook and forget about.  Though out of view, pipes…