Unusual Glasses help in Traumatic Brain Injury
Marine Corporal Steven Schultz suffered a traumatic brain injury during his second tour of duty in Iraq. His brain injury has affected his vision in such a way that his brain is ignoring visual input because of a lesion in the visual processing center of his brain and is called hemi-spatial neglect. “Because of the brain injury, I don't see a lot of stuff on my left,” he explained. While walking he will run into people if they are on his left side. Combining an old technology with new at the DeBakey VA Medical Center is helping veterans like Corporal Schultz to regain some of their independence. Doctors at DeBakey say some odd-looking prism glasses help retrain the brains of patients with visual impairments caused by a TBI. Dr. K ia Eldred says wearing the goggles a couple times a day can help a patient correct the hemi-spatial problem. “When they take the glasses off after doing this exercise, they then start being more aware of the left side of space,” Dr. Eldred said. “It's like they're over-correcting back to the left.” Steven has been using them a couple of months and has already noticed a difference. DeBakey low vision therapist Tonya Mennem said, “He (Steven) moved into a new home and he hasn't run into any of the walls and that's incredible progress for him.”
