Retained primitive reflexes. Bunkum or legitimate?

[Thingsthatgo]

Ds, 6 years old, saw his optometrist today for a routine check up. The optometrist is also a specialist in behavioural optometry and retained reflexes. I have read a little about them before, and ds’s behaviour and physical abilities do seem to fit with retained reflexes.
She told me about the work she does and suggested he might benefit from working with her (based on his response to her asking him to perform certain tasks) Some of it privately and some on the NHS. The price is reasonable.
Does anyone have any experience of this type of therapy?

If it was a routine check for a 6 year old and you weren’t reporting problems, it sounds a bit like she is on the lookout for people to label with this and treat, as it is her special interest and she can get extra money for it.

I know nothing about this other than what I've just Googled. It looks really interesting. Would it benefit someone with ASD. I'm just struggling to understand how it's linked to an optometrist??

I would feel wary of someone suggesting a kind of therapy was required where they stood to gain financially and you hadn't previously identified an issue.

magnetic it seems to have a link with ASD, but I don’t know much more than that. It’s a particular interest of hers because she has retained reflexes herself, and she has a holistic approach I guess!
Ds mentioned a problem, about focusing on words in a book, and she asked him to perform a few tasks.

I personally don't believe it, it seems very pseudo science-y

Having said that, it's not inconceivable that certain exercises will improve core strength, hand eye coordination, ability to cross midline etc, and these improvements might lead to an improvement in behaviour or academic ability (thanks to the child not having to work so hard in other areas, they can concentrate more on their work)

We’ve done this with DS3, aged 9, who has autism. I don’t know if I’ve totally bought the whole retained reflexes thing, but I could see the things that she pointed out to me, things his brothers don’t do, the exercises have been fun and we have seen an improvement. Whether it’s rr, or the benefit of an extra 5/10 minutes a day of play with me, I don’t know.

See your GP for a second opinion.

Our route in was also through a behavioural optometrist, who we saw on the NHS. She now works privately and has trained someone else to do the RR stuff alongside her. The behavioural optometry stuff has made a huge difference, too.

There's no evidence that either behavioural optometry or retained reflexes therapy work.

Thank you autumnboys, that’s interesting.
hardassnails that is what I am wondering about. A friend who is a speech therapist for the NHS said it’s accepted as a therapy In the NHS, however I can’t find much information about it. Do you know much about it?

I've done searches for evidence before through the Cochrane review and searching academic databases in the past. I'd recommend anyone considering these sorts of usually private and costly interventions to do proper research.

Yes, DS1 (now 14) saw a behaviour optometrist at age 7. He was unable to track words along a line (or follow a moving object with his eyes). It was discovered he had several retained reflexes. Retained reflexes can stop the working of eyes developing as they should - the theory goes that once the RR are gone, the eyes can start to develop normally.

We signed him up for Vision Therapy (which mostly involved gross motor exercises to get rid of the retained reflexes, before moving onto explicit eye exercises). The results were almost miraculous! We did 20 minutes exercises at home every day and an hour session every other week at the optometrist, and in 3-4 months the reflexes had gone and his reading / tracking improved vastly. Prior to the therapy he would wriggle constantly on a chair, and often fall off chairs - but afterwards his general coordination seemed better and he stopped falling over and falling off chairs.

It was the best money we have ever spent.

My eldest stopped veering into people, falling over flat floors and walking into things, was early teens .. Very long process but extremely visible difference in coordination/ space awareness. Though this was not eyes more the Danish programme for overall retained reflexes. Also do not know A&E staff of every town visited anymore ..trying to glue her back together. In fact no A&E for several years now.

watsername and scissor thank you for your experiences. The optometrist gave us a Brock String exercise to do at home, which Ds doesn’t mind doing and is already improving. This is supposed to help him track words better and help convergence.