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Brooke Morris' reading age and school work instantly leapt ahead when she slipped on a pair of glasses with specialised blue lenses.
She was 7 and had been diagnosed with a visual-processing disorder.
Now 13 and heading for Rangitoto College next term, the North Shore girl has recently changed to purple lenses, which continue to help her perform above average at school.
"Without them, I get sensitive eyes and can't concentrate," Brooke said yesterday, after speaking to a conference in Auckland organised to discuss the disorder, called Irlen syndrome or scotopic sensitivity.
When Brooke first started school her eyes watered and became sore whenever she tried to read or write. The words seemed to jump around the page and had no spaces between them.
"I was taken to numerous optometrists and they all said that I had very good eyesight. Then what was the problem; was I just dumb?"
But when an Irlen practitioner - there are now seven here, from backgrounds in teaching, psychology and optometry - placed a blue/purple overlay across some text, "I said out loud, 'I can see, I can read'."
People with the syndrome can experience headaches, tiredness and many other symptoms when reading, and their reading can be slow and inaccurate. It also shows up in difficulty catching balls, from misjudged depth perception. Irlen practitioners say it is not an optical problem; it is a dysfunction in how the nervous system encodes and decodes visual information.
American educational psychologist Helen Irlen, who developed the method of treating the disorder with individually tailored coloured lenses or book overlays, said about 26 per cent of people had reading difficulties of some sort.
Her technique could help nearly half of them.
She acknowledged that not all medical organisations viewed the method as a valid treatment, but said many did and its effectiveness had been established through more than 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals.
The strongest evidence yet was published in an Australian journal two years ago.
It showed that in a group of about 50 American 9-year-olds with visual perception processing disorders who were given remedial help, the reading skills of those given the coloured overlays jumped ahead, while the skills of those without this assistance stayed static or regressed. Dr Irlen said about one-third of people "labelled" with dyslexia actually had a visual processing disorder and could be helped by her technique.
Likewise people could be helped who had been mislabelled with an attention-deficit disorder. They might look inattentive but, in fact, they might be restless from having difficulty reading.
"If you eliminate the discomfort and distortions, that same individual just sits there and says, 'This is easy, it's calm, it's comfortable, I can read, nothing is happening on the page'."
Eye specialist Stephen Best, chairman of the New Zealand branch of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists, said the concept of Irlen syndrome and its treatment was of interest.
"This appears to work in some people. We would be interested to see long-term results of a scientific study."
