Shalom Baer Gee/MDN Dr. Liza Stremick at her practice at Eyes on Burdick in Minot.

Dr. Liza Stremick opened Eyes on Burdick, a new optometry and vision therapy practice, in November 2021 in Minot.

Stremick, who is originally from Minot, graduated from North Dakota State University with a degree in microbiology. She continued her studies at the Arizona College of Optometry at Midwestern University in Glendale, Arizona, and then completed a residency in Pediatrics, Vision Therapy and Neuro-Optometric Rehabilitation in Louisville, Kentucky.

Eyes on Burdick offers traditional eye exams and contact and glasses prescriptions, eyeglass frames, as well as vision therapy. Vision therapy is used to correct vision issues not treatable with glasses or contacts, such as lazy or crossed eyes, certain reading disabilities, and vision problems caused by traumatic brain injuries or strokes.

“Vision therapy is all the visual skills that go beyond just reading 2020 on the eye chart. It’s your tracking, your depth perception — how you process that information,” Stremick said. “It’s like any new skill that you would want to learn. You practice it, you practice it in different ways, you make those neural pathways and go from there.”

Stremick said that so much of how our eyes operate is tied to the brain, and vision therapy focuses on training the brain itself rather than simply correcting the eyesight.

“Some people think of it as just strengthening the muscle, but it’s not necessarily strengthening, like working it really hard. It’s more coordination and brain stuff. So many neural pathways are tied into vision,” she said.

One of Stremick’s favorite parts of vision therapy is seeing patients’ everyday quality of life improve.

“Sometimes you’re working on this one skill, and you expect the reading to get better, but then they come in at the end and are like, I didn’t notice I was struggling in all these other areas,” Stremick said. “Just seeing how much you can improve their life and their functioning and different things like that is really exciting. It just makes your day.”

After establishing primary care patients, Stremick opened up her books for vision therapy this January.

“We’ve had the chance to work with some other practitioners and share patients and refer back and forth, which is kind of fun,” she said. “We only have three in therapy, but we’ve got new emails every week and are kind of slowly ramping up. We got everything on the other half of the practice settled first.”

Eyes on Burdick will have their grand opening on March 9 with giveaways, drinks, and appetizers. They are located at 1821 Burdick Expressway West in Minot. For more information, visit their website at eyesonburdick.com or call 852-8807.