Welcome to the EyeClarity podcast! In today’s episode, I share a powerful story about a patient diagnosed with glaucoma and the shocking way the news was delivered. This incident highlighted the importance of going beyond the routine eye exam and considering the patient’s unique needs. Glaucoma diagnosis can be challenging, but incorporating functional vision tests can lead to major breakthroughs. Don’t miss these valuable insights into comprehensive eye care. Enjoy the show!

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

glaucoma, eye, eye exam, vision, optic nerve, open angle glaucoma, doctor, diagnose, prescription, visual, test, major breakthrough, important, health, give, access, pressure, prescribed, missed, delivered

00:05

Hey everybody, its Dr. Sam and I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. So before we get to today’s show, I’m going to give you some ways to contact me, you can send me your questions at Hello@drsamberne.com. Or you can text them to me at 1-844-932-1291. I want to let you know about my new membership program. This is an exclusive membership where you get access to my content and resources, new information, articles, videos, webinars, even a live q&a, where I will answer your questions. So you’ll be able to access valuable information to empower you to make informed decisions about your vision and your health. I’ll be offering personalized support and coaching, giving you recommendations, helping you with goal setting accountability, so you can achieve your goals. This is a convenient way for you to access me 24/7 Without paying for appointments, or going to your doctor every week. So I’m so excited about this, I hope you can join me. And by the way, if you do join, you’ll get access to my advanced workshops in aromatherapy, color and light therapy, nutrition and physical vision therapy. So the sign up go to my website www.drsamberne.com. Now to today’s show.

02:09

Everyone, welcome to the program. So today’s episode is titled, The advice that goes beyond the eye exam. Recently, I saw a patient who was diagnosed with glaucoma. And that’s serious enough, but the way the doctor delivered, the message was even more mind blowing to me. So the story goes like this. Somebody called us and said, You know, I want a second opinion. And we had some space. So she came into the office here. And I asked her, you know why she came and she said that she had had a conversation at the end of her last eye exam where the doctor said, and oh, by the way, you’re diagnosed with glaucoma. And it’s early stages, but you know, you’re probably going to go blind. And I’m gonna go on to my next patient. So she sat there, she was very upset, she was devastated.

And there was absolutely no emotional support, or anything beyond here’s the diagnosis and goodbye. And this happens more frequently than not and you know, speaking from somebody who used to be in a busy private practice, and you start seeing lots of people, you get kind of dumbed down, you know, where everybody looks like they’re the same and that, you know, you’ve delivered the message 1000s of times in, you’ve got this diagnosis, and you’re gonna go blind. So, we sat there for a few minutes, and she processed a little bit. Definitely she was traumatized. And as we went through the records, it became clear to me that she was more of a glaucoma suspect, than she had full blown glaucoma. And there are three main ways that you diagnose glaucoma.

The first is obviously the eye pressure, and that’s an important test. The second is the health of the optic nerve. And the third is the visual fields testing. And I had the good fortune when I was in my training that I studied with some ophthalmologists who were specialists in the area of glaucoma, and I would shatter them and it was very interesting for me at that time, because they weren’t sure when they saw certain patients whether they had glaucoma or not. And it became kind of a detective story where they had to do a number of tests multiple times before they could make a definitive diagnosis. Now not to minimize glaucoma because it is a very serious disease. And it’s also a silent disease, we don’t really know that we have it until we start losing our peripheral vision.

Now in most types of glaucoma, especially open angle glaucoma, there’s no eye sensation, like we have eye pain or I, you know, eye inflammation or things like that. Now a narrow angle glaucoma, different story, you can certainly experience pain. But in regular open angle glaucoma, it’s pretty quiet. And this is why it’s important, especially if there’s a genetic predisposition that you get your pressures checked regularly, you get an optic nerve analysis, maybe through an O CT, and also do a visual fields test. So you monitor those things. But the bottom line is that Glaucoma is pretty hard to diagnose.

And in this particular case, it was pretty sketchy because we went went back and looked at some of her earlier photographs and her eye exam records. And her eye pressures were normal, the optic nerves looked the same, they hadn’t changed. And the visual fields were normal as well. And this is where I bring in another very important point that is completely missed by most of the eye care field. And that is how we use our eyes affects the anatomy and the physiology. So let me explain in this case, this person does very fine work as hair removal, and it’s a very stressful job visually. And you know, you usually use some kind of a magnification loop.

Anyways, it’s a very intense visual demand. And she was also wearing trifocals, not transition progressive lenses, but straight line bifocals. And when I tested to see how well the two eyes work together, on a functional level, the left eye was shutting off, the brain was shutting off the left eye.

And this is important to note that, you know, we can do all the eye health tests, we can check the eye chart readings. But if we are not testing how well the two eyes are working together, we call this by nodular vision, then we’re missing a very big point in the brains relationship division. Remember, I said in a few podcasts ago, that I say n is glasses, reading the eye chart is glasses. And vision is brain. And we can do a great eyesight exam. But if we don’t do a vision exam, where we’re checking to see how the eye brain connection is, then we’re missing out. And in this particular case, a lot of the symptoms of the visual stress visual deterioration, eye pain in the right eye, was due mostly to how she was using both eyes together.

When I showed her our binocular vision test, basically, the left side of the image, the left eye seeing that was blanking out there was it was was coming and going coming and going. And this really surprised her it freaked her out. It was a epiphany, you know, we we explained exactly what was going on. And in the end, this was a major breakthrough for her to understand that on a functional level, her left eye and her right eye were not working together. And in fact, the right eye was doing most of the work. The other thing that was really amazing about this is that her current eyeglass prescription. I had to read the chart, and she could read all the way down to the very bottom line, which unless you’re going to be an astronaut for NASA is really overkill. It’s unnecessary.

So when I gave her a reduced prescription immediately, she said, Oh, my eyes feel more relaxed, and I can still see the eye chart. So this was a signal that she was wearing a prescription that was way too strong for her. And I blame this on how the eye exam is done. And I’m just as guilty because it’s the way I learned it. It’s the method I learned. And it wasn’t until I met some mentors who told me about how to prescribe based on looking at the whole person that changed the way I prescribed lenses. So in any event, what we’re going to do is we’re going to reduce her prescription. And that’s going to take away a lot of the eye stress. And that should be a game changer for her in terms of how she feels about her eyes,

10:13

it could be even a contributing factor to some of these soft glaucoma symptoms that she’s having as well. So this was another major breakthrough for her that was entirely missed. The last thing I’m going to say is that, you know, if you ask your doctor, is there anything naturally integrative medicine wise that you can do for glaucoma? And he or she says, No, there’s nothing you can do. That is actually not true. Because there are many, many things that you can do to slow down the progression of glaucoma.

I’ll name a few, first of all, to check into your oxidative stress and your inflammation in the eyes and also in your body, your stress levels, what kind of prescription you’re looking through? Is it a bifocal trifocal, or single vision lens? If you have myopia, maybe you’re over prescribed. These are all, you know, risk factors that can be removed that can actually improve the eye circulation and your peripheral vision. In addition, making sure you’re hydrating your eyes with natural eye drops. Also feeding your eyes with all those great antioxidants that I talk about, especially lutein, zeaxanthin, astaxanthin and vitamin A. And then in terms of optic nerve health, making sure you’re getting enough healthy fats and or oils, Omega three gingko bilberry, taurine just to name a few, that are really important for optic nerve health.

And if you do have a pressure problem problem, there is an herb out there called coleus, which you could look up. And there have been small studies done to say that when you take this herb, it actually reduces your eye pressure. Jumping on a mini trampoline has been shown to bring high pressure down getting cranial sacral therapy changes the relationship of the cerebral spinal fluid into the eye that can lower the pressure, even meditation. I’ve done a video blog, you can Google it, where I talk about how meditation actually can bring down your eye pressure. So there’s lots of things that you can do.

It is a serious condition. It’s it’s very important that you track it. But the eyedrops and the eye surgery are the court of last resort. And to make sure that if you’re going to somebody, they have a deep experience on recognizing what is glaucoma, and can they definitively diagnose it, and also the delivery and how they give it to you is in such a way that you they’re not just gonna walk out of the room like this doctor did. And you know, maybe he was having a bad day or again, you know, he was burned out who knows. But the thing is, is this is collateral damage with this person. This is happening all the time, and I care practices. And I think that if you’re delivering some very serious news, you want to at least hang out so that the person has some time to process it at least to some degree. Okay, well, that’s my lesson for today. That’s our show for today. Again, I want to thank you for your support. Thanks for tuning in. And until next time, take care

13:51

Thank you for listening. I hope you learned something from the EyeClarity podcast show today. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to subscribe on iTunes or Spotify and leave a review. See you here next time.