Let’s talk about how to approach the conversation around eye care with someone you’re close to, whether it’s a family member, friend, or your child. This can be a very delicate conversation. When someone you know is diagnosed with a problem like glaucoma, cataracts, or macular degeneration, I suggest taking a holistic and integrative approach, but it’s important to respect their choices and ask permission before offering advice. So let’s jump into today’s episode. Enjoy the show.

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

eye, vision, health, cataracts, conditions, macula, inflammation, myopia, retina, reduced, floaters, red light, talk, body, ai, open, treating, child, diagnosed, podcast

Hey everybody, it’s Dr. Sam, I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. If you want to get in touch with me with questions, you can email me at hello@drsamberne.com. And you can always text me your questions at 1-844-932-1291. I would like to let you know about my new membership program. This is going to offer members new information on how to improve their vision and wellness. So you will get access to articles, video, blogs, podcasts, and webinars. Also a live q&a with me. And all of this information will empower you to make informed decisions about your vision, and your health. So to sign up to go to my website, drsambernesmembership.com. And you can see the details there. All right now on to the show.

1:37

Everybody, welcome to the program today. So I want to talk about what happens when either your family member or friend gets the eye diagnosis. So let’s say you have a parent, and he or she has been diagnosed with glaucoma, or cataracts or macular degeneration. And the doctor will say something like, well, let’s just watch it. Or let’s schedule you for a procedure. And you being a holistically minded person says maybe there’s something else. So how can you help.

Or let’s say you have a child who’s maybe struggling a little bit in school, or you notice that there’s an eye turn, or he or she covers one of her eyes, and you go to the doctor and he says, Well, you’ve got esotropia or amblyopia. And we need to either patch full time, or you need to do i muscle surgery right away, let’s get this scheduled. Or even if it’s just a friend, a friend who maybe has had a botched cataract surgery, or is facing glaucoma surgery, and you know that there might be a better way, how do you navigate the waters, the day doesn’t go by when somebody will write me and say, you know, I have a family member or a friend who’s got this eye condition. I know there’s a better way. And so you know, I offer certain suggestions and so on.

But this is educational only. So I’m not diagnosing or treating. But how do you handle the dynamics of this? So first of all, I think it’s important to note that everybody is on their own path. And as much as we want to help others, I think it’s important that if you’re going to offer advice that you want to ask permission, you want to make sure that it’s okay. Because some people just aren’t open to a more holistic integrative approach, especially with the eyes. For some reason, we don’t think we can improve our vision. It’s the one part of our body that isn’t going to heal at least that’s what maybe your eye doctor has said, even though people have had healings in so many other areas of their body, why not the eyes? So if you have that conversation, and the person says, Yeah, I’m open to it, what do you have? I think the first thing to do is maybe show some research based on the condition if that’s possible.

I’ve got a good resource list that you can use to show them that, you know, if you do x, it might change Why, certainly with conditions like macular degeneration, the research is pretty rock solid. That says that you know, if you add things like lutein, zeaxanthin, acid Xanthine, Omega three vitamin A zinc, that you have a chance of maybe improving your vision, if you start feeding your eyes with those nutrients. Of course you can get a little more edgy, and you can show them the red light therapy, which the studies have been done by the Jeffrey’s lab I’m in UCL University College London, which said that red light actually might be able to regenerate your eyes, especially the macula. And also there might be a reduction in drusen. You know, some people with red light if they’ve never been exposed to it before, this is a bit of a leap.

But you know, the research is pretty definitive, that red light is definitely helpful, at least in supporting mitochondria function, reducing oxidative stress and inflammation, at least on a body level. Another thing to consider is, you know, how open the person is that you know, diet and nutrition, play a big role in your eye health. And I’ve said this many times that the retina has one of the highest metabolic needs in the body and the macula has the highest metabolic need in the retina. And if we look at all the eye conditions, at least the main ones, we start at the front of the eye, we’ve got conditions like blepharitis, and meibomian gland dysfunction, it comes down to the state of the health of our eyelids, how much inflammation we’re carrying, how much I stress and blue block or blue light exposure we have.

And when we when we have inflammation in the eyelids, of course, this leads to dry eye, and cornea health, more problems like cataracts, of course, cataracts are formed because of oxidative stress, and also the glycation process. That glucose molecule attaching itself to the protein molecule of the lens is the person really willing to reduce their sugars and eat a more natural, organic, non GMO, low or no pesticide type foods, this is really important food is medicine. And if you can heal your gut, it’s going to have a positive impact on your eyes. And the more inflammation you have in your body, the more it’s going to create eye problems, as we know this, so this this is kind of the first conversation you can have. As we move further back. Of course, floaters are disturbing, but they’re not sight threatening, although people have a real emotional response to floaters. Again, some people get so frustrated and angry with their floaters. And again, it comes down to how can you boost your vitreous health, collagen health. And you’ve seen many of my video blogs to talk about that. And even things like posterior vitreous detachment, there are things that you can do to reverse that.

And then of course, then we move to the retina, we’ve got the optic nerve and the retina and the macula. And so that covers the eyes. Nutrition is an easy way to start. If you start making changes, this is a way for you to start seeing improvement in your eyesight. You know, I’ll never forget when I got into practice very early on my first practice was in the Philadelphia area. And I didn’t know very much when I started my practice, I knew I was committed to holistic optometry, but I used to counsel people just to change their diet. That’s it, you know, just eat a more healthy diet. And they’d come back and three and six and nine months later, and their cataracts were reduced, or their macular degeneration was reduced or their glaucoma, they weren’t taking as many medications they’re dry was less their myopia was less. So I saw early on the relationship, the connection between what we eat and how we see, obviously, eyes and vision relate to our lifestyle, our stress, how well we sleep, our relationships.

And all of these things contribute to the eventuality that if we don’t take care of ourselves, we have a higher risk of developing all these different AI diagnoses and conditions that the eye doctor is great at figuring out. So in the conversation that you have with your friends and your parents, these would be some of the places that I can start and then you can maybe turn them on to some of my content or other people’s content, who talk about holistic healing and functional medicine, things that are you know, steeped in research and you know, testimonials and things like that. If they go more deeply into it, then they can get into the AI exercise realm. But that would not be a place that I would start because that takes more commitment. It takes more buy in and you know if they’re open minded to doing it if they’ve done other things like yoga, or Feldenkrais, or you know, any kind of body centered practice mind body, meditation, those kinds of things, then they may be more open to the eye exercise therapy.

That’s certainly true. Now with kids, you or your child, if they had been diagnosed with a high condition like strabismus, or amblyopia, or high hyperopia or myopia or astigmatism, there are physical therapy exercises, in my opinion, that work so well organically in helping the child re educate, reprogram how their eyes connect to their brain and body. And taking a developmental approach, where you start looking at the arc of development from gestation, birth, and the first few years of life, these experiences definitely can impact a child’s sensory motor development, I put their vision in there as well, traumas have a huge impact on our visual system. You know, more and more professionals are talking about the effects of trauma, and how it affects our mental health. And our mental health and our vision are very tied in together. I’ll never forget one of my mentors, saying that vision is mostly mental, what we think about as what we see what we project and what we manifest.

Now, I know that’s kind of a metaphor, but it actually rings true on a physical practical level, that what we think will impact what we see and what we believe. And if we change our thinking, we can change what we’re seeing. And so with kids, especially because of their plasticity, I would definitely seek out a more organic physical therapy type program, instead of doing something invasive and traumatizing, like surgery, or long term patching, that stuff just doesn’t work, even though that’s what the mainstream promotes. It’s really fixing a symptom. And I think if there’s one takeaway today, when you talk to your family members, your friends, or your thinking about your children, or even yourself, is do you want to be in the fixed model, which is just treating symptoms? Or do you want to get to the causative factors, and realize that at least in the vision world, there’s physical, emotional, energetic, and psychological reasons why we develop our eyes in the way we do. And if you think of it that way, and you want to treat the cause, then you can seek out a more holistic approach and it works very well. It takes more time. It takes more persistence, consistency, commitment, but the results are amazing.

12:37

So digest that for a while. I want to thank you so much for tuning in today. Until next time, take care.

12:50

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.