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Keywords

holistic eye care, traditional eye care, vision therapy, eyesight improvement, eye health, diet and vision, glaucoma reversal, brain-eye connection, vision exercises, iridology

Summary

In this enlightening conversation, Dr. Sam Berne discusses the differences between holistic and traditional eye care, emphasizing the importance of treating the root causes of vision problems rather than just the symptoms. He shares his personal journey of overcoming severe nearsightedness through holistic methods and explains how vision therapy can benefit individuals of all ages. The discussion also covers the critical stages of visual development in infants, the distinction between eyesight and vision, and the impact of diet and lifestyle on eye health. Dr. Berne highlights the potential to reverse conditions like glaucoma and cataracts through holistic practices and emphasizes the deep connection between eye health and overall brain

function.

Takeaways

Holistic eye care focuses on treating the cause, not just symptoms.

Vision therapy can improve eyesight at any age.

Early development stages significantly impact visual health.

Eyesight is a static measurement; vision is dynamic.

Diet and lifestyle choices directly affect eye health.

Cataracts and glaucoma can potentially be reversed.

The liver plays a crucial role in eye health.

Craniosacral therapy can improve vision by enhancing circulation.

Emotional and psychological factors influence vision.

The eyes are an extension of the brain, reflecting overall health.

Sound Bites

“We treat the cause instead of the symptom.”

“We can improve our eyesight anytime.”

“I was seeing 2400 on the eye chart.”

“Vision is how the eyes and brain work together.”

“Eyesight is a static measurement.”

“Cataracts can be slowed down or reversed.”

“The liver is critical for absorbing nutrients.”

“The eyes are the brain.”

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Holistic Eye Care

02:03 Understanding Holistic vs Traditional Eye Care

03:58 Personal Journey to Improved Vision

12:17 The Importance of Early Development in Vision

18:19 Distinguishing Eyesight from Vision

22:32 The Role of Diet and Lifestyle in Eye Health

28:20 Reversing Glaucoma and Liver Health

33:05 The Connection Between Eyes and Brain Health

Sam Berne (00:01)

Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast today. So I’m being interviewed by Ashley Dealey and she is a wellness practitioner. She’s got a big following on Instagram. So I’ve agreed to be on her show and I thought I would do a recording and share it with you. So enjoy this it’s new information and here we go.

Why don’t you call me Dr. Sam? Okay, Dr. Sam. then this is also when I remind my guests this is not a live podcast. Okay, so if something’s on the tip of your tongue or maybe your alarm goes off, don’t worry. I’ll edit it out. Okay. And then this is usually when I ask my guests to make sure to put their phone on do not disturb or airplane mode. Yep. That’s good too.

We’re good to go. I would say, well, let’s just see how it goes. I don’t have a hard stop. yeah, we’re good.

Yes. So I am just so excited that you’re here. If at any point you need to take a break, just let me know. Okay. edit this. So I’m going to go ahead and get started. Like I always do. Okay. Dr. Sam. Welcome to the show. It’s great to be here. Thank you, Ashley, for having me so excited. I feel like

matches mine and I’m just thrilled to have someone so open-minded here.

is to get a good understanding of what’s the difference between holistic eye care and traditional eye care. It’s pretty simple because in holistic eye care, what I’m doing is looking for the cause instead of treating the symptom. Also, I would say number two that I’m looking at the eyes as it relates to our metabolic systemic

and psychological, emotional, spiritual health. And number three, the eyes are interrelated and interconnected to our awareness, our diet, our lifestyle, our stress. So it’s not just genetics. Yes, there’s epigenetics, but there are many factors that influence how we see and it actually starts very early in our life. And so when I

figure out, okay, what are the causes? We treat those. Lots of times the symptoms actually just go away.

So are you saying we could improve our eyesight anytime? Yes, we can from infants to elders. That’s the scope of my population, my community. I did it on myself very early on in my career. I was very nearsighted and I met a holistic eye doctor and I went through his physical vision therapy program.

And in a period about six months, my eyesight improved to 2020 and I didn’t need my lenses anymore. And so I am firsthand experience of people being able to improve their vision at any age. Yes.

That’s a fascinating story that I really want to dive into because I feel like in a regular optometrist office, you’re going to read an eye chart, be fitted for glasses or contacts, and then buy your prescription for glasses or contacts. So can you please tell me, how did you find this doctor and how did you change your vision?

Hmm. Well, I was in a study group in the Northeast. That’s where I went to school. That’s where I grew up and I had heard about this doctor. He was in the 70s. His name was Dr. Albert A. Shankman and he wrote a book called Vision Enhancement Training. So he was a physical therapy type optometrist who practiced in Connecticut and he was, you know, on the shady side of the mountain of his career.

And he was inviting certain young optometrists to year-long training on teaching us his methods of holistic vision care. And so I resonated with it because I had always been really open-minded. You know, even as a child growing up, there was a there was an openness that I had and a curiosity. So even though I went to a very conventional

Optometry School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania College of Optometry, which I’m really grateful I graduated there because it was a very disease focused, eye disease focused type practice school. And I had done some experiences in internships where I worked in holistic optometry practices. One was in California, one was in the East Coast. And I also had just finished a

program learning how to treat children on the spectrum disorders. And this was called the Gazelle Institute in New Haven, Connecticut. So I was already primed to practice this way. And then when Dr. Shankman set that invitation, I jumped on it and I started to become a student of his. And then I went to him as a patient and started doing physical vision therapy. And that’s how I transformed

the habits and patterns in my eyes. So that’s the short story.

Well, I feel like I’m on the edge of my seat because now I want the long story. What was the physical vision therapy that you did to change your eyes and a two-part question? What was your eyesight before you saw him? So before I saw him, I was seeing 2400 on the eye chart. So that’s the biggie. I needed a really strong nearsighted prescription in order to function. And what?

What he offered was a mind body approach. So he was a yoga teacher and he also taught meditation. you know, there there are I exercise programs out there that are very mechanical. So if you do certain amount of exercises every day, your eyesight gets better. But as soon as you stop doing the exercises, your eyes get worse.

What he did was he really focused on what our belief systems were around our vision our attitudes and he worked a lot with our movements our body movement and different lens prescriptions that we would use as exercise prescriptions. He worked a lot with each eye separately and we delved into what were some of the psycho-emotional patterns around why we developed our vision.

I was nearsighted. That was my diagnosis. Nearsighted is I pull the world in, I tighten up, I get very defensive and you know, I was a memorizer. I always had a hard time learning to read. My mom took me to a lot of different educational tutors and we could never figure out why I wasn’t a good reader. And so I became a memorizer and I went to an eye doctor and he gave me nearsighted glasses when I was about eight years old. at 10.

up my eyes, but it didn’t really treat the problem, which was Dr. Shankman diagnosed me as having

my two eyes not working together and my left eye wandering out. And that’s why I saw double vision and I had poor attention. So through his vision therapy techniques, I was able to learn to coordinate both eyes together. So my double vision went away and my reading took off. And so then I didn’t need the tension in my eye muscles to do the work, the schoolwork that I was asked to do. And so since I didn’t need that tension anymore, I methodically started to reduce

my prescription and with each prescription reduction I

I felt more relaxation in my nervous system and more openness. remember I had started a practice in Philadelphia and one day my staff said to me, know, you’re really different. What what’s happening? You seem more relaxed and I said, well, I’m going through vision therapy and my my eyes are more relaxed. Therefore, I’m more relaxed and they said, yeah, you don’t have your edge. You’re not as intense. So that’s that was a real breakthrough moment for me to really

I

how strongly my vision affected my affect my behavior my reactions and when I got to the point where I didn’t need my prescription anymore. was able to see possibilities in a different way and that’s what inspired me to move out to New Mexico because I didn’t have the fear anymore. I could see possibilities and so I sold my Pennsylvania interests and moved to Santa Fe. This was in 1990 and

up a holistic practice there. But that moment of wow, I could actually do it and you know that that permission, know, most eye doctors you go to their offices and you know, bless their heart. Their whole thing is let’s measure and give you the strongest prescription. But what they’re actually doing is perpetuating the same problem. They’re not really treating the problem. They’re treating the symptom and that’s why people get strong.

stronger and stronger glasses like you referenced. Yeah, you get new glasses every year because the doctor keeps increasing your prescription and that’s a formula for making your eyes even worse by wearing that super strong prescription that he or she is giving you. And of course, there’s the the feedback that you get this strong prescription to go. Wow, I’m dizzy. I’m nauseous. I don’t like it. It’s making me sick and you go back and the doctor says well, don’t worry. You’ll you’ll get used to it.

And you don’t want to get used to something that’s making you dizzy or nauseous, but that’s what we do. We internalize a lot of our visual experiences through our eyes, but we have no place to express it except, know, swallow it. Just, you know, this is how it is kid.

So I’ve really over the years have helped thousands and thousands of people get free of just the programming that has been put into them by going to the eye doctor’s offices.

with that story, especially about being a bad.

reader because I have a cousin who has a nine year old and he doesn’t like to read. And so now I’m wondering, does he need to see a holistic eye doctor? And I also really like what you say about treating the whole person because I feel like in the mainstream conventional medical structure that we have, it’s a sick care system and the eyes are separate. Why would anybody look at anything else when you could just look at the eyes? So I would love

to hear how you help treat infants all the way to elderly people. So with infants, first of all, one of the most there are three really important stages. One is in utero.

That’s when our sensory systems really start developing. We’re floating in our mom’s waters. And so that’s developing our peripheral vision, our vestibular system. And then the second…

milestone is when we actually are born and that imprint of when we come out of the birth canal or if it’s a c-section or There’s the forceps delivery or there’s been some stress birth trauma really impacts our sensory motor systems And then number three is the bonding period, know what we go through like initially when you’re born and you’re laying on your mom and there’s this oxytocin flowing through and all this love, you know kids that are put in incubators or

or, know, preemie babies or, you know, all kinds of weird things that happen that affects our sensory motor development as well. I’m including the eyes in that because our eyes originate from the brain very early on after conception. So every structure of the eyeball is brain. In fact, the eyes are the only part of the brain that sit out of what we call the cranial vault, the skull, but the eyes are such a an intimate part of our brain.

And that’s why we can improve our vision because there’s a neuroplasticity capability in our vision if we’re shown the way and so in infants a lot of times they may be diagnosed with crossed eyes or lazy eyes. Well, the last thing you want to do is put glasses on a child or do eye muscle surgery at that age. There are stimulating activities that can help improve an infant’s vision very early on and we call it visual stimuli.

because their world is mostly

you know here and so there are definitely prescribed activities that you can do to help an infant then we go into a toddler and then you know we go into a you know a child the the the things of learning how to hop and skip and swing on a swing and go down a slide and you know spin these are all things that help develop our vision and our sensory motor program.

So I want to make a distinction here between eyesight and vision. Eyesight is reading the eye chart at 20 feet. That’s a static measurement and that’s eyeballs and glasses. Vision is how the eyes and the brain and the body work together. So it’s very much brain centered. Most eye exams are eyesight based and then they check for disease. They’re not testing for vision.

And vision is a skill that you start developing in utero. These three experiences that I’ve named have a strong influence on our visual coordination, our visual tracking, our visual focus, even though it’s very early in the nonverbal time.

And then as a child develops and they’re learning to read, they need to have those visual skills to be able to read. I I certainly didn’t have those skills and sounds like the nine-year-old you referenced maybe has a deficit in the visual skills. So it affects our visual processing, our visual thinking, our visual moving. All of those things can be repaired through vision therapy, which is a reeducation.

process of relearning of how the eyes, brain, and body work together. Now if we fast forward to adults, when we hit age 40 we start needing reading glasses, our arms aren’t long enough.

Well, when you start wearing magnifying glasses that actually weakens the eye muscles and so then you get addicted to these magnifiers and they only make your eyes worse. So there are exercises that you can use to repattern the eye muscles in the brain. So you don’t need those magnifying glasses. All right. Now let’s move to age 60 870. This is when people start developing conditions like cataracts like over 90 % of the population.

is going to develop cataracts. Well, cataract is really oxidative stress that accumulates in the protein of the lens and in early stage cataracts and or if you’re proactive, you can actually slow down the progression of cataracts and even reverse cataracts.

Macular degeneration is the number one leading cause of blindness today. Why is that? Well, it’s related related somewhat to our diet, our stress, our screen time. And so there are protocols that you can do to slow down or even reverse macular degeneration. And the third big died disease is glaucoma, which is a problem with eye pressure and it affects our peripheral vision. Well, there are things that you can do to slow

that degradation down and in some cases even reverse glaucoma. So now you’ve seen the spectrum from infants to elders that you know, these are the people that I work with.

my goodness, you just gave me so much information. I’m going to, excuse me, I’m going to unpack some of what you said bit by bit. And where I wanted to start was.

You said that eyesight isn’t the same as vision and there’s exercises that we can do to strengthen our eyes. So Dr. Sam, can you walk me through the shape of the eye, the muscles and what we can do to strengthen our eyes? Okay, so the eyes sit in an eye socket.

This bony orbit and there’s six eye muscles two on the top two on the bottom one on the outside one on the inside. Those are called extraocular muscles. So they help us track and move and rotate our eyes very important for eye movement. So the brain has got to be really connected to controlling those six muscles and then inside the eye. There’s a tiny little lens like maybe a third of the way back from the front.

of the eye and that lens has little ligaments or ciliary muscles we call them to change the shape of the lens. know, and based on that, that helps us with our focus, our ability to see clearly. Now what happens is when we start develop blurry vision, we go to the eye doctor and there’s a deficit. We don’t see the eye chart as well. And then there’s the whole question of which lens is clear number one or number two and let’s

Let’s say you’re having a bad day. Let’s say you’re a mom and your your child is sick and you’re worried about her and you’re going to this exam and it’s a high-pressured situation to begin with and he’s flipping the lenses, which is clear one or two one or two. Come on. You got to pick one. So you pick number two and you’re you’re stressed out to begin with that lens fixes your vision in that particular position based on that bad day that you were having. So then for the next year.

to you’re looking through this lens this reality based on a decision you made and most likely it’s going to be too strong for you. And again, we’re just treating the symptoms here. There are

relaxation exercises, their eye movement exercises. There are awareness exercises that can help release the tension which then gets rid of the blur. So that’s one thing. Then the other aspect is what do you eat? You know, what’s your diet like?

And one of the modalities that I use is I analyze the colored part of the eye. The colored part of the eye is called the iris and the

process is called uredology and the iris is a map to the entire body. And so I take really good pictures of the irises and I look for patterns and those patterns can tell me genetic tendencies like what has been passed down through the genes. The right eye is the father eye. The left eye is the mother eye or the grandfather grandmother.

And then you could look at things like your liver health liver gallbladder health because the liver is rules the eyes in Chinese medicine.

We can look at the pancreas and what your blood sugar levels is. So sugar is really poisonous for your eyes. We can look at your thyroid health. We can look at, your respiratory health, your heart health. So iridology and it’s been around for a long time. It was actually really fathered in by a doctor named Bernard Jensen. You could Google him and I became certified in iridology. I’ve taken all the tests and studied it. And so it’s well part of my

If somebody is having an unusual vision problem, I will do an iridology analysis and that tells me a lot about what they should be eating, what supplements, what herbs, what essential oils, flower essences, lots of things. And based on that, it’s a roadmap to bring people’s vision back to health. So it’s that two-pronged. One is more functional and the second is more on the biochemical.

said about the liver. I’ve heard you mention that before, but I also want to go back to where we were going to unpack that first lot of information. So I was also curious to learn.

little bit more about, let’s say you put on those glasses and you say they weaken your muscles around around your eyes. So what can we do then, and maybe this is a bit redundant from what you already said, but what can we do to wean ourselves off of wearing glasses?

Well, I think finding a doctor who does physical therapy, vision therapy because it’s going to be a combination of what habits created the blurry vision that that’s kind of what happened in my case. What were the habits that created?

The prescription so in nearsightedness my habit was I pulled the world in and farsightedness people tend to push the world away in astigmatism. They twist the world. So when the doctor is testing the eyesight the doctor also needs to test. Well, what are the visual habits? What are the visual skills that have created the blurry eyesight?

And then based on that, maybe giving 60 or 70 % of the prescription so that you can function, so you can pass the driver’s test and you can drive and you can read, but then starting to do physical vision therapy and it’s very individualized based on what your deficits are.

And then you can start wearing a reduced prescription. That’s what I did. That was what I shared when I was in my office. I had a prescription for driving and I had a reduced prescription that I wore indoors. And the more I wore that reduced prescription, my eyes flexed into that reduced prescription. And then eventually it became my distance prescription. So I incrementally started to reduce that first prescription that the doctor gave me.

You know, another thing that works really well is in non demanding and non threatening situations start taking your glasses or contacts off. There’s a practice I recommend called going on a vision retreat. It’s called a vision quest and if you wear lenses, you take four hours on a weekend like a Saturday or a Sunday and you don’t put your lenses in at all and you

function without the lenses and you use the experience to learn about your reactions without having the lenses in what is your relationship with blur? Are you totally dependent on your lenses or can you function what comes up for you emotionally spiritually energetically when you don’t go without these lenses? It’s kind of like a vision detox.

I saw you do detox stuff. Well, this is a vision detox where you take the lenses off and you don’t wear them. Remember the lenses are approved by the FDA. They’re a drug and they have side effects. And so when you start

Weaning yourself off a drug, you’re going to have side effects and the toxicities that have been created from this prescription are going to start to show up. And so in this vision quest or vision retreat where you sequester yourself in an environment where there’s no demands on you and you can start to really notice what your patterns are. So this is a question for all your listeners who wear glasses or

Context take them off and give me three belief systems that you feel around blurry vision.

And just to kind of cue people a little bit give them a context most people in blurry vision a feel out of control be are afraid they’re going to get hurt and see they’re afraid they may get criticized. So all of those things creates a fear and a hypervigilance in their attitude. So when I have a hypervigilant attitude, I got to be on, you know, fight or flight all the time. I’m going to put that that

fear through my eyeballs. That’s one of the main causes of why people need glasses because of that, that early programming in the hypervigilance that they’re having to deal with. So it’s a, it’s a very interesting way of healing from the inside out, looking at your thoughts and belief systems and attitudes of what created the blur to begin with.

It reminds me of a book that I read about 10 years ago that I found completely fascinating where this person had multiple personality disorder. And in one of her personalities, she needed reading glasses. And in the other personality, she had perfect vision. And that was the first time that I think the light had kind of…

peeked open for me or at least peeked my interest and I couldn’t believe someone could change their eyesight. I found it so fascinating. So I really resonate with what you’re saying about people’s habits and lifestyles and what are their environments like. I also wanted to go back to where you said you could potentially reverse glaucoma and talking about the liver in Chinese medicine. So can you walk me through how can we possibly reverse glaucoma?

Okay. Well, I’m to start off with when I first moved to Santa Fe and Santa Fe is a pretty alternative community, even though an eye doctor’s there. There was no alternative eye doctors, but there were, I think at the time to acupuncture schools. And so I enrolled in one of them because I wanted to learn the relationship between the eyes and acupuncture. And I remember one of the very early lectures.

And the professor knew I was a practicing licensed eye doctor. He looked at me and he said, did you know that the liver and the gallbladder are critical for our ability to absorb fat soluble nutrients? And did you also know that some of the most famous fat soluble nutrients are really important for the eyes like vitamin A lutein?

and zeaxanthin and moat and he said most people have a congested liver and gallbladder because of the toxicities we’re living in and we could go into you know variety of reasons it could be dental health mercury amalgams it could be trauma in the head it could be being exposed to

mold or you know those kinds of toxins parasites yeast infections in any case the liver the meridians go right to the eyes and that if you clean up the liver and the gallbladder your eyesight is going to get better and I remember studying herbs and milk thistle and burdock root and yellow dock. I would give those to people that had you know eye diseases for example, like you mentioned glaucoma.

And lo and behold, their eye pressure would come back to normal or their cataracts would would reduce or their macular degeneration would get better. I call macular degeneration by the way, macular regeneration so that you know that that mindset is like, you know, we hear that diagnosis and it’s just like game over not really. So in any case the

That the liver gallbladder is so important in doing some kind of cleansing or supporting and I’ve seen it thousands of times where people’s eyesight gets better. The glasses reduce their their eye disease goes away and in doing acupuncture you’re redistributing the energy. let’s say you have a puffy or you have swollen this around the eyes. If you start doing acupuncture either around the eyes, but you can also

do it, know, distally in other places. It actually redistributes the energy and by redistributing the energy those symptoms go away. So the liver and the gallbladder and I’m going to also add our digestive health, our spleen, our

pancreas our thyroid, you know, all those endocrine glands have a very strong influence on our visual system and part of it is because this is such a blood vessel rich area, you know, and we require a lot of oxygenation and hydration to keep those oxidative stress molecules away. And one of the issues that I see with most people is they have a lot of oxidative stress. They have low

and the killer is inflammation. And so when they’ve got that inflammation and their lymph system isn’t working well.

You know, for example, in iridology, if you’ve got blue eyes, you’re what we call lymphatic. You need to take really good care of your lymph system or you’re going to have all kinds of health issues and eye issues. And the other thing is you need you need to stay away from gluten, dairy, sugar, because as a blue-eyed person, the lymphatic system, it’s very easy for you to get inflammation and that’s going to be a killer for you. So, you know, there’s all these connections. I think you want to

say something so I’m gonna turn it over to you what you

Eye health is so important and it seems like one of those things that isn’t quite moving in the medical field. Everyone takes their kids to the eye doctor. Everyone has the same vision test. And I’ve heard you say, I’ve done a lot of research on you before and I’ve heard you say the eyes are an extension of the brain all the way from in utero. So knowing that.

and what you mentioned about taking care of ourselves, no sugar, no gluten. What can you tell me about the relationship with the eyes and the brain?

Well, the eyes are the brain. They’re, you know, an outer representation. Some of the latest research is showing that we can actually see amyloid plaques in the retina or the optic nerve. And that could be the early stages of Alzheimer’s or dementia by looking at the eyes.

Another thing that we can say is that if you can improve the cerebral spinal fluid from the brain to the eyes and the eyes to the brain, you can lower eye pressure, which is the glaucoma situation.

So another modality that I studied when I moved to Santa Fe was I was working with kids with birth trauma. I work a lot with occupational therapists and physical therapists and teachers and all these kids had birth trauma and some of them had strabismus, the eyes were crossing, they had learning issues and it was mentioned to me, I think you need to learn craniosacral therapy. So I enrolled in the massage school. Well, first I went to the upledger.

Institute and I took a lot of their courses, which I really liked and that was more muscular skeletal level and then at the massage school I learned the biodynamic craniosacral so that was more of the fluid part of the body and I began doing craniosacral on my patients and this is a really interesting story. So people would come in and I’d measure their eyesight at distance and I’d measure their prescription and then my massage table was right next to my eye exam equipment. So I’d say lay down and I’ll

do an hour of craniosacral and then after the craniosacral session, I put them back in the exam chair and invariably their prescription was 30 to 50 % less and that’s what I would give them and they would love those prescriptions because their system was relaxed. It was the nervous system was balanced. They weren’t in that, you know, one or two or in that machine the foropter. So it taught me that craniosacral has a very strong effect.

on the cranial nerves and the muscles and the fascia and the connective tissue around the eyes. And as I got more into traumatic brain injury patients, that was another thing that I researched and that was back in Philadelphia.

It’s funny because when I first opened, I opened a practice up with a holistic eye doctor whose name is Dr. Ellis Edelman and he was like one of my great mentors and we became partners and he passed away about 10 years ago, but.

One of the things that happened was I couldn’t get any patients to come see me. It was really difficult because Philadelphia at that time was very medically oriented. So I went to the local hospitals and I volunteered with the physiatrist there that hey, I can work with your brain injury patients. They all have double vision. They can’t walk there, you know, they can’t read their memory is off. And so I began applying a lot of these physical therapy.

exercises and color therapy and you know some of the other techniques I learned and they all got better and so from that experience I began to start to get patients word-of-mouth because I was doing this great work and with the TBI population. The other thing I did in Philadelphia and I still do this today I work with special needs kids. So these are kids that have been written off Down syndrome, minimal brain dysfunction, severe developmental delays, severe autism. So I started

working with these kids and they got better. And so that was another way that I word of mouth. was like, hey, this guy’s working with special needs. He’s working with TBIs. The regular eye doctors don’t have the time or interest to work with these populations. fast forward when I moved to Santa Fe, I affiliated with a clinic in Albuquerque called Kid Power. You could look it up, Kid Power Associates. And I began consulting there and I still do to

This day I go down a couple times a year from Santa Fe.

This population is amazing because these kids are been written off and they’re doing primitive reflex therapy and vision therapy and sound therapy and craniosacral and nutrition stuff and I’ve kind of helped them in certain areas. And so it’s a great match to do that. But the craniosacral is so important around the brain health because it just improving the circulation. You think about a newborn that there’s a forceps delivery. Well, what they

want to do is put a helmet on a kid and try to force the skull to go back into alignment. I mean, it’s Neanderthal stuff. But if you do craniosacral, then this starts to breathe more the cranial rhythm and this is going to affect not only the eyes, but the ears and the body and the whole situation. It’s pretty obvious how interrelated the eyes and the brain are. So here’s a statistic. The eyes in the brain make up 2 % of the body weight.

and use 25 % of the food intake. So 25 % of what we eat is needed in this metabolically needed area. And that’s why what we eat has such a strong effect.

on our eyesight and vision. And when I started to study functional medicine, I could see the relationship in this eye brain health and then the gut, you know how the gut and the eyes and the brain come together. I’ll say one more thing because this is another really nice story. So when I was writing my first book in Santa Fe, it’s called creating your personal vision. I wrote that book in 1994. You can still get it in their new editions out now. I think you can get it on Amazon.

but

I was interviewing a woman who was a master nutritionist and her name was Dr. Hazel Parcells and Dr. Parcells was 103 when I met her and she was just starting a retreat center in northern New Mexico. And so I became a student of hers for three years. She died at 106 and taught me a lot about energy healing and other things that are a little more esoteric that we could get into if you want to. But

Dr. amazing around nutrition. knew food combining, what to cook with, and we had a good run together. There’s a book about her called Live Better Longer. The author’s name is Dispensas. So your listeners out there, they want to learn about Dr. Parcells. What an amazing woman.

But she was really focused on the brain, the eyes, the nutrition, and it kind of all came together for me when I moved to Santa Fe. I met some extraordinary people that kind of pushed me in different directions.