eyeClarity Podcast

eyeClarity Podcast


Traumatic Brain Injury and Vision

January 30, 2023

In this episode, I give a lecture on how traumatic brain injuries can affect your vision. I discuss a variety of techniques that reduce trauma including vision therapy and color therapy. We also cover how to navigate your eye disease diagnosis and how screen time affects your vision. Enjoy the show!


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SUMMARY KEYWORDS


eyes, symptoms, vision, trauma, diet, retina, deterioration, people, prescription, creates, screen, eyesight, topic, oxygenation, lens, doctor, brain, improve, disease, health


00:06


Hello, everyone, it’s Dr. Sam, I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. This is a show that offers cutting edge information on how to improve your vision and overall wellness through holistic methods. I so appreciate you spending part of your day with me. If you have questions, you can send them to hello@drsamberne.com.


Hey everybody it’s Dr. Sam and I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. Before we get to today’s show, you can always text me your questions 1-844-932-1291 Or send me an email hello@drsamberne.com.


I’ve got a couple of great workshops coming up in March in Southern California. I’ll be in San Diego March 5, LA March 7, and Santa Barbara March 12 doing my famous masterclass. I’m back doing that again in person. This is a great way to work with me one on one, if you’ve got an issue that you haven’t been able to solve. Register Here.


And I’ll be doing some book events. As you know, my new book, Vital Vision is coming out the end of February, we’re in a pre sale right now. So if you want to order the book, you’ll get a discount. And there are also some events happening. You can sign up and we can do an online workshop that’s going to be happening in April. Also, you can get some coaching one on one sessions with me if you buy the book, and I’ll be doing a gathering in Santa Fe in September. This is gonna be a small group at my geo-dome. So if you’d like to register for that, we’d love to have you.


Preorder the book here OR learn about my book events here.


00:44


I want to start off with a couple of topics. These are questions that people have emailed me. And then definitely, I want to get to you bring you up on stage. So I want to start off, and the first topic I want to speak about is trauma, trauma and the eyes. And this is a topic that in my profession, unless you’re doing some kind of rehabilitation, therapy, for vision, a lot of times you get symptoms that you don’t really even know they’re connected in a way where the trauma is connected to your vision. And, you know, for almost all of us, we’ve had some kind of a, you know, trauma, car accident, fall, it could be even emotional or spiritual psychological trauma.


And because of the relationship between the eyes and the brain, it’s very common that a person can suffer vision problems when they have trauma. But because the trauma is usually absorbed in the soft tissue, it’s hard to pick it up and say on MRI or any kind of scanning device, but you know, you’ve got the symptoms. And some of the main symptoms would be things like blurred vision, double vision, actually problems with memory, so cognitive issues. And then the other one that’s really common is balance, having difficulty with either your inner ear, vestibular system, and your eyes, or just a sense of nausea, dizziness. And, you know, most eye exams are just based on reading the distance eye chart, and they’re checking structural health font, you know, your health, but they’re not really looking at the functional connection between how the eyes enter act with the brain. And there’s certain very essential skills that help us with our reading or focusing our depth perception, our motoring. And so these particular symptoms can really start to confuse people because they all go and the doctor says, well, everything is, is normal, your eyesight is 2020, your eye health looks good.


But then there are the symptoms that keep, you know, keep surfacing. So the process of rehabilitation through physical therapy, physical therapy for your eyes, is something that’s really helpful. And it’s helpful for anybody. But it’s really helpful for people who have suffered trauma, because it helps them rework and re educate, how to use your eyes as it interfaces with the brain. And you can do things like color therapy, which is very helpful for releasing trauma, relaxing the eyes, balancing the nervous system, and also just some of the physical exercises that can begin to help you integrate, you know, the skills as it relates to your functional vision, how you’re using your two eyes, in relationship to the body. So the second topic that I just want to just really briefly touch on and then if you folks have questions we can go right to that is the process of how do you actually reduce your prescription and improve your eyesight because this is not something that is readily talked about in our you know, in our profession, we’re trained to be in a disease based system and so when a person and has a certain symptom and they come in, what the doctor is doing is trying to treat the symptom reacting to the symptom, but in doing that, it creates a further deterioration. And yet, if you can interject some positive influences, you can actually stop the deterioration and regenerate or create an improvement. So the technique is really pretty simple.


And it has to do with being able to be flexible. And understanding that whatever prescription you get reading the distance I chart is probably going to be too strong for you, in your daily routines, aside from maybe driving, or, you know, looking at a TV screen across the room. So by beginning to wear some kind of a reduce prescription and and this is where you have to, you know, be adept at negotiating with your eye doctor or following my content and understanding Well, you know, if I can get a prescription that say is slightly less than, maybe like 20% less than what I normally wear, and you start wearing it, whether it’s in contacts or glasses, you’re going to find that as long as you use it in a circumstance that doesn’t make you want to squint or get frustrated. If you start wearing that over a short period of time, your eyes and your brain are gonna flex into the reduced prescription. And eventually, you will be able to see in the distance with that prescription. So any lens that you look through, again, contact lens or glasses, your your eyes adjust to what the lens is promoting. And the stronger the lens, the lens is promoting more tightness, less flexibility, and ultimately more deterioration. Another technique in the process of re retraining your vision. And this is very much a mindset. It isn’t just in the eyeballs. We think faulty vision is just an eyeball problem.


But it’s actually the source of it comes from our thinking, our moving our posture, our diets, our stress, our toxicity, there’s so many factors. And because the eyes originate from the brain in embryology, very early on in the prenatal period, every single tissue of the eye of the eyeball is actually brain. And so when we’re talking about the eyes as it relates to the brain, we are now including something called neuroplasticity or neurogenesis. And so by introducing new stimulation to the visual system, and so the second technique is to just take your lenses off, and start going without them in non demanding and non threatening situations. And if you do that, over time, you’re going to become much more comfortable in your mental setup of going, you know, actually see more than I think I do, and your eyesight is going to start to improve. And then the third piece in being able to improve your vision I think is what kind of foods you’re eating. You know, early on in my practice, before I became more adept at understanding the nuances of vision and wellness from a more naturopathic perspective, is they just used to counsel people about their diet and so the diet is so influential on our eye health. And what I mean by diet is very simple things to check off the list eliminate sugar reduce or eliminate gluten, increase your fats and oils, eliminate fried foods, processed foods, you know, fill your diet full of


09:23


green leafy vegetables, even the rainbow diet and you’ll find that if you are going to eat more of a plant based diet with a lot of organic, non GMO, non, you know pesticide based foods, your liver is going to be really happy and the liver is related very closely to the eyes and Chinese medicine. So once you start boosting your antioxidants, your eyes are going to be really happy and they’re not going to be frozen in that certain position. That was measured when they went to the eye doctor, so, nutrition diets so critical, those are the three things that I would, I would suggest. And the third topic that I keep getting lots of questions about. And this has to do with disease, eye disease. And what’s happening in our culture is because of the increase in our digital time. And of course, this was happening way before the COVID 19 pandemic. But since the pandemic, because a lot of kids are online with their school, and you know, people are working from home, the number of eye symptoms based on staring at a screen has been exponentially magnified. Because we’re basically in a visual confinement situation, when we’re staring at our screen all day. And the staring of the screen we have, first of all, from a, from a more physical level, our eyes are basically positioning in one place one distance, throughout the entire day. And this repetitive positioning creates a deterioration in the physical structure of the eye, the eye muscles, there’s less circulation, less oxygenation, more stress.


And so people are getting this computer vision syndrome, where they’re just so stressed out on their screen time. So that’s just the physical ramifications. But then, on top of that is the blue light that we are learning about right now. And in some circles, especially in the science research area, researchers are studying the effects of blue light on our health, and our wellness and our vision. And some of the preliminary data points to the fact that blue light could in fact be very detrimental to our eyes, and certainly could affect our sleep cycle and our circadian rhythms. So doing something to protect yourself from the blue light is important whether you get a screen protector, or whether you invest in a pair of blue blockers. But something to deflect some of the high intensity, blue light, the chaotic frequency that we know comes off the all the screens, LED lights, and it doesn’t affect us as much during the day.


But the critical period is after 6pm. So after 6pm is when you want to really pay attention to being able to protect yourself. And then I think the third thing I would say about eye disease and just overall eye health. And this is a little bit of aside from the screen time is that many of the eye diseases that doctors diagnose macular degeneration, glaucoma, cataracts, dry eye, just to name a few really have their roots in a accumulation of oxidative stress, better known as metabolic waste or free radical damage in the very sensitive areas of the eyes. So in the cornea, it’s the dry eye issue the eyelids dry eye with the lens of the eye, it’s cataract formation. In the vitreous, it’s those darn floaters that we get in the retina could be macular degeneration or other retina conditions that create light sensitivity Night, night vision challenges, or just a retinopathy, whether you suffer diabetes or hypertension.


So across the board, if you want to preserve your eyesight, it’s important that you think about how can I get more oxygenation hydration into my body, and that the eyes are one of the first sensory systems that is affected because of the sensitivity of all the blood vessels that are living in the eyeball. You know, the retina has one of the highest metabolic needs of the body. And the macula has the highest metabolic needs of the retina. And the retina is made up of a tiny blood vessels called micro capillaries. And in these micro capillaries, they help in the ability for our retina To do couple things, first of all, to absorb nutrients, number two, to be able to detox, metabolic waste. And if they’re not able to do either or one of those things, then what starts happening is inflammation. And so with inflammation, this creates the beginnings of the oxidative stress and the deterioration. So in the regular paradigm, it’s it’s pharmaceutical drugs and at surgery in my community, we know that there are eyedrops that actually can improve lens health. There are eyedrops that might even be able to read reverse or reduce some of the floaters. We know that for the retina, if we boost our nutrients are carotenoids as to Xanthine, lutein and zeaxanthin, that we might be able to slow down or reverse some of the retina degeneration that is, you know, increasing, especially with people over the age of 50. And then you’ve got more serious conditions that are vascular based like glaucoma, which is related to our ability to hold on to our peripheral vision.


And if we’re not able to do that, we begin to shrink that. And it’s a silent disease, we don’t even know that we have it unless we get some tests that measure what is happening in our peripheral vision. So bottom line, you can improve your vision at any age, you can reverse certain eye conditions as long as the the cells are not dead, you know, if they’re just in a starvation mode, there are things that can be done on a exercise level, color therapy level nutrient level that could in fact reverse some of the degeneration. And the eyes are interrelated and interconnected with our entire body on a metabolic level on a says just a general systemic level, our digestive system is very connected and energetically through the acupuncture meridians. So I think that why don’t we I’ll take a pause here.


17:35


I want to thank you


17:36


for joining us today. And if you liked the show, let us know. Send your comments to me. And thanks for tuning in. Take care.


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.