I'm Answering Your Questions

I sat down with my Instagram followers and answered a bunch of questions I’ve received recently. We talk about how to get the most out of your eye exams and how to get the prescription that’s right for you. If you have any questions for me, be sure to email them to hello@drsamberne.com. Enjoy the show. If you want more, sign up for my newsletter at: www.drsamberne.com.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

prescription, eye, lens, cataract, doctor, glaucoma, nearsighted, reduce, question, astigmatism, vision, magnification, important, people, wearing, stigmatism, glasses, acupuncture, double, glutathione

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@drsamberene.com. Now to the latest EyeClarity episode.

For people to get on for a few minutes, I’ve got a couple of announcements to make. First of all, October 7 to ninth, I’m going to be doing a vision sanctuary retreat three day retreat. And I did this last year. And it was very, very effective. It’s an online workshop. And we’re going to meet for three days consecutively. And I’m going to take you through some of my latest processes to help you improve your eyesight, your vision, your brain health, your neurological functioning, your vestibular system, and much more. So we’re getting ready to put it up on my website, you can look for it at a Dr. Sam burn.com, it should be up this week. And so if you want to register, I would do so early we sold out last year when we did it. Again, this is going to be online, if you can’t make it in person live, then you can also watch it anytime 24/7 Because it’ll be recorded. And you also get a 10% discount on all my great products. So that’s the first thing. Second thing is I’m getting ready to release my own castor oil eyedrop. So this is something that’s been in the works for a while, you know, I talk a lot about the benefits of castor oil, and how it can sometimes improve our eyelid health. Remember, eyelid health is important for dry to reduce dry eye syndrome. So in this castor oil eyedrops, you’ll be able to massage it on the eyelids, it’s very moisturizing, lubricating, it also may help reduce some of the irritation and inflammation that people go through when they’re dealing with chronic dry eye syndrome.

So we’re going to be putting that up probably in early September. And so look for that. All right, we’ve got a ton of questions today. So I’m going to try to run through these as best as I can. Some of these questions were emailed to me ahead of time. So I’ll I’ll do my best to just jump back and forth. This is from Jane from Facebook. And she’s asking what is the procedure in being able to reduce the nearsighted prescription? Okay, I think that’s a really good question. How do you go about wanting to improve your vision? If you’re nearsighted? How do you do that? Well, I think number one, it’s important to get a an updated prescription that you would use for distance. So this would be you know, for safety reasons, driving, you know, watching TV or movies, anything beyond, you know, 15 feet, you want to get a prescription, whether it’s contacts or glasses, that is going to give you enough clarity. You know, one of the posts I did recently on tick tock, if you’re not on tick tock, I would follow what I’m putting out there. So I did this great, very short tip on when you go to go for an eye exam, and the doctor is usually in a hurry. And he or she is you know, flipping lenses back and forth, which is clear one or two. And you have no time to even process what you’re looking through. And so what I recommended on that

on the TIC tock video was to ask the doctor to slow down and look through each prescription, giving yourself at least 30 seconds. So you can look at the chart, you can feel your eyes, you can feel your body. And you want to choose the lens that feels the most relaxing, but allows you to see clearly, usually the the feeling part of it is left out because we’re in such a rush. But the thing is you get that prescription and then you’ve got to wear it for the next two years. So you better make the right decision. And let’s say you’re having a stressful day or you know, you’re not sure what to choose. And the other piece of that puzzle is that when you give you get something that’s really strong, you shouldn’t wear it, you should go back and ask the doctor to to lighten it up a little bit. And so you’re looking for an open minded person who can help you say use a prescription that’s strong enough that allows you to see clearly but isn’t going to amp you up isn’t going to overdo it because that creates more deterioration and accelerates it. So you want to get that prescription and then if you can, if you’re nearsighted a good technique to do without getting into saying I’m going to do Vision Improvement is ask your doctor for a second prescription that’s reduced and that would be for your screen time. And you can get the blue blocking filter in it.

But by wearing that reduce prescription both indoors and at arm’s length and start walking in it, you know walking in in Scituate shins where you’re feeling safe, maybe walking in a park or walking around your, your yard and gardening, that’s a great place to do it that eventually that prescription is going to become your distance prescription. That’s a technique that I learned many years ago, by giving a person a reduced prescription to where their eyes in their brain flex into the reduced prescription. And if you’re feeling frustrated, when you’re wearing it, like you can’t see well enough, then just put on your other glasses. That’s it, or contacts. So we want to get two pairs and start wearing the reduced prescription. And then it’s very important that you start doing a re education program, meaning the physical therapy, physical ie therapy because you have to do some reprogramming on how your eyes your mind, your brain, your body, are seeing as a nearsighted person, there’s certain habits and conditioning that nearsighted people develop. And I could speak firsthand because I was very nearsighted as a child, and I completely reversed it in my late 20s While I was working with a behavioral holistic optometrist, and he ended up becoming my teacher and I studied with him for quite a few years.

So he, he helped me experience what’s what it’s like to see 2020 without needing the lenses, so if I can do it, you can do it. But the bottom line is I had to do physical therapy exercises, I couldn’t just wear a lens. And so my eye exercise program for nearsightedness, which is on my website, it’s a 90 day program, three exercises a day. And each week, they build on each other, you need to discipline yourself, you need to make a commitment. And that’s the way for you to permanently be able to reduce your nearsightedness. So it’s a combination of getting the two sets of glasses or contacts. And doing my eye clarity program. And then the third component that I really like is start doing a self assessment of your diet and nutrition. Take a look at you know, foods that have sugar in them. You want to eliminate or reduce those, and then also amping up your plant based antioxidants, your fats and oils and so on. You know, these are things that I talk about many of the other functional medicine, naturopathic doctors online, also talk about, you know, what’s healthy nutrition. So those are the those are the

steps to do it. And it’s basically a very similar approach if you’re farsighted. Because somebody has just texted me and said, What What about farsightedness so that’s a magnification lens. Now the thing about that is is that you start wearing a magnification lens for reading and you need to wear it exclusively for reading because if you look up and you start looking out at distance with that magnification lens, you are going to lose your distance vision, you’re going to have to come back to the doctor and get a bifocal, which is is really going in the wrong direction. So you get the magnifier you use it just for reading, you can start reading with pinhole glasses, I have done many posts on the value of pinhole glasses, these are special glasses that just have holes in them, you can get them on Amazon anywhere, and you start wearing them when you read and you’ll be amazed that you can read clearly, and it doesn’t have the magnification in it. So you’re not getting the side effects of what the magnification lens does, which is weakens the eye muscle responsiveness.

So the thing is, is that you you want to do those things and then the eye clarity I exercise program and once you start doing it, I would go to the drugstore and buy the next step down of the magnification that you’re currently using or you were prescribed. And when you do that, you start now using your eyes through a weaker lens and as long as you know the size is big enough the lighting is good, then you’re able to start weaning your way off of the the far side of prescription. And then the last one that’s really important for farsighted people, is to do my opposite lens prescription. So this means that in in a therapeutic setting, you buy what we call minus lens to blur now I sell that on my webstore so you never have to worry about trying to convince your doctor. It’s basically you get this opposite lens prescription and then you in a safe environment. You get a baseline without any lenses then you put the lens on and it makes things blurrier and mentally and emotionally Your job is to relax into the blur. And as you relax into the blur, you do that for one minute and then you take the glasses off. And you notice that things are even clearer like there’s a pop. And so you do that three times with each. I like to do it with the eyepatch. So each eye has its own experience. And you do that every day, the 30 Day Challenge is do it and you will come down from your magnification lenses and so those would be the things that I would say are essential for being able to reduce your prescription that somebody is is writing me from Tiktok saying,

what about a stigmatism Okay, so briefly I’ll talk about that. So astigmatism means that the eye is shaped more like an egg or or a football instead of being spherically round and so therefore, you have to get a special prescription that corrects you for this irregular blur. It’s kind of like a warping in your visual perception because the the the lens is, is matching a warping that’s going on in the eye. Now in studying bodywork and I’m a cranial therapist, I’ve been able to observe the connection between a stigmatism in the eyeball that warping or twisting and the twisting in the body. And there is a correlation that when you have a twist in the body, a lot of times you start developing astigmatism in the eye, or if you start developing a stigmatism in the eye, it creates a warping in the body twisting. And when people would come in for their eye exam, and I would measure their astigmatism, and I would do an hour of cranial work and I would unwind their spine or there’d be a lock down in their pelvis or sacrum or cervical spine, wherever it was, and the neck is very tied into a stigmatism as well.

And then I would re measure them 95% Of the people showed at least 30%, less a stigman, just astigmatism just after that one treatment. So the worst thing you can do is if you’re wearing a strong astigmatism correction, and you want to start reducing it is if you do start getting some body work, and then you put on your lenses after the session, it basically eliminates the unwinding that the therapist did to you. So this is where again, negotiating with your eye doctor or finding somebody you know, you can even write me and I’d be able to I would be able to help you to wear either a reduced astigmatism prescription to allow your body to hold the treatment, or even getting a prescription with no astigmatism. Now, I know that’s very controversial. among my colleagues, they hate that they think it’s irresponsible, but just the opposite. You start wearing it in non demanding and non threatening situations as an inquiry, you’re not going to wear it when you when you’re driving, or, you know, writing a check or you know, working on the screens, but you start wearing it just as an experience just putting it on and experiencing a lens that isn’t warping, now you’re warped. The lens is not warped.

So it’s going to create a mismatch, there’s going to be a little disorientation there. That’s what we want. We want to create an experience so that you have to learn how to adapt to a non warping perception. And it’s brilliant. It’s not my idea. I learned this from my mentors. I had several of them when I was, you know, when I just got into practice and I, I have such gratitude to them. They’re not alive anymore. I missed them. They were great. People who were visionaries, very progressive. And they taught me all these different great techniques in the art of prescribing and the art of being able to help people in the prescription world where something that doesn’t weaken their eyes, like what’s going on in most of the eye care practices. So that’s, that covers the refractive error. I want to thank everybody for for those questions. I want to move on to eye health. So now I’m going to take a question from a listener writing in from YouTube and he is dealing with glaucoma. He says I’ve got open angle glaucoma. Every time I take the drops, they make me nauseous. My eyes are red, they’re stinging. And there may be a controversy because some doctors say I have glaucoma and some doctors say I don’t have glaucoma. What can I do to be more proactive? With my eye? Health? Well, the first thing to note is Glaucoma is a vascular disease. There’s a problem with the circulation in your eyes, either, you’re not getting good flow through the little meshwork and the different canals and pathways inside the eye. Or you’re not producing enough. So there’s a dehydration going on. Now, there are many reasons why we have vascular issues, it could be something as simple as head trauma, inflammation, oxidative stress,

toxicities,

just just to name a few. But when you have been diagnosed as a glaucoma suspect, it comes down to how can you improve your micro capillary circulation in the retina and optic nerve? That’s really the bottom line essential question that you want to ask yourself, and you probably aren’t going to get the answer from your eye doctor, you’re going to have to go outside of that. Maybe in functional medicine or functional nutrition, someplace where somebody understands the ability of the bodies able to, let’s say change a certain pattern, either through diet either through body work, either through meditation, either through exercise, whatever it is, there are many things that you can do to improve the micro capillary circulation that can neutralize the glaucoma suspicion. And it’s a very important that if you have been diagnosed with a as a glaucoma suspect that you protect them, the most important thing is your optic nerve. And how do you do that? Well, you got to jump into at least 2000 milligrams a day of Omega three fish oil. And I like I like doing more of the fish oil. Although you can do things like algae. They’re they’re vegan sources of Omega three. So whatever your journey is on that, but you want to increase your omega threes. Another another component that’s very important for glaucoma and the nerve is the amino acid taurine, gingko, bilberry, vitamin A zinc, and the carotenoids lutein, z is Anthon and acid Xanthine.

You’ve heard me talk about these things a million times. So you can you can look at my content. And you can learn about those I go into deep dives on all of those. So that would be on a nutrient level you want to get more of those circulation, or herbs and supplements and nutraceuticals and phytochemicals into your body. And I would consider lymphatic health. So improving your lymph health is important with glaucoma after all, it’s a disease of the fluid body of the water inside of you. So you need to do some lymphatic drainage or lymphatic stimulation. You can also even look at certain things like red light therapy. I’ve been really high on red light therapy for a long time. And there was a research study that came out actually reported it on social media, which says that if you expose yourself to three to four minutes of red light therapy in the morning, that you have a chance of being able to improve your retina health. So this is a very exciting breakthrough study. It’s not new, but it’s new in the sense that now research is being done to validate what we know that photo photobiomodulation or light therapy can be very beneficial for the mitochondria, the mitochondria, you know, they live in your retina. In fact, the mitochondria have they have such a high concentration in the retina. So we need a lot of that ATP and a lot of eye diseases that we develop whether it’s macular issues, cataracts, glaucoma, all of

these diseases can be kind of

neutralized if you feed the mitochondria better and the mitochondria love red light. So there you go, just three to four minutes a day and you want to do it in the morning. That’s what the study found. So that would be the time that you would do the red light therapy if you choose to do it. Let’s see some other things. Acupuncture can be really helpful microstimulation or just getting some general acupuncture remember, the liver the gallbladder her spleen, the large intestine, the colon, these all have meridians that go to our eye structures, believe it or not. So in acupuncture, we’re not treating the symptom. But we’re rebalancing the energy along the meridian. And the eyes are so sensitive to energy. I mean, they’re the organ of light, that’s how we see light comes in, it stimulates the photoreceptors, it sends an electrical impulse based on that through the optic nerve to the brain. So we need energy in our eyes as a way to have good circulation, and hydration. And so acupuncture is a way to redistribute that energy. So it’s more harmonious, more balanced. So acupuncture, cranial sacral, your diet is very important. So you know, again, anti inflammatory, lots of plant based antioxidants, good fats and oils, which I referenced, too. So that is how you begin to enter the domain of reversing glaucoma. All right, next question.

This is from Facebook. And I have a gal who’s she says she’s 67 years old. She was just diagnosed with a cataract in her right eye. She’s been following me for a long time she asked her doctor, what kind of cataract it was. And he said that it’s a cortical cataract. That’s, by the way, that’s a great thing. If you are in the office, and the doctor says you’ve got a cataract, ask him what kind nuclear in the center, posterior subcapsular area in the back, or the cortical, which is the spikes along the edge of the lens. So in this particular case, because it’s a cortical cataract, this is based a lot on the glycation process where the the glucose molecule is binding with the protein molecule of the lens. And this creates cataracts. So carnosine is very helpful. And acetylcysteine is also very helpful. This would be an opportunity for you to really take a look at your sugar sugar intake. So being able to eliminate sugar, dairy, gluten would be a good thing to do. And at the same time, you’re boosting the antioxidants, lutein and zeaxanthin. Vitamin A is another one. The B complex is also very important for lens health. And my favorite one is glutathione. So glutathione is the master antioxidant in the body. And glutathione if you are developing cataracts is usually pretty low. And so you can you can supplement with a liposomal glutathione.

That’s a great way to get it into your body. Think of the cruciferous vegetables, make sure you’re adding selenium so that you can absorb the glutathione better. Again, we’re talking about sulfur base foods, sulfur, where have you heard that my MSM drops so MSM is also very good for the blends out, we’ll leave it like that. And you can do a second eyedrop which is really targeting lens health, which is called ocular Med, which has glutathione and vitamin C in it. So that’s that’s very good. So those would be some things I would say one more I would add would be vitamin C. Studies have shown that low levels of vitamin C have a higher risk of developing cataracts, I would take about 2000 milligrams a day of buffered vitamin C. That’s a good way to go. All right, we got a couple of questions here. I already talked about astigmatism and myopia.

So in any reversing of a astigmatism, and then the the nearsightedness or farsightedness, and the question is, should you keep reversing the nearsightedness? And the answer to that is yes. You can ask your doctor, as somebody who’s more holistically minded. Would they be willing to have you look through a lens that meets this criteria? You know, you’re asking a very, a very obtuse question, because the answer to that is all dependent on how your visual system responds to the reduced prescription. That’s really how you have to do it. And I get these questions all the time. Well, what do you think, should I and I would say, in theory, that makes sense. But I never really prescribe unless I’m able to watch the person’s response on whether or not they can handle that level of reduction. So the easiest way to do that is just to go back to your doctor and see if he or she would offer you that service. Alright, another question. Somebody’s using my eyedrops. Might I ever changed the bottle material? So we’re working on that, you know, we have to use the you know, because we’re using plastic, we have to do something that is very, very low on a toxicity level, I find the lowest toxicity level for the plastic bottles as I can.

We don’t think the glass is really the answer. We just can’t do that. So we are constantly testing and trying different types of bottles so that it is easier to remove. And so I apologize about that. We’re trying. We’ve made a couple of improvements, but I know people are still struggling with it. Okay, well, I’m gonna take one more question. This is this is a cool question. So hey, Dr. Sam, I’ve been following you on YouTube for a long time. This is YouTube. And you talk about in your podcast on something called double vision. And I’ve got double vision. It just came up. I went to my neurologist, and he said that he doesn’t really know why it’s happening. There’s no tumor, there’s no neuro degenerative disease. And so he sent me away with an eyepatch. Can you help? Well, double vision means the two eyes are working together. And you did a really smart thing there. When you first get double, you want to rule out things like tumors and neurological disease, sometimes inflammation is involved with it. So when you’ve got double vision like this, you know late onset because this person is let’s see, 6069 Wow.

Okay. In progressive lenses. So first thing I would say is get out of your progressive lenses, get two pairs of glasses, the progressive lenses could make the double vision worse, I would start it on my exercise program right away, because those exercises for double vision, create a reeducation in the brain that teach you how to aim your eyes again with each other. So basically, you’ve lost the ability to aim. And so one eye is here and one eye is there, well, it’s going to be a double image, or the brain just says I’m going to drop one of the images. So the exercises can really help, I would get some cranial sacral, sometimes releasing the occiput, or the cervical spine can help remove the double vision. I know it’s kind of amazing. But I’ve had it happen enough times to say I’ve got to check that. So find a good osteopath and go for it and see if that helps you.

And last but not least, I think there’s a dietary component to it of being depleted in your trace minerals. So it might be great for you to go to a functional medicine person and boost your trace mineral levels, your probiotics, your fats and oils. And the trace minerals, especially magnesium, I found people with double vision have very low levels of magnesium. Magnesium is very important for our muscles, our heart health, our eye health, and so much more. And so I really would check out whether in fact, you do have enough magnesium, most people are deficient in it. But you know, you can get any kind of a test, blood panel hair analysis, urine analysis, you know, go to somebody who’s functionally based and they will be able to tell you what’s going on in your biochemistry. And usually when somebody develops double vision like this, there’s a real depletion in their biochemistry. I get two hearts hear from him say thank you. All right, ladies and gentlemen, this will be archived so you know, tell your friends and family. I want to thank you for taking the time today. I know you could be doing many, many things. And thanks for being part of the community. Until next time.

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.