Fireside Chat: My Hot Take on Trends in Holistic Eye Care in 2023

Here is a fireside chat I had recently with a private group of interested consumers in vision improvement. We cover all the hot topics in holistic eye care including Glaucoma, eye exercises, dry eye, floaters, and more. Enjoy the Show.

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

eye, myopia, glaucoma, astigmatism, lens, nearsighted, cataracts, farsightedness, part, work, retina, floaters, macula, vision, eyedrops, give, reduce, prescription, body, related

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. Now to the latest EyeClarity episode.

I am a optometrist and might be called a behavioral optometrist, holistic optometrist. And I’ve been in practice for over 30 years, and have developed a lot of modalities to help people improve their eyesight and vision. I am a firm believer in the Bates method. And you still utilize a lot of the things I learned from Dr. Bates and also from the vision educators. So today, I want to give you my perspective, and I want to do a disclaimer and say that this is all educational information. So it’s not a substitute for your doctor. And also, this is my opinion. So it’s, you know, it’s, it’s what I have developed and experienced. But check it out for yourself before you embark on anything. So, you know, when you go for the eye exam, which we all have done, it’s a very mechanical and usually pretty quick experience. And I’m going to be focusing on people who are nearsighted or farsighted, or have a astigmatism at least to start off with, we can get into some of the eye conditions also.

But when you go for that perfunctory exam and you get a lens for nearsightedness, we’ll start there. Basically, the prescription that you’re getting is a computer readout of your score of history. In other words, the adaptations that you have made in your life, to adapt your vision into nearsightedness. And, you know, on a classical definition, nearsightedness is about pulling the world in, it’s about tightening up, it’s about, you know, walking down at a close distance, and you give up your distance, clarity. And so the doctor gives you a minus lens, minus lens negative lens, you might take on more negativity, it’s also a lens that tends to tighten you up and compress you.

And yet, you get that instant gratification that I can see clearly, at 20 feet. But you give up a lot in that transaction, because now you are going down a road of perpetual reinforcement. And for any of you on the, on the call today, if you’re nearsighted. Usually that’s not the first prescription or the last prescription, but you ended up going back subsequently, year after year to get a stronger lens, because it’s a symptom based model. And so you keep getting this nearsighted prescription and then, you know, eventually you get sucked into having to use them all the time. And so one of the things that I talk about in myopia, and this comes from working with 1000s of patients, you know, I have, I’ve done my own clinical research. And so this is what patients have told me about myopia. And this is based more on a behavioral, like, how does it affect you behaviorally, emotionally, energetically? How does it affect your decisions? So what patients have told me about myopia is that first of all, it’s being caught in the past past perceptions. And it’s kind of a historical perspective that nearsighted people get into because in nearsightedness, what happens is at the moment where we start losing our distance acuity, many times there are some circumstance that’s going on, that we don’t understand now could be just something as simple as, you know, being called on in a school in school and feeling embarrassed because you don’t know the answer. There’s definitely a shame connection around the being nearsighted or an invisibility. I don’t want to be seen or maybe numbing out your feelings because you know, you’re afraid so the the primary emotion related to nearsightedness is fear. And, you know, if we kind of look at Chinese medicine, we know that the kidneys represent the fear emotions, so sometimes

kidneys get involved later on. But the bottom line is is that myopia is, is first of all, it’s growing by epidemic proportions. And when people become nearsighted, they’re fixing their vision up close. And they’re giving up the flexibility, versatility, fluidity of being able to recognize flow. There’s also a hypervigilance in their mental perspective. You know, if you’re nearsighted and you take your lenses off, the first thing to pay attention to is what are you? What are you thinking? What is the mental response when you go into blur, and for most people, when they take the nearsighted glasses off, and they go into blur, they go, Holy cow, I don’t like this, there’s a control issue around like, I want to feel like I’m in control, and I’m out of control. Or I can’t see the details. So I’m, you know, addicted to information, I need to see more detail. I had a lady about three months ago, who came to see me and she was minus five. And at the first session, I gave her the opposite lens prescription, which is called plus lens, the blur, you can find that on my website. And it’s an exercise where I give people the opposite lens to what they normally wear. And as soon as she put that plus lens on now gives you a real deep level of blur that goes way beyond no prescription. So she puts it on and I asked her well, what are you thinking about? She said, Well, the first thing that comes up for me is invasion that I had an uncle and his energy was really invasive to me. And I became nearsighted as a way to keep him out. Because I used to see him every Sunday for dinner, he would come over for dinner to my mom and dad’s house. And it was kind of creepy, because this energy that he would put in to me was really, it made me really scared. And I was only about nine years old when this happened. And I couldn’t really tell my parents. And this is the moment that I started to develop myopia.

So I said, well, let’s just stay with this energy, we don’t need to go into the whole story. It’s more about you know, first order experience, what are you feeling in your body? Where do you feel it, track it. And within about, I would say five minutes, she released that memory, that energy. And she said, Oh, you know, this blur actually feels relaxing. To my eyes, it’s kind of a relief. And so we did this process over a week. And by the end of the week, I remeasured her eyes, and she’d gone from a minus five to a minus 350, just in one week. And so she recognized that her mental attitude was was putting this energy into her into her eyes, saying I need to be on high alert, I need to be hyper vigilant because I need to defend myself against this family member. So anyways, to fast forward, we kept doing some things where we go into the blur, we also did some high dialogue with each eye. And I just saw her the other day. And now she’s only wearing a minus one and a quarter. She’s gone from minus five to minus one and a quarter, and a very short period of time. And she’s only using those for driving. And she recognized that the amount of myopia that she created was really an artificial

representation of what she needed as that nine year old to have some sense of safety. So that’s another issue with people. Now the other thing that happened to her is that she was in a job that she didn’t really like and now going from minus five to minus one and a quarter she quit. And she’s now going to do what she really wants to do is photography.

So that’s a really cool case history over a very short period of time, where she was ready to really confront the mental part of her myopia. Now, there have been a number of people that I’ve helped over the years. I’ve another case where there was a gentleman who came to see me he was in his 40s and he was developing

What we call presbyopia. Now he’s nearsighted. But he was now in progressive bifocals. And if you’ve ever seen my content on social, you know that I don’t really like progressive lenses because they split your vision into different compartments. And for a nearsighted person to start going into presbyopia, it’s, it’s really unnecessary. So again, his prescription was about minus six. And during the exam, what I decided to do with him, because he was also into bodywork is I did about a half hour of cranial sacral therapy, I’m a cranial sacral therapist. So I helped him unwind some of his myopia that was in his head and neck. And then I re measured his prescription. And I couldn’t believe it, he measured like minus four, and he was able to see 2020 on the eye chart. That’s the relationship between tension in our eyes and our body and myopia. That’s another connector anyways. So I said, Let’s do minus four for distance. And then I gave him a minus three for his computer in his reading. And now, it just so happens, he’s using a minus 250, for everything. So he’s completely out of the presbyopia. He’s reduced his prescription quite a bit. And he recognized that a lot of his myopia was related to tension. And some of my somatic body colleagues have said to me that 60 to 80% of body tension is carried in the eyeballs.

That’s a lot. I don’t know if it is 60 to 80%. But certainly, with all the screen time we’re doing, I think that we do carry a lot of tension, because we’re so high centric, and we’re so detail centric. Okay, I could spend hours on myopia, but let’s move to the second condition, farsightedness, or hyperopia. So this is a very interesting condition. Because what happens in farsightedness or hyperopia is that you wear what we call a plus lens, a magnifying lens. Now, you know, if you just think about it, well, that doesn’t sound so bad, I’m wearing a plus lens. But what happens in a plus lens is that it reduces your eye muscle responsiveness. So we have six muscles that attach to the other part of the eye. And we also have these little tiny ciliary muscles, they’re called Little ligaments that attach to the lens of the eye inside the eye. And in both sets of muscles, they do different things to help us with visual coordination with visual focus bringing things into a resolution. But when once we start wearing a magnifying lens, that all goes out the window because the magnifying lens makes things artificially bigger. And so you don’t contribute or interact with your eye muscles in the same way. And they eventually become very flaccid or unresponsive.

And this is why when you wear a magnification lens, even for a short period of time, you take them off and you can’t focus. So the key thing about farsighted this is I’m not really great at focusing or focusing up close, I’m losing my detail. It’s the opposite of nearsightedness, which is I do have really good detail, but I give up the distance. The initial steps and farsightedness is I see pretty well in the distance, but I can’t see up close. So a lot of times people will get that magnification, you know, the readers, and you know, it usually starts to to affect you at around age 40 Because you starting to lose your focusing flexibility. When you get the readers, you were in for a while, and all of a sudden your distance vision is starting to go. So you go back to the doctor and he says well now let’s put you into bifocals. So now you’ve got a less prescription in the magnification for distance and then now you have even more magnification for reading. So this is kind of like a death spiral with your vision. If you’re farsightedness and anybody who’s farsighted out there probably knows what I’m talking about. Because eventually the lenses just get thicker and thicker. And by the way, the thicker the lens, the more disconnected you become from your eyes. Another thing about as the lens gets stronger, the power gets more. A lot of times not only are you you losing your distance vision, but you’re also using losing

you’re intermediate, and then eventually your close vision. And if you wear bifocals or trifocals, or progressive lenses, and you’re trying to figure it out on the screen, now you’re focusing your eyes through a tiny part of the lens. This is training your brain to ignore peripheral vision, the most important part of your seeing, because peripheral vision is about developing depth perception. It’s important for visual memory. It’s important, very important for orientation, and depth perception. Let me give you a case history. This is a great one. So this was an 81 year old who came to see me and she was scheduled for cataract surgery. And she was very farsighted. She was I would say, plus four for distance, and then she was probably about plus three for her bifocal, and the doctor was pressuring her into the cataract surgery. And she wanted no part of that. So she came to she was in a wheelchair, and she her husband pushed her in to the office, wheeled her in, and she said, Dr. Byrne, I need for you to help me because I don’t want to get cataract surgery. So I put her on a protocol which

dissolved the cataract like within six months. And so now she was at six, I think 650 For her bifocal plus for now, after working with me for a few years, she’s only wearing reading glasses, and I think the prescription is about a plus 350 She’s not wearing anything for distance, her balance, and her orientation and her walking has improved. But the big thing that she’s excited about is that she’s out of those progressive lenses, and she is seeing the world. So well she knits that’s her passion. She’s a master knitter and she says I’ve never seen the yarn. So clearly. So you know this is one case after another that I’m sharing with you, but you can definitely improve your farsightedness. Some other things about foresight and this to know is they tend to be more

projecting into the future. It’s more of a future oriented way of seeing but coming into the present, not not quite as easy for them. They’re always looking ahead. Another thing about it the primary emotion that people tell me about farsightedness is anger. So again, in Chinese medicine, the organ that dealing with anger is the liver meridian. And so you know if you’re gonna get some acupuncture, you know, working on that liver meridian and your anger sometimes that can also help bring down the farsightedness. I also see with farsightedness it’s a little challenging to make decisions, especially when you when you have to break down the problem in a way where you look at the individual parts. In nearsightedness, you can see the parts but you don’t see the whole picture.

And in farsightedness, you see the whole picture, but you have a hard time breaking it down into the different parts to maybe seeing the sequence or the things that you may need to do. And so, you know, in both cases, as you begin to dissolve your prescription, it definitely changes the way you problem solve and see situations, see relationships and so on. Okay, I don’t want to run out of time here I want to talk about a astigmatism. So a astigmatism is a really interesting, refractive error. Because what happens initially in the astigmatism is the eye begins to change its shape towards like an egg shape instead of being completely round. It’s more like a football or an egg. And part of the reason that occurs is because of those six eye muscles that are attaching to the eyeball that’s held in the socket of the eye. They’re not working equally, maybe you know, certain pairs of muscles are working more than another pair. And this creates the shape to change. It can also occur in the lens of the eye with those ciliary ligaments as well so you can get a stigmatism in the eye, you can get it in the lens. But here’s the rub.

When you have a an eye that’s now shaped, you know, like an egg or a football. This creates a kind of warping consciousness warp, so there’s a curve and in this warp, what happens is mentally in perception

Li, you start seeing these different kinds of blur. Another way that I might describe a stigmatism in that warping is a twist. So the eye becomes twisted in a way. And sometimes this occurs because of posture, you can take a look at your, you know, cervical spine in your neck, or you know, just the way you are presenting yourself to the world. On a postural level, this begins to initiate a twist, and sometimes the twist occurs more in the body, and then that shows up in the eye. Sometimes it shows up in the eye, and then that influences the twist in the body. And so you have this twist, and you go to the eye doctor, and what does he or she do, fits you with the warp fits you with the twist. And all that’s going to do on a mind body level. And a mind eye body level is reinforce the twist to reinforce the work. And so you think then at that point, ah, everything is corrected. But what’s really going on is that you are now looking through this warped perception.

This is very disconcerting. And as you continue to wear the astigmatism prescription, it induces more embeddedness in the twist either in the body or in the eyes, in your consciousness. And sometimes the astigmatism is the same in each eye, but then sometimes it’s different. And so this creates even more of a split, more of a warp. I’ve seen sometimes with the stigmatism, when we work with each eye separately, is that the eye splits in creates this warp because of trauma or and when I say trauma, it could be emotional trauma or psychological trauma, or just confusion that we kind of split our eye into a couple of different fragmentations. And that’s the way we survive. So there’s a real connection to survival, trauma, confusion. And so there you go. Now, in my practice, because I’ve studied body work and things like Feldenkrais and Alexander and something called continuing movement and cranial sacral and yoga, I’m a body person. And so I look at a person’s body, the way they walk the way they hold themselves. I remember I was working. This happened about a year ago, I was working with this college golfer he was he was a really good scratch golfer. And he came in because his doctor had prescribed Goddess’s astigmatism.

So if you know about golf, and you know, you take a swing and you’re twisting a lot, right, so I had him stand and walk and twist and turn. And I said, you know, I think a lot of this astigmatism is due to the fact of how much twisting you’re doing in the golfing, and the doctor has fixed you in that eye twist to match the twisting in the body. And he said, You know, I started wearing a stigmatism glasses when I started playing golf said, okay, so anyways, we went through a process where I actually made him up a pair of glasses that were not a stigma to no astigmatism in it. And when he put them on, the first thing he said is, wow, things look really warped. And I said, Well, yes, maybe they looked really warped, or maybe this is the way things should look. And he was kind of tuned into that.

He said, you know, that makes more sense to me. And the other thing he said about the non astigmatism glasses, he said, my body feels so much freer without the astigmatism on my eyes, even though it’s a little blurry. I said, okay, so start using the glasses in non demanding situations, and you can take walks with them, but you know, go easy, start slowly with them. So he did this for about a month. And then he came back in, and I measured his eyes and I said, Well, your astigmatism is now half as strong as it was. When you first came in. He says, Yeah, you know, I’m feeling that way as well. And so we reduced the astigmatism correction, we gave him half so when he was golfing, you know, he could see the golf ball and see the pin and we want them to be able to see the ball when he hits it. But then he kept wearing the non astigmatism glasses. And then I started to do some cranial sacral on on my head and get some other kind of body work took three months.

US and a stigmatism gone eyesight 2020. And he said to me that the way he now sees and moves through the world is in a much more fluid, letting it come to him, letting it happen being in a flow state, whereas before, he was always grabbing, and tensing and wheeling it making it happen. And he also said that his reading improved, and even his golf game improved. So that was a really cool relationship between that that body movement from the from the golf, and how that went into his astigmatism into his eyes in his body. So I would leave you with this, that with any of these conditions, whether you’re nearsighted, farsighted, or you have astigmatism, or you’re going into the presbyopia where you need reading glasses, I think the, the bottom line is, is that if you can find and they’re out there have a holistic developmental optometrist or behavioral optometrist who can work with you through maybe some of the base exercises or some of the other exercises, and then giving you reduced prescriptions, or prescriptions that support the expansion that you go through, you can also improve your vision and reduce your dependency on the lenses. So that’s part one, I see I have a little more time. So I want to go into eye circulation and eye health a little bit, because that is another area that really is exploding in our culture. Because if we look at the big three diseases, macular degeneration, cataracts, and glaucoma, and I probably add a fourth one dry eye, it’s off the charts with people complaining about these or suffering these conditions. And yet, the standard medical care is pretty limited. And if you don’t want to do pharmaceutical drugs, which are symptom based, or some type of invasive surgery, then what I’m about to say, is going to give you another option to think about just yesterday, I had a woman who flew out from New York, she was diagnosed with cataracts.

And she said, you know, she went to three surgeons, and they were pressuring her to get the cataract surgery. And of course, because their income depends on doing these cataract surgeries. She wanted an independent opinion on what I would recommend. So one of the things about cataracts is to know what kind of cataract you have. So there’s the nuclear cataracts, which are the age related that’s the cataract that’s more in the front of the lens in the center part of the lens. There’s the posterior subcapsular cataract which is also in the center, but it’s in the back part of the lens. And those are more age related. Although the posterior capsule sub capsule airy can also be related to if you’ve taken steroid drugs or you know, you have to look at if, if in your life, you’ve taken pharmaceutical drugs or you’re going to take some some of these drugs cause cataracts and glaucoma so you need to be very, very careful about what you’re taking. You can’t depend on your doctor to do the homework, you have to do the homework to say Wow, is this really something I want to take? Anyway, the third type of cataract is called cortical, and that’s what she had. So cortical is like spokes on a wheel. It’s along the edges of the the lens. And it’s related sometimes to glucose molecules attaching to the protein or collagen particles molecules in the lens of the eye. And the process is called glycation.

So anyways, we came up with a plan that combined using eyedrops and also some supplements and also the big thing for her was a low carb diet doing some intimate intermittent fasting.

And, you know, making sure she was getting enough of healthy fats and oils and the four essential ingredients for a healthy lens glutathione vitamin C, lutein and zeaxanthin. I’m sure you’ve heard of these before. Anyways, she’s super excited and you know her eyesight is still very good. So she doesn’t need cataract surgery. And so she went away from the session like okay, now I’ve got a plan and I feel

She’s probably going to dissolve the cataracts. So the thing with cataracts is that most people do get them. I’ve read statistics, anywhere between 70 and 90% of the population are going to develop cataracts in their life, but you don’t have to. Again, you know, diet and nutrition are really important in this, in this equation, I think the sugar that’s in our foods is something that you need to track. And if you’re going to do sweeteners, you want to make sure you’re doing low glycemic index foods. You know, consider intermittent fasting, you know, again, work with your functional medicine doctor or your functional naturopath. You can also even look at things like a low carb diet or a Mediterranean diet. You know, I’m not a cookbook person. So I don’t have one diet for everybody. Some people do really well on the ketogenic diet, some people do really well as vegans. And I think that, you know, you have to know your body, you might get some lab tests to figure out, okay, what is my body? Do? What does it need? What’s my dietary absorption? What’s my inflammatory situation? And then you go from there. So

I’m not able to give kind of one answer for everybody, because it’s all dependent on lifestyle, stress, genetics, and diet. And so those things are really part of what you have to do in your self examination. But if we move to macular degeneration, so the macula is the center part of the retina, where we see detail, it’s a part of the retina that’s very vulnerable, because it doesn’t have direct blood supply through it. So relies on its nutrients indirectly. And so when we think about the retina, the retina has one of the highest metabolic nutritional needs in the entire body. And the macula has the highest nutritional need in the retina. So in this particular scenario, it’s not uncommon where that Macula starts to get starved for a variety of reasons, inflammation, or just poor dietary absorption, or whatever. And what happens is oxidative stress starts to accumulate, we can either get dry, which is not a serious or we can get the wet kind where the fluid starts to accumulate behind the macula. And again, you know, in the mainstream, although it’s changing, there are kind of glimpses that yes, there are some things you can do to help improve your macular health. I’ll throw in another condition called macular pucker, or epiretinal membrane disorder.

I see a lot of those cases and that brings in the vitreous, which is the gel sack that sits in front of the retina. And sometimes the vitreous shrinks and it starts to pull on the macula, the macula wrinkles, and there’s your macular pucker, also, inflammation or other eye surgeries can lead to macular pucker as well. So the bottom line is, if it were me number one, I would really amp up my vitamin A lutein, Xia Xanthan and asked his Anthon for macular health. Now, in addition to the vitamin A situation, things like zinc are very important also having a healthy liver and gallbladder. So if you know we are taking these nutrients and we’re not seeing any improvement, the next step is to see if we are actually absorbing our fat soluble vitamins. Vitamin A is fat soluble, lutein and zeaxanthin are fat soluble. So we have to look at the health of our liver that produces the bile, and the gallbladder stores the bile. So if you have a congested liver or gallbladder either get some you can get some acupuncture, or you can take some bile salts after a meal. I have a really great gallbladder formula that I that I’ve started providing to my patients, because a lot of them were in fact, getting the nutrients that they need, but they were still having some some symptoms and some some problems there. So that would be first and foremost. The second thing I want to clue you in on is the therapeutic value of red light. 670 nanometers. Dr. Glen Jeffery did a study University College of London, where he found that giving people red light into the eyes. Over a period of about 12 weeks. This was a morning exposure to red light, improved people’s macular health, reduce their drusen

Improve their visual acuity by about 22%. So using red light on the eyes can also be very helpful if you suffer any kind of macular conditions. Retina conditions, retinopathy, hypertensive retinopathy, diabetic retinopathy, if you’ve had a retinal detachment, or your risk for retinal detachment or lattice degeneration or retinal holes, anything related to the retina, macula, I do think that the red light is something you ought to take a look at. I think it’s very helpful in increasing the mitochondria health in the retina and the macula. And this particular mitochondria increase reverses the aging in the eye, which tends to happen in all of us after about age 45. So if you can boost your mitochondria health, by all means, go for it. And there’s more and more research coming out in the medical journals, supporting red light, not only to help our eyes, but our body as well. So I think red light would be another thing to say. And then last thing is that, you know, the retina is made up of about 50% fatty acids, so your omega threes, or at least the good fats and oils, whether you get them through nuts and seeds, or supplementation, I think that you want to take a look at your healthy fats and oils. That’s really, really important.

And now I’m going to segue to dry eye I’ll come back to glaucoma. So in dry eye, one of the keys is eyelid health. And one of the problems with dry eye is the meibomian glands which are by the eyelashes, they don’t work properly, they may be inflamed, they may be damaged, because they produce the oily part of the tears, which reduces the evaporation of the tear. So when you have something like blepharitis meibomian gland dysfunction, you’re probably going to suffer dry and part of the reason is you’re not getting that oily component of the tears. So the key here is reducing the inflammation in the eyelids and in the body. So you can do that either diet with diet for sure. You can also do it with a castor oil massage. And I know Claudia probably has talked to you about castor oil.

I know we’ve talked about it, and we’re both very positive. We’re very high about castor oil as a way to help reduce the inflammation in the eyelids. In fact, there was a study that ophthalmologists did where they took people who had meibomian gland dysfunction and they gave him an A Castro eyedrop and there was a significant reduction in the dry from just using the castor oil treatment. So that would be something that I would suggest. If you’re going to be using eyedrops I would definitely steer towards natural eyedrops or eye drops that don’t have all the chemicals and preservatives in it whether you do homeopathic eyedrops natural tear eyedrops or MSM, eyedrops, but whatever you’re going to do, I think that the bottom line is you don’t want to be using eyedrops that you get from the drugstore because things like vi zine and you know some of the sustain and some of these other eyedrops are really going to dry your eyes out even more. And they’re going to also

create more redness and more irritation. Just some other quick things about dry eye that I have found to be really important is estrogen levels. So if your estrogen levels are really low or really high, this can lead to dry eye also thyroid issues as well. I also think you know how well your two eyes are working together we call this

I call this the functional aspects of your vision. So Visual coordination, visual focusing if your two eyes are not functioning well, this can also lead to a dryness because of stress and, you know, blue light and I think that blue light that comes off the screens can be very drying. So consider maybe some kind of protection. On the screen. One of the companies I really like and I have no financial interest with them is a company called acha shield. And they have nice screens that you can put on your tablets or phones or your computers. So or you can go with blue blockers as well but perhaps even after 6pm using something to protect your eyes from the blue light cannot

also reduce some of the dryness. The thing about dry is that it’s a puzzle. And again, one size does not fit all. So you may have to try different things to help you in being able to both get relief and also begin to move you away from the dry eye syndrome. Okay, I wanted to talk about two more situations and then we’ll open it up for questions. The first is glaucoma. So with glaucoma, this is a vascular disease that affects the eyes. One of the things I’ve observed is that it can also affect the circulation in the brain, or the circulation in the brain can affect the eyes, or the circulation in the eyes can affect the brain. There have been studies that show there can be a correlation between Alzheimer’s dementia and glaucoma. So, bottom line, we’re talking about circulation and the retina, the optic nerve, specially the optic nerve needs to be protected in glaucoma. It’s also a disease that’s very difficult to diagnose. And it’s very quick for high doctors to say oh, you may be a glaucoma suspect, let’s immediately put you on the glaucoma medications. So you need to check three things. The first is your peripheral vision, testing your visual fields, your optic nerve health and your eye pressure. You can’t just diagnose glaucoma, just because of your eye pressure and high pressure fluctuates. Also, some people have higher eye pressure and don’t have glaucoma. And some people have normal eye pressure and they have a risk of glaucoma. There are many different kinds of glaucoma. But again, if you can work on a couple of things number one, your lymphatic health. Number two your inflammation levels, especially in your eyes. And number three, making sure you’re getting enough fats and oils. Little gingko little taurine, bilberry vitamin A for optic nerve health. That goes a long way because if you can protect your optic nerve, then you get to neutralize the effects of of glaucoma. I’ve also found glop, glop with glaucoma, acupuncture and cranial sacral therapy to be very helpful in being able to neutralize the ill effects of of glaucoma and be very, very cautious about going into doing things like a vitrectomy procedure because it creates scar tissue, and it may only be a temporary solution in improving the circulation in the eyes.

All right, let’s talk a minute about floaters. So most people in their life are going to get floaters and floaters represent

a part of the eye which we call the vitreous, which is a collagen sac. And it’s a gel sac. And if it begins to change its integrity, either by drying out or becoming too wet. Then what happens is we start to get these this floating debris in the vitreous. Thus, we’re calling them floaters. And you go to your eye doctor and probably they’ll say we could laser them out which you definitely don’t want to do, or you know, just live with it and we’ll watch it. So here are some tips on being able to reduce your floaters. Number one, there’s an enzyme called bromelain. This is in pineapple. Some studies have shown this can be very helpful in reducing some types of floaters. Number two, improving your lymphatic health. This is where I like to do things like the long swings or sunning In other words, I want to move my eyes in my body and improve my lymphatic health. That’s really very helpful. Number three, consider doing some kind of a detoxification process, maybe a liver cleanse, gallbladder cleanse. Sometimes the floaters are related to toxicities. Number four, check in about your dentistry. So if you’ve had root canals, or you know you’ve had mercury amalgams or you’ve had difficulties with your teeth, sometimes this will trigger floaters in the eye. Being exposed to blue light doing a lot of screen time, being under a lot of visual stress. These things can cause a floater so reducing high stress using blue blockers. Just doing some of the eye exercises. The palming exercise on a regular basis can be helpful.

And then the last one is MSM eyedrops. So my 15% MSM eyedrops, have helped some people reduce floaters, but it’s not a guarantee, and I don’t want to sell you on it, because it doesn’t work for everybody. But certainly a lot of my patients have had some benefits using the 15% MSM. The one thing I’ll caution you about the MSM 15% is they sting and they burn when you put them in, but that’s actually a good thing. My community uses the word feel the I burn as a positive, but it can be kind of startling. So if you’re going to try MSM, I might start with the 5% First get used to it before you move into the 15%. But you can definitely reduce floaters. There can be an ebb and flow where sometimes they get better sometimes they get worse. Track your body what you’re eating, what your sleep is like what your toxicity is like, and that might give you a clue on what you need to do to reduce your floaters.

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.