April 12, 2025 - EyeClarity Podcast
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Keywords
holistic optometry, vision health, eye care, Sam Berne, trauma, stress management, visual processing, integrative health, eye conditions, functional vision
Summary
In this enlightening presentation, Dr. Sam Berne discusses the profound connection between vision and overall health through the lens of holistic optometry. He shares his personal journey of overcoming vision challenges and emphasizes the importance of understanding how our eyes reflect our physical and emotional well-being. Dr. Berne explores various aspects of holistic eye care, including the impact of stress, trauma, and nutrition on vision, and offers insights into common eye conditions and their integrative solutions.
Takeaways
• Holistic optometry focuses on the whole person, not just symptoms.
• Vision is deeply connected to emotional and physical health.
• Stress management is crucial for maintaining good vision.
• Nutrition significantly impacts eye health and function.
• Trauma can lead to disorganized visual processing.
• The gut-eye connection is essential for overall health.
• Functional vision is about how we use our visual system.
• Understanding the root causes of eye conditions is vital.
• Vision therapy can help improve learning and processing in children.
• Integrative approaches can reverse common eye conditions.
Sound Bites
• “The eyes never lie about your health.”
• “We see things as we are, not as they are.”
• “Your vision reveals your health.”
• “I reversed my progressive myopia.”
• “Emotions impact how we see the world.”
• “Stress affects our vision significantly.”
• “The gut and the eye are very connected.”
Chapters
00:00Introduction to Holistic Optometry
08:01The Journey of Sam Berne
15:10Understanding Holistic Optometry
21:50The Connection Between Vision and Health
30:05Trauma, Stress, and Vision
38:50Common Eye Conditions and Their Solutions
Sam Berne (00:00.106)
On the final lecture of the day, which will be followed by a couple of panels. We’re privileged to you our next speaker, Sam Byrne, OD. He’ll be talking on the Eyes Never Lie, what your vision reveals about your health. Dr. Byrne.
few words about him dr burn received a bachelor of from penn state university a doctorate from the pennsylvania college of optometry and a post-doctoral advanced degree from the gazzal institute in child development aside from having a private practice he’s done clinical research been a faculty member at the es salon institute and authored five books he’s a member of both the new mexico optometric assuming optometric
Association and the American Optometric Association. is licensed to practice optometry in New Mexico and Hawaii. Did I say that right? You were very close. You got a gold star. was that was was. There you go. All right. Well, welcome. Thank you. Very excited to have you here today. OK. For everything I have to say, you go ahead and begin your presentation.
Well, thank you so much for inviting me and I’ve been looking forward to this. And so we’re going to start off with a quote and I want to give you my interpretation of it. You probably can have your own. We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are and one of my intentions about this presentation today is to help you see through your eyes.
And we’ll get more into that. But I want you to have ownership of your eyes and vision. Now in this next quote that I put up the eye is the window to the soul, but it’s also the mirror of the body. And today I’m going to connect the dots on how our eyes affect our metabolic and endocrine health and I’ll get into that in a few minutes.
Sam Berne (02:13.303)
The title of my presentation is called the eyes never lie what your vision reveals about your health and then the upper left corner is something called functional vision integrative body and that’s the method that I’m using now to teach practitioners all the things I’ve learned. I’m going to this for about 40 years and we started a practitioners training last year. That’s actually open to
non-eye doctors. There’s a way that people can use this method and they don’t have to be eye doctors and they can really help their clients. And then the lower right corner is me reading one of my books, my latest book vital vision and I’ll talk about my books at the end of the lecture today. But I thought I would start off about the question that I get a lot and that is how did I get into this?
How did I get into this optometry specialty? Well, it started when I was about eight years old. I was diagnosed with a learning disability and my parents took me to a lot of different professionals. You know, I grew up in a family that really stressed reading and intellectual thinking and I couldn’t read. I didn’t know how to read. So we ended up after
visiting several different professionals at an ophthalmologist office and I got a pair of nearsighted glasses and I became a memorizer in school. That’s how I got through school. I got really good grades. I worked really hard and every couple of years my myopia got worse. I had progressive myopia and I got to the point where I couldn’t see the biggie on the eye chart and I was really
Dependent on my lenses. Well, after I graduated optometry school, I met a developmental optometrist. name was Dr. Albert a shankman and he practiced in Connecticut. I was living in Philadelphia at the time. So I started to go to him as a patient and he said two things to me. He said number one, I think your myopia your progressive myopia is due to tension that you’ve been carrying in your eyes since you’ve been a child.
Sam Berne (04:37.899)
I never heard that before even in Optometry school. And then the second thing he said is that your left eye wanders out and you’re not using your two eyes together. That’s why you see double and that’s why you have poor reading comprehension. So I began working with Dr. Shankman in a process called physical therapy for vision and about six months later, I woke up. I was rushing to my office in Philadelphia and I’m driving on the freeway.
And I’m going, my God, I forgot to put my contact lenses in and I can see the road signs. I couldn’t believe it. It was really a shocking moment, but it was amazing. It was an amazing healing and I had been reducing my prescription, but this was amazing to be able to see clearly without my lenses and we fast forward 40 years later and I don’t wear any lenses for distance or reading. So I experienced
a shift in being able to completely reverse my progressive myopia. The second thing that happened to me was that I began to use my two eyes together and I stopped seeing double vision and I became a voracious reader. So with those two things impacting me in my practice that I opened up and I actually affiliated with a another developmental optometrist. His name is Dr. Ellis Edelman in Philadelphia.
I started a practice where I was very inspired to help people improve their vision. But the problem was I was in an area that was very allopathically centered a lot of ophthalmology hospitals and clinics around our office and I couldn’t get any patients. It was very frustrating. So one day I went to one of the hospitals nearby and I met with the physiatrist and the physical therapist and I said, you know,
I know how to do this rehabilitative optometry physical therapy on your patients. Could I come and try for three months and see if I can make any, you know, improvements. So, of course, after a month, these people who were suffering double vision vertigo and balance issues focus and concentration issues. These are people with traumatic brain injury stroke, you know, brain insults all kinds of things.
Sam Berne (07:03.648)
They were going back to their life in a normal manner. So I began then working at another couple of hospitals around Philadelphia and that’s how I built up my practice. The second thing I did at that time is I began to work with special needs kids. These were kids in the spectrum disorders down syndrome, minimal brain dysfunction, and I had a very strong impact on them and I really helped them.
So going after those two population groups, I built up a successful practice which I sold about five years later and I moved to my present home Santa Fe, New Mexico and I opened up a holistic integrative practice and you know, never looked back very successful at it. So that’s my beginning and now I want to bring you into what is exactly that I do.
So before we get to that, I want to give a disclaimer that the information I’m sharing today is only educational that this is not a substitute for medical care. It’s not a substitute for your eye physician. This is just education. Okay, and so I am not diagnosing or treating in this. I’m only sharing information.
I want to give a shout out to my mentors and my teachers. I have several of them in optometry and also in the world of body centered healing also in nutrition, craniosacral therapy, aroma therapy and iridology. So really grateful that I had these people really touch me and I wouldn’t be here today without them.
Sam Berne (08:58.795)
So I’m sure all of you have been to the eye doctor and this is an optometrist and he has a machine in front of the patient’s eyes. It’s called a foropter and you probably have been in this situation where your optometrist will put you in front of this and say, okay, which lens is clear one or two and you go, can you show me that again? And he says one or two and you go
I number two, no, number one, number one. think number one, they’re so close. So the optometrist will probably say, well, let me show you three and four. This is number three. This is number four, four, I think four. The optometrist may say, well, you’re, you’re pretty definitive there. He says, well, you know, I think I really screwed up because I still messed up because of number one. And so this goes back and forth.
And let’s say you’re having a stressful day and you choose a lens. And then the next thing is you you get the prescription and you go back to the doctor and you say hey doc, you know, I’m I’m kind of seeing out of a fishbowl and he says, that’s that’s normal. You know, that’s you know, you’ll just get used to it. And actually in six months, you’ll come back and we’ll make the prescription stronger and no problem or the other thing is you get the glasses or the contacts and go.
Why is the world slanted and the optometrist will say, well, that’s just your stigmatism. You know, just tilt your head a little bit. You’ll get used to it and you know, six months, you’re going to get a cataract anyway. No worries. Well, no, we don’t want to adjust and get used to something that’s creating some kind of disharmony in us. And this is how the eye exams regularly go. So in mainstream eye care,
It is dominated by reactive symptom-based experiences. I’m sure many of you have had that you have going with the symptom and you leave and you know, maybe the symptoms a little better, but you’re not really getting to the root cause and usually, you know, whether it’s, know, farsightedness or nearsightedness myopia hyperopia astigmatism cataracts.
Sam Berne (11:22.952)
macular degeneration dry eye. We’re going to get into all those today. Eye care is very reactive and they’re going for the first line of defense. Okay, how do we control the symptom? They may manage the symptoms through prescription lenses, which by the way, when you do get a prescription lens and you see 2020 out of it invariably, it’s probably going to weaken your eyes. And you know, in my practice, what we do is we figure out perhaps
giving you a full prescription, but then we might give you a vision improvement prescription that you can work with in a non demanding and non threatening situation. And over time your eyes can flex into the weaker prescription happens all the time for us. Also in mainstream eye care, basically it’s pharmaceuticals needles surgery and you know, one of the big moneymakers today. If you have wet macular degeneration as an example.
is the the shots of Avastin the anti-VEGF and we’ll go into some of those things. What are alternatives to getting the injections month after month? You know, I’ve had a lot of patients over the years that have been doing those injections for a long time and they’ll come to see me and within three to six months using my method. They’re able to completely get off the need for injections and their eyes get better. They return to health.
Obviously surgical invention interventions are very common and sometimes you do need surgery. I’m not against cataract surgery. It’s actually, you know, one of the safest surgeries out there, but there might be alternatives that you can you can do that instead of doing surgery. So we’ll go into that.
The other thing that mainstream eye care does is it treats the eye as a mechanical structure and it often ignores the deeper connections to the brain to our systemic health our trauma lifestyle and stress. You know, one of the things that I did after I had my experience working in the hospitals is I published an article on research on the relationship between traumatic brain injury and vision. And by the way, if you
Sam Berne (13:41.937)
want any of the citations that I shared today. I’d be happy to send you the article. My hair is a little less gray, but otherwise it is me and the the I would say the case histories that I shared were really compelling and it made a big difference in terms of bringing traumatic brain injury into the conversation around vision.
So what is the science of holistic optometry? Well, there is definitely peer review literature in vision science. The journal behavioral optometry, optometry and vision development have published many articles on case histories and outcome-based reports on things like visual processing problems, convergence insufficiency, which is an issue with
coordinating your eyes together, it’s what I have.
Sam Berne (14:41.864)
So what is holistic optometry? Well, it considers the whole person, you know, in this conference and I’ve been listening and watching some of the other practitioners. They’re all talking about, you know, we’re treating the whole person, you know, we’re reminding patients that we’re already whole and instead of treating fragments, we’re treating the whole person. So in vision science in our holistic optometry approach.
I’m looking at things like behavioral neuroscience. We’re going to do an exercise a little later in this presentation on how to increase our neuroplasticity. And because the eyes originate from the brain, the eyes are the only part of the brain that sit outside the cranial vault. But the eyes do come from the brain very early on in utero. So when we start applying new
Stimulations to the eyes. We can make changes and some of those changes can really affect our behavior. That’s why there’s a term that sometimes used in holistic optometry called behavioral optometry. And that means that if we change the way we’re seeing we might change the way we respond to ourselves in the world and we’ll talk a little more about that.
Another thing that I do in holistic optometry is something called somatic movement body movement. Well, you know, we don’t just see with our eyes. Our eyes are actually our GPS system that guide our body through space and our peripheral vision our depth perception all of those skills that interface with the brain gets stimulated through movement and so movement and vision work hand-in-hand with each other.
I don’t know. I don’t think I have to say much about nutrition. mean in this conference, everybody’s talking about eating, you know, in a healthier way. And certainly if we change our diet, if we eat more antioxidants, you know, the eyes have one of the highest metabolic needs of the body. And so if we give it healthy clean food, non-gmo organic, you know, we prepare it. Well, that’s going to improve our eyesight.
Sam Berne (17:04.667)
No question about it. Stress management is another thing. So how many people here spend more than one hour a day on a computer that in itself being on digital devices creates a lot of stress in our eyes and in our body. So what can we do to reduce the stress to de-stress our vision so that we’re not behind the eight ball in terms of oxidative stress inflammation and
This creates the deterioration. You’re in for a treat today because we’re going to talk about light and color therapy and I’ve set it up. So we’re actually going to all get a light and color therapy treatment. So that’s going to come towards the end of my presentation. So stay tuned for that. And then finally visual processing and integration therapies. I do this a lot with children. I’m in the process of producing directing and producing a new documentary that’s going to be coming out this summer.
And it’s my work with the spectrum disorder kids that I’ve been, you know, helping for over 40 years. And so, you know, get on my email list because this this documentary is really fabulous and I’ve been working on it a long time. We’re kind of in the final stages of it, but I want to bring awareness to the general public that vision and learning and the brain.
are very interrelated and it can really affect our learning and processing of information.
Alright, some other things that affect our vision. I referred at the beginning of my presentation astigmatism and astigmatism means there’s a twist in the body a twist in the eyes and this creates an imbalance in our posture.
Sam Berne (18:57.735)
It’s interesting with the stigmatism. I’m a craniosacral therapist and when I used to have my main office, I used to have my eye exam equipment and right next to that I’d have my massage table. So I would measure somebody’s prescription and then I would ask them to go on the massage table and I would do an hour of craniosacral therapy on them. Then I’d put them back in the eye exam and I would redo the exam and invariably their eye prescription was
at least 30 to 40 % less after doing an hour of craniosacral therapy and that’s what I would prescribe and people were thrilled. They love that prescription. So the point of it is is that what prescriptions we have in our eyes can really impact our neck our head our body our spine our sacrum and if we give a lens that’s too strong. I’m telling you that the cervical spine
the thoracic, the sacrum, the pelvis is all going to feel it. And I’ve had a number of cranial osteopaths that refer patients to me because they say, you know, this guy’s prescription is way too strong. I can feel it in his cranial rhythm. This happens over and over again. So posture the body how we hold ourselves.
Based on what prescription we’re worrying in our eyes. It’s going to affect our posture. What about emotions? Is there any relationship between emotions and how we see well with 40 years of patients telling me this so this is coming from patients. They’ll say something like my nearsightedness my myopia is related to fear and I’ll then talk to farsighted people.
hyperopia and they’ll say my main emotion is anger. So if we relate that the Chinese medicine what is fear is in the kidneys and anger is in the liver. I’m going to talk about the liver kidney relationship in a little bit. So our emotional body definitely has effect on our physical vision. And once you start uncovering what’s behind your eyes.
Sam Berne (21:21.486)
what’s been internalized. Those things are going to start to come out and you can have emotional psychological even spiritual insights that can actually clear up your physical seeing. I talked a little bit about learning. So we know that, you know, when you go to the regular eye doctor and he or she has you read the distance eye chart. That’s actually not vision. That’s your eyesight. It’s eyeballs. It’s glasses.
Vision is how the eyes and the brain and the body work together. So the more seamless you have that eye brain body connection that’s going to improve your learning. mean, I experienced it firsthand. I was a terrible reader for 20 years and when I met Dr. Shankman and I went through his vision therapy program and I healed my visual coordination problem. No problem in reading. I can read and write and
So it was a real epiphany in me and again over the years helping thousands of kids regain their vision which really impacts their learning and then finally the nervous system regulation. So our eyes reflect our sympathetic nervous system and our parasympathetic nervous system. So how does that work? So we have something in our eyes called our pupil and the pupil is I call it the the light.
gatekeeper like for example, you go outside and your pupils should get small. They should constrict because you want to protect yourself from the light. You don’t want to have light sensitivity like you come inside and you come inside and the pupils dilate because you need more light. Okay, so that’s a nervous system autonomic nervous system response. When you have too much sympathetic nervous system.
in your vision. Guess what happens your poop. Your pupils are dilated all the time. So you’ve got light sensitivity, your sensitive to glare. You get eye strain, eye fatigue. Another thing you do is you tunnel your vision. This is the start of myopia. So your nervous system is a reflection of how your visual system is working and how you’re working. You can’t really separate it out.
Sam Berne (23:50.051)
All right, little more on research because people like that. And again, I can send you citations on the science of holistic optometry. The Journal of Behavioral Optometry has reported, you know, improvements in convergence insufficiency by doing something called the convergence insufficiency symptom survey. They also do something else called developmental eye movement test.
And eye movements are very important in terms of our reading our tracking. And so there are physical kind of standardized tests that you can do to measure the effects of the physical therapy. And not only are you seeing subjective changes, but you’re also seeing objective changes. Now, what about vision mirroring stress? I talked a bit about stress and stress management.
There are scientific findings out there that the sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive and just like I talked about we go in our fight-flight-freeze response. This increases pupil size. If we’re in chronic stress, it’s going to affect our accommodation, which is our focusing muscles, our vergence is our coordination. And the other thing that we measure is the relationship between visual stress and cortisol levels. We’re not surprised by that.
So we go into adrenal fatigue and I’ll kind of bring those things together a little later. How does vision mirror trauma? Well, in some of the scientific reports early trauma can lead to disorganized visual processing. So this would be birth trauma and any kind of c-section or breach or forceps delivery will affect something called
primitive reflex retention. So now we’re kind of in the world of occupational therapy and physical therapy and I had the good fortune with one of my mentors. Dr. Albert a Sutton who was a world-renowned developmental optometrist. He brought a group of optometrists from Scandinavia and they taught us the primitive reflex integration therapy. So the primitive reflexes are early movement patterns that start in utero.
Sam Berne (26:12.932)
And they kind of set the stage for the infant toddler child to move through these primitive patterns movement patterns. And then the brain gets freed up where they learn how to hop and skip and jump rope and then eventually they’re tracking their eyes. They have visual coordination. And then finally they move into executive functioning processing where they make decisions and they plan ahead stuff they do in school.
But what we learned was these school-aged children that have learning problems. It was because they didn’t integrate their primitive reflexes. This is what these optometrists from Scandinavia taught us. So what we found was is that if there was early trauma could have been in utero could have been at birth could have been at the bonding period. These primitive reflexes got stuck and they’re controlled by the reptilian brain our survival brain.
So our survival response and so by doing this primitive reflex therapy on them, it released the brainstem. They integrated the primitive reflexes. Then they could then move to the higher brain centers and this actually had an effect on their processing. So it’s a long answer to it’s one way that you can heal trauma. Probably another way you can heal trauma that I use in my practice, especially with the kids.
Is craniosacral therapy. I feel that craniosacral combined with primitive reflexes is a really great foundation for helping children heal trauma. And I would say craniosacral works on the fluid body and primitive reflexes work on the nervous system. Now the fluid body comes way before the nervous system. So, you know, in a lot of rehab, they’re talking about just primitive reflexes.
They just stay in the nervous system. So in my practitioner training as an example, we go all the way back to the fluid body, the cerebral spinal fluid, the fascia, the connective tissue, the lymph because if we can go all the way back, then we can reprogram the fluid body and then we can do the primitive reflexes on the nervous system. And there you go. You’re covering all the bases. This also can be with adults. This is what I saw in the hospitals.
Sam Berne (28:36.804)
PTSD and trauma survivors, you know, I’ve worked with a lot of veterans and in veterans as you probably know, there’s a lot of PTSD and the thing about our vision is because it’s soft tissue. We absorb the traumas, but we can’t see them on the MRIs. We can’t see them on the scans, but where I do see them is functionally symptomatically. And so by doing again, physical vision therapy.
This is a way that you can start healing the PTSD and the trauma. Some other things that happen in trauma around vision is we tend to tunnel our peripheral vision. We have trouble with eye contact. We have trouble with convergence. That’s where our eyes aiming in towards each other and focusing issues. And also the last thing is we’re sensitive to light and there’s a problem with our balance our orientation. We might have vertigo. That’s that vestibular visual mismatch.
What about vision and inflammation? I’ll tell you a lot of the eye diseases. I see are really related to inflammation gone amok. And if you look at conditions like dry eye uveitis macular degeneration, just to name a few, there’s a connection between those and cytokine cascades. Also oxidative stress and pairing.
the lens health. So that’s why we develop cataracts or retinal problems, either macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy or other very weird retinopathy conditions. There is a very strong gut-eye axis. I know that can be hard for some of my colleagues to understand, but the gut and the eye are very, very related and connected.
Sam Berne (30:38.604)
So in my functional integrative body, my functional vision integrative body method. What I’m here to say is that functional means how we are using our visual system as opposed to just looking at it from a structural point of view. You know, when I was in school, I learned the structure of all the anatomy and actually in a few minutes, I’m going to give you a functional anatomy session just
Just to teach you a little bit about function as opposed to just structure. There’s also in my experience a neuro emotional and a somatic approach when we start adding those things to our vision. It allows us to open the door to create to create and treat the root causes not the symptoms and I would say most I care is really interested in symptom suppression. They’re not really
Looking at the root causes. So I think of it as education prevention and restoration empowering people to take agency in their healing and this is what our practitioners training is about. Okay, so I’m going to bring you in to structural anatomy versus functional anatomy and structural anatomy focuses on form and shape. This is the lens. This is the eyelids. This is the optic nerve.
Okay, so there’s an identification of here’s the anatomical parts and maybe this is where the disease is. This is where the disease begins. It could be in the optic nerve. It’s glaucoma. It could be in the macular. It’s macular degeneration. In functional anatomy, what we’re interested in is how the anatomy moves, how it works. It’s more of a dynamic situation. In this particular saying that I use function
affects structure. So how we use something is going to eventually affect the anatomy. As an example, a lot of people out there go into what we call invisible bifocals or progressive lenses. And when you wear a progressive lens, what happens is basically the edges of the lens are not usable and the only part of the lens that you can see through is the middle part and it’s
Sam Berne (33:06.12)
Split up. It’s a gradient where the very top fourth of the lens is for distance. The middle part of the compartment is for computer and the bottom part is for reading. And let’s say you now have been diagnosed with macular degeneration. This happens a lot in our practice. So they come to see me. They’ve got macular degeneration and they’re wearing the progressive lenses. They don’t like them.
but they were prescribed for them and what the progressive progressive lenses are doing functionally is they’re making the person focus and use primarily their macula exclusively. So they’re making them use the weak part of their retina, but they’re not even thinking that the practitioners that are prescribing these aren’t even thinking of the functional ramifications.
They’re thinking of it as this is cosmetically great. Nobody’s going to see the line, you know, it’s everything’s in one lens and you know, so they’re they’re not really looking at the root cause they’re just trying to treat, you know, the the symptom again. So we take them out of the progressive lenses. We might give them a single vision lens for driving and a single vision lens for the computer and maybe we give them a reading lens as well. Okay, they can still use their
progressive lenses if they’re really shifting back and forth. But the key thing on function affecting structure, the bigger the window you look through the more of the eye you’re using the smaller the window you’re using the less of the eye you’re using and you’re putting stress maximum stress on the stress point. It’s the weakest part of the person’s retina, which is the macula macular degeneration. So you have to look at what are you giving the patient?
as it relates to their functional vision experience. Okay, so here’s the anatomy of the eye and if we go over here, see my arrow. This is the front part of the eye. We have the the front part, which is the eyelids which protect the eyes and they house the glands. So people that have things like blepharitis or you know, my bone me and gland dysfunction.
Sam Berne (35:30.708)
Their eyelids are swollen. There’s inflammation going on. And so, you know, that’s going to impede their ability to produce the proper tears that then cover the clear window of the eye, which is the cornea. And so the cornea has a lot of nerve endings on it. And if it’s not getting lubricated every time you blink, it feels like you’ve got sand in your eyes. Well, the standard approach would be to use, you know, an immune suppressant eye drop called
Restasis, which is very expensive. It suppresses your immune system. It gives you some temporary relief, but it’s certainly not dealing with the the cause of why the person is getting dry eye just as an example. And then we go behind that and we see the iris, which is the colored part of the eye. And then here’s a healthy lens. So I read a statistic recently that by the age of 70.
95 % of people are going to get cataracts. Okay. Why is that? Why do we get cataracts? Well, partly it’s because the lens of the eye has no blood vessels that run through it. You don’t see any blood vessels here. It’s what we call an avascular structure and it’s very susceptible to oxidative stress accumulation protein accumulation.
something called the glycation process where glucose molecules attach to the protein molecules and this creates the cloudiness in the lens. So what can you do to reverse cataracts or slow down cataracts? Well, two of the main ingredients are glutathione and vitamin C just to start with we’ll get into some other things. But basically if you’re developing cataracts, you’re low in glutathione, you’re low in vitamin C.
And the third thing is you need to really monitor your pancreas health and your glucose levels because if your glucose levels are moderate to high, if you eat a lot of carbs and a lot of you know, white foods or sugars or you know, bad fats, you’re going to start getting oxidative stress in the lens of the eye. So there are things that you can do nutritionally to start to reverse that and we’ll talk a little more about that.
Sam Berne (37:54.346)
We look back here. This is called the posterior chamber. This is where we get those bothersome floaters. I floaters. I probably get a question a day on social media. How do I fix my floaters? And we think that floaters is just an eye problem, but actually there’s a systemic and metabolic cause to floaters anything from inflammation in the eye liver congestion.
poor dentistry head trauma just to name a few and so there’s some things that you can do to mitigate some of the floaters. I think improving the lymphatic system is another way getting better circulation in the eye. Sometimes is a way to get rid of the floaters and then finally we’re back at the retina and the retina is made up of photoreceptors. We have the macula we have the
which is right here the fovea and then we have the the retina itself and then we have the optic nerve here and this is the connector back to the brain. So the eye in general needs a lot of nutrients and after about age 35 or 40 of we get less and less of those nutrients into that eye area unless we have really good digestion and
coupled with stress poor lifestyle lots of digital use not getting enough morning sunlight. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons why our eyes let us down and there is a genetic component to it as well. So we’ll kind of go into that maybe in about five minutes. We’ll go into that. All right, so common eye conditions. I had progressive myopia and I was able to reverse it. Certainly myopia is running an epidemic.
portions because of all the screen time we’re doing. I call it visual confinement time.
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