June 15, 2022 - EyeClarity Podcast
Charles Bonnet Syndrome is a condition that’s triggered by vision deterioration that causes visual hallucinations. It isn’t well known and can be hard to diagnose, so we are going to look deeper into this eye disease today. Enjoy the show. If you want more, sign up for my newsletter at: www.drsamberne.com.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
eye, vision, macular degeneration, experiences, physical therapy, syndrome, talk, cataracts, charles, condition, exercises, retina, visual, heard, benet, visual hallucinations, glaucoma, suffering, hallucinations, physical
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.
Hey everybody, it’s Dr. Sam and I want to welcome you to another EyeClarity Podcast. Today I am taking a question from a listener who’s got a condition called the Charles Bonnet syndrome. The Charles Bonnet was a Swiss philosopher. And he first described this syndrome in 1760, in a publication, where he was talking about his grandfather, who was suffering visual hallucinations. And he was going blind, secondary to a cataract diagnosis. But it wasn’t until 1967, when George demore, CA, who was a Swiss scientist, he actually labeled the condition as the Charles Bonnet syndrome. So this is a condition that’s triggered by vision deterioration that cause visual hallucinations. Now, these are only visual, so you’re not hearing things, you’re not sensing things in your body. And this particular syndrome is directly related to deteriorating eyesight and vision. It’s not caused by a mental problem dementia, you know, from taking drugs, LSD, things like that. This is triggered by a vision deterioration. So what people experiences, they see things like grids, and shapes and lines, sometimes the colors are vivid. And there’s just complex patterns that come through the visual system. And they can last a few minutes or several hours. Sometimes they’re moving, sometimes they’re static. So in terms of vision loss, it’s very interesting, because with these visual hallucinations, many times they are related to eye diseases that people are experiencing.
And with the Charles Bonnet syndrome, these are caused because of problems like macular degeneration, cataracts, glaucoma, dry eye, myopia. So there’s a lot of reasons why we start getting these visual hallucinations. And what’s interesting about this condition is that it’s related to eye diseases. You know, whenever we have a change in the retina, for example, let’s say you’ve got diabetes. And one of the conditions that can occur in the retina is called diabetic retinopathy. So the retina either begins to hemorrhage, or edema is accumulating behind the retina. And when people are then trying to use their eyes, because of these physical deteriorations, they start to see these very weird things that come into their vision. And it can be very disconcerting, and disorienting. Sometimes it will happen when you close your eyes, and then you open them, or if you go from a light space to a dark space, or vice versa. Or it may even come from moving your eyes say when you’re reading. Now, when you go to your eye doctor, a lot of times you start experiencing, you know these certain Well, I could say hallucinations, but you know, you can explain this to your doctor. And unless he’s heard of the Charles Bonnet syndrome, he actually might think you have a mental problem. And it really is not a mental problem at all. It’s related to the physical changes that are occurring in the, you know, in the visual system. So this is where, you know, coming into my body of work because when a person is suffering, say, let’s just take macular degeneration, whether it’s the dry kind or the wet kind, it does create some distortion in your vision. You know, if you do the
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Amsler grid, which is the grid you look at, when you have macular degeneration, many times, you’ll see either some of the grid disappearing, coming and going. That’s a visual field loss, or you see some distortions. And this is what we’re talking about in terms of seeing things in your vision that maybe you normally do not experience. And so it’s really important on a, a mental emotional level, to have some understanding that okay, this is the cause, these are the reasons why I am getting these hallucinations. And then to begin to do some of my integrative proactive methods. So like, for example, with macular degeneration, the combination of doing some physical high therapy exercises, and by the way, when you do physical therapy exercises, you are broadening your range of visual experience, because at least in the physical therapy that I teach, many of the experiences you have are going to be outside the normal range of what you normally see. And, you know, I’m always counseling people that we want you to go more into your blur, we want you to be able to go from blurred and clear dark to light, use each eye separately.
Being able to work with eye movements where you’re stretching your eyes, putting sound into your eyes, my poem, hum exercise, for example. So there’s a lot of new stimulation that I asked people to do in the physical therapy. And in doing that, you begin to relax mentally and emotionally, that you see things may be out of the norm. But it takes a special doctor, therapist practitioner, to understand that, you know, vision is more than a two dimensional experience that you actually can see things outside the normal scope of what we’re used to. And in a therapeutic setting, it’s actually a great inquiry to do that. Because it opens up your your vision in a way that you actually see more things you see in a more creative way, you see in a more relaxed way.
And it really takes that permission of being able to go into those experiences in a rehabilitation type exercise type program. Because in regular eye care, well what is it it’s very linear, you go in and you’re measured, which is clear one or two, and you get a lens or you read the eye chart, or you’ve got this disease, and it’s only gonna get worse, you know, it’s very black and white, and it’s very, I call downward spiraling, there isn’t a lot of, you know, new or open ended information. And you’ve heard me talk about closed systems and open systems. closed system means you know, there’s very little information outside the, you know, the box that a person is in, that’s a closed system and those systems deteriorate. Whereas an open system is you take yourself far from status quo. And when you move away from the status quo. This is when new information can come in, and new, new experiences. This is when neuroplasticity can kick in as a lot of things that go on here. So the physical life therapy exercises are great at helping a person who’s got the Charles Benet syndrome, or anything like that, to be able to monitor and navigate and regulate the new things. And then on top of that, usually when there’s an eye deterioration, whether it’s cataracts, glaucoma, macular degeneration, dry eye
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refractive errors myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, that there are nutritional things that you can do to feed your eyes to have a chance to reverse or at least slow down some of the anatomic Michael deteriorations and so in a lot of my other content, you know, you hear me talk about for the macula, lutein Xanth and Astra Xanthan, are you absorbing your fat soluble vitamins? If not, maybe you need to boost your gallbladder health. If you’ve got glaucoma, you might look at increasing things like bilberry, gingko, taurine, omega threes. If you’ve got cataracts, you might increase your vitamin C, and glutathione. And, you know, in all of these cases, maybe getting some blue protection on your eyes, from all the screen time. These are some of the basic principles that you’ve heard me talk about. So you can plug into those shows or on my website to learn more about the specific protocols. So the bottom line is that this Charles Binay syndrome is more common than we think. Because, you know, especially as we get older, we get a little more isolated.
I mean, since COVID, we’ve been told to isolate. So we’re not in our communities like we were. And so these weird things, we see these things, and we go, Oh, my goodness, am I losing my mind. So I want to assure you, you’re not this is not a mental problem. This is that your vision is really changed in a way that’s creating these very different states of dimension. And to understand that there are some things that you can do both in the physical therapy level and the nutritional level, to at least at least help you understand the, the shifts going on, but hopefully get you to adjust and accept and flow with what you’re seeing, because there’s a real imagination and a real creative potential in this way of seeing. So I hope that that’s helpful to you. I know there are more people out there that are suffering that condition, then that maybe we’ve thought about but it’s definitely something worth noting. So that’s my show for today. I want to thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, take care.
Thank you for listening. I hope you learned something from the EyeClarity podcast show today. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to subscribe on iTunes or Spotify and leave a review. See you here next time.
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