June 29, 2022 - EyeClarity Podcast
Double vision is something that affects a number of people, no matter their age. it can lead to issues with concentration and balance. Today I want to share how yoked prisms can help you with double vision and share where you can find this help. Enjoy the show. If you want more, sign up for my newsletter at: www.drsamberne.com.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
prisms, eye, creates, vision, called, prescription, visual, light, yoke, system, prescribe, trauma, vestibular, motion sickness, spatial, part, talking, fovea, doctor, changing
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, its Dr. Sam, and I’d like to welcome you to another EyeClarity Podcast. Today I want to talk about double vision and prisms. You know, in my training, I spent some time early on working in a hospital setting. And I was able to help people who suffered traumatic brain injury. Another term for that is closed head trauma. It was an interesting juxtaposition because I just opened my practice in another doctor’s office in the Philadelphia area was just starting out. And I had great training for sure. But I had trouble getting patients.
And so I contacted one of the local hospitals. And the physiatrist there said, you actually do something called physical therapy for the eyes, I never heard of that. I’ve got a lot of patients for you. So when I started in the outpatient part of the hospital, these folks suffer things like double vision, concentration issues, balance issues, they’re pretty lost. And the eye doctors tend to evaluate people’s vision, as you know, very much in a linear way, meaning that they’re just testing the HR at a distance, maybe at near looking at eye health, and then you’re out the door. So I began applying many of the techniques I had learned. And within a few months, I was getting such great results in this one hospital, that I was offered a contract in three other hospitals. And it’s a way that I actually built my practice in Philadelphia, which I eventually sold.
And Philadelphia at the time was pretty conventional medical place. And so this alternative, innovative way of working with vision was not really well accepted. So in the communities of trauma, and special needs kids, these were the people that weren’t getting their needs met. And so I feel the need, and my reputation grew. And that is how I eventually built up a pretty nice sized practice, which I sold, and then moved out to New Mexico, where I am now in the early 1990s. And one of the techniques that I used and I learned this from about five developmental holistic optometrists. And what was really cool about it is they were in their 70s. I was in my late 20s, early 30s. And I would go to their meetings, they were usually up in either the Connecticut area, or down in Washington DC. And I would just be a sponge, I would just sit in the room and listen to them and know, they taught me a lot about lens prescribing. And one of the techniques in using lenses is using the special prisms called yoked prisms, why o ke D.
03:30
And this is a very different prism prescription than what is usually prescribed. The regular prism glasses that are prescribed by most eye doctors try to fix an eye by prescribing a prism on that eye. And what it does is it helps in the moment, but usually either the person rejects it in their vision, and they go back to seeing double vision or whatever their condition was, or they need more prism. This is very different. This is a prescription that actually is a game-changer in helping the eyes and the brain synchronize better. So I’m going to break that down a little bit more. So you understand. So when you go for an exam and the eye doctor is correcting you to 20/20 eyesight, they’re giving you glasses or contacts. And when you wear that prescription that lens, it focuses the light on a very small part of the real estate of the retina called the fovea. And this is the sharpest pinpoint, it’s like the bullseye where you know you get the prescription and you see things more clearly. And of course, what’s really going on is that you wear that for three months, six months a year and your eyes
Then need more. And so you go back. And you get this prescription that again refocuses the light on the fovea. And this is how you get stronger and stronger prescriptions. On a yoke prism, this is a set of glasses, where you’re wearing the same prism on each eye, and the prisms are actually changing the direction of light that’s coming into the eyes. And the prisms can either shift the light, more, right, more left, more up and more down. So there’s a four types of yo prisms. But what happens is, is that when you wear this type of lens that shifts the light, it has a major effect on your posture, your movement, your visual processing, and how it synchronizes with the brain. And it actually changes the timing of how the light comes into the brain through the eyes. And so it’s going to have an effect on your posture, your vestibular system, that’s the inner ear, and your proprioceptive systems, how my my hands, my feet, my body kind of interact in space, it’s the feeling part of me, that is now changing, because the light now is coming into the eyes in a very different way.
So say for example, you have somebody who has a right eye that is over dominant, we have dominance, you know, left dominant, right dominant, I’m not talking about that I’m talking about when the eye is overcompensating, and for most people, it’s the right eye right handed. And so when you were a prison, yo prism, that say changes the light, so it bends it more to the left side. Now the left eye is engaging, more equally to the right eye. This changes movement, spatial decision making depth perception, reduces visual stress changes the posture. And it’s pretty immediate, you know, when you put on these yoke prisons, either, they’re going to challenge you more, and sometimes, therapeutically, I will prescribe them based on challenging you. And other times, I’m going to prescribe something based on making it easier for your nervous system to create more relaxation to create better visual processing.
07:48
Let’s say for example, somebody has a stroke, and they lose some of their peripheral vision on the left side, or they have glaucoma and they’re losing some of their peripheral vision, what you can do there is you can actually prescribe a yoke prism that moves the light into that blind area. And it actually creates more stimulation in the retina, which affects the brain. And you can start to regain some of your spatial problem solving spatial awareness, spatial decision making. And so it’s really interesting when you put these on, and you look through the prisms, it can make the world shrink, it can make it longer, taller, wider, skinnier. And so it’s like being on drugs without, you know, it’s a non drug way of changing your perception.
When we use these in our workshops. It’s an amazing to watch people, you know, walk and move with this type of change in their spatial problem solving. But what ends up doing is it creates more relaxation and more release in the stress patterns that we carry in the eyes. So there’s a principle here that I want you to think about and that has to do with the status quo. Now in status quo. That means that you know, things are in a habitual, normal kind of way. And you know, we get set in our patterns and sometimes when we get too much status quo, this creates a deterioration. So in these yo prisms when you take the visual system far from status quo, it actually creates more aliveness and more versatility in a person’s visual system to have to interact with some pattern outside their normal My day to day situation, of course, this is done in a therapeutic setting with me or in workshops. So it’s never done like when you’re driving or reading or you know, taking care of your kids or your parents.
No, it’s not done there. But when you take a system visual system far from equilibrium, it creates what we call an open system, there’s more aliveness, there’s more possibilities of flexibility of being able to handle change better, to engage more, with your vision outside, what you’ve been used to are normal, and this creates an improvement that’s lasting. So this idea of moving out of your normal status quo in this particular situation, is actually therapeutically very, very positive. Now yoke prisms can be helpful. If you suffer something called motion sickness, you know, there’s a syndrome called the C syndrome S II, and it has to do with for example, riding in a car and because of the movement, it actually creates an overstimulation in your visual vestibular system. And this can create motion sickness, vertigo, you know, then we can get into the vestibular issues which I have done a lot of video blogs on, you know, vestibular dysfunctions, inner ear balance issues and the vestibular visual relationship is really important, and it usually gets interrupted for a variety of reasons.
But, your prisms can help in this particular condition of motion sickness can also help if you have strabismus so that means an eye turning in turning out up or down. That can also be a way for you to engage a better integration between your two eyes. Again, I talked about nystagmus which is an oscillating of the eyes it’s an uncontrollable movement, erratic movement of the eyes, you have prisms can help those a droopy eyelids, sometimes your prisms can help there, your prisms can help with certain learning and reading problems. And of course, head trauma which I alluded to at the beginning of the show. When you start wearing these prisms, it actually can improve your reading. So your tracking is better, it can improve your sports and your comfort on your screen. Now usually the yoke prisms are worn part time, during visually intensive activities. This is not a permanent situation. So once your visual system gets the memo on Oh, I have more peripheral or, you know, I need to use my left eye more than my right eye and the brain gets synchronized, then you don’t need the prisms anymore. And finally, if you’ve got double vision, this is a very troubling disconcerning problem that is occurring more in older people. I’m seeing it more where I used to just see it in kids. And I think part of the issue is as follows unresolved traumas
13:42
stress, trying to wear progressive lenses those are the multiple lenses that I really don’t like. So you have to work harder to coordinate your eyes through the progressive lenses. And of course neurological issues things like Parkinson’s disease, Ms. You know, these nerve conditions can affect the cranial nerves that affect the eye muscles. So there’s a lot of reasons why a person gets double vision. And again, the yolk prisms are there to help you kind of reconnect in a way that gives you more versatility, more flexibility. And remember, vision is a learned skill we can learn to improve our vision at any age.
So this idea that our eyes only get worse with age. Well, there’s there’s something to that I’ll give it a little credence, but you can also improve your vision as you get older. You know, I just have 1000s of patients who have experienced that and these are people into their 60s 70s and 80s. Even I have a couple people in their 90s that are still driving and they pass their driver’s tests and they’re doing well. So yo prisms yes I’ll be talking more about those and I want to thank you for tuning in today and 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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More