November 23, 2021 - EyeClarity Blog
I want to bring you into this session I did recently with a parent, she’s got a child with a condition called alternating esotropia. That means the two eyes don’t work together. And she received a surgical console from a doctor who wanted to cut the eye muscles to try to straighten the eyes. And so she contacted me, and I’m going to play some excerpts from the session. And so if you’re a parent, and your child has strabismus, this would be a good one for you to listen to. Enjoy the show. If you want more, sign up for my newsletter at:Â www.drsamberne.com.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
eyes, work, surgery, learning, called, depth perception, startle reflex, trauma, cranial-sacral therapy, eyeball, doctor, excerpt, alternating, primitive reflexes, kids, cosmetic, brain, motor, muscles
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.
00:01
Hey, everybody, it’s Dr. Sam and I want to bring you into this session I did recently with a parent, she’s got a child with a condition called alternating esotropia. That means the two eyes don’t work together. And she received a surgical console from a doctor who wanted to cut the eye muscles to try to straighten the eyes. And so she contacted me, and I’m going to play some excerpts from the session. And so if you’re a parent, and your child has strabismus, this would be a good one for you to listen to. And so enjoy the show. And so the first thing I want to say to you is that if you do the surgery, basically, you’re changing the length of the muscles in the eyeball, but you’re not telling the brain. And so what happens is there becomes a confusion in the brain, because it’s the brain that directs the eye muscles. And learning to coordinate your eyes is a skill that’s learned and developed. It’s an organic skill that infants, toddlers, young children go through.
And so when there is a, an alternating situation in the eyes, the way to improve that is by working with the whole person with different physical therapy techniques based on their age. And so it’s, it’s an education process or re education to get the two eyes and the brain to work together. So whenever you do the surgery, you are then disrupting or interrupting the normal developmental arc that we go through to learn how to use both eyes together. Because once you change the length of the muscle, you’re basically going for a cosmetic here. So it’s going to look straight for a while. But the brain says, gee, you know, I don’t know how to work these eyes now, because there’s new input in the muscles. And so you end up having to do multiple surgeries, which creates more trauma, which creates more confusion. And it’s probably the surgery that has the least success. And the idea that there’s a critical period is dead wrong, because neuro neuroscientists are proving that you can actually access you know, different patterns, even into old age, you have to do some different things in order to, to access that. But the surgery is the last option that you want to consider. And that doctor is dead wrong about exercises and physical therapy, things don’t work, they actually work really well.
And I want to I want to give you a kind of a baseline on how to do that. But you don’t really want to go into surgery, if you can avoid it, because it’s the success rate is very low, maybe 20 to 30% at best. And the physical therapy, the success rate is anywhere between 80 to 90%. And you don’t have the side effects of the trauma of the surgery. It’s very, it’s very much a a mechanical eyeball, symptomatic answer. In this next excerpt, I talked about the importance of depth perception, you know, that’s being able to use our two eyes together and judge distances spatial I called spatial IQ. And it’s a learned and developed skill. But it’s certainly an issue for people that have strabismus because their two eyes aren’t working together. And they have to use other cues and signals to figure out where things are in space in relation to their body. Well, one indicator in depth perception is if the eyes look straight, or both eyes are aiming at the same thing at the same time, then she’s going to have a better chance of depth perception. When one of the eyes is straight and one of the eyes is turned in. What she sees is either double vision or the brain just suppresses or ignores that. And so the eyes bye bye. Learning how to aim both eyes together is a kind of a fine motor muscular skill. That would be kind of an indication that she’s probably got good depth perception and the spatial, the spatial understanding
04:54
through the physical eye therapy is one of the things we’re going to work a lot on Like getting her to use both our eyes together. But the way we’re going to do that is by we’re going to include her her body coordination, that’s going to help her eye coordination. And I’ll explain what I mean by that in a minute. So, the eyes Originally, the eyes originate from the brain pretty quickly after conception, so every part of the eyeball is brain tissue. And so when we’re working with trying to straighten the eyes, it partly happens by getting both hemispheres of the brain working together, and both sides of the body working together.
And so in the physical therapy exercises, we’re not going to just focus exclusively on the eyeballs to help Maddie get her eyes to work together. But we’re going to use her body coordination, and other movement techniques, where she’s got to use her eyes, in the context of using her body. And so this is going to be a learning learning curve, a learning curve, about how to straighten her eyes, but getting the support of her body to help her eyes look at the same thing at the same time. So one of the questions I get a lot is, How long is this going to take, and I address this with the parent, by doing these exercises, you should start to see the eye strain within two, and you’re probably going to need to attend to this, for the next three to six months, we might hit a plateau, take a break, and then maybe have to revisit it, you know, down the road. One of the things that happens in a Maddy situation is whenever she’s under stress, or if she’s going to be getting sick, you’re going to see more of the the drifting and moving of the eyes in and out of focus.
That’s going to be your barometer that she’s overwhelmed. Another thing is another thing is is in this process, it is what we call nonlinear meaning that we’re dealing with a human being with emotions, we’re dealing with a human being who’s got her own path. And so it isn’t cut and dry. That one day she hasn’t been the next day she doesn’t, it’s going to be a gradual learning. And again, some days, you’re going to go wow, her eyes are really straight. And then you’re going to see other times when the eyes are drifting and moving around, there could be some emotional frustration that comes up. And so you just have to be prepared, that this is not a black and white change should be a gradual learning. But you should start to see changes. And you’ll start to see behavioral changes, you’ll start to see things where maybe she’s doing better than she was before or taking on new things. And I think the chance for depth perception is 80 to 90%. Using this method, in fact, maybe even higher as she gets older. So we’re not going for our cosmetic fix. We’re going for a functional and a cosmetic fix.
08:51
So these next two excerpts, the first excerpt I talk about the difference between something that is externally imposed, like surgery, versus doing some physical eye therapy, which requires an internal change and internal awareness. So it’s an interesting juxtaposition that I make. And then I move into a new topic called the primitive survival reflexes. And this is a set of movement patterns that I learned, oh my goodness, over 20 years ago, from a group of optometrists from Scandinavia, Denmark and Sweden. And these were optometrists that have been working with this type of movement patterning repatterning since the mid 70s, and it was groundbait breaking work for me when I started to bring it into my practice. And it accelerated the ability for persons vision to improve by including the set the set of movement patterns into the physical eye therapy. So I can lay it out in terms of how it works and what it’s all about. So that she’s able to get depth perception, but she’s, she’s controlling it, instead of having something imposed on her surgically, which is basically a cosmetic, but she’s not learning how to then adapt to the change that’s being imposed on her externally. It’s got to come from the inside out, okay.
The primitive reflexes, a lot of occupational therapists work with this, I actually learned about the primitive reflexes from a group of AI doctors from Sweden and Denmark. And they began using this type of motor repatterning to help kids with strabismus and one of the famous primitive. One of the famous primitive reflexes is called the startle reflex, the startle response. And the medical term is called the Moro reflex. Well, I went to Sweden and I yeah, I have. So the the doctors in Sweden and Denmark, I went there and I studied intensively with them to learn this technique as part of the overall motor repatterning in the alternating esotropia. So we’re going to start there in terms of giving you a motor repatterning that’s going to help integrate the Moro reflex, the startle reflex better, because there’s a correlation between not integrating that startle reflex and strabismus and Cesarean birth. In this last segment, I bring in the body of work called cranial sacral therapy. What is it? How did I get involved with it?
And how can it help kids who’ve had say, a difficult birth, maybe a birth trauma, and how that interferes with the sensory motor development. So many years ago, when I was working with a lot of special needs kids, we found that a lot of the kids had birth trauma. And I went to massage school and became a cranial sacral therapist and began helping kids who’ve gone through tough births by doing this form of cranial sacral. And it helped remove some of the initial imprints. And when it did, when we removed those, their sensory motor systems tended to develop better. And so if you were if you were in my town,
12:44
and you decided you wanted to run into my office, and I would be doing a little bit of cranial sacral therapy, since you’re not in my town, I would consider as an adjunct to the things I’m giving you, for you to take Maddie to, you know, a pediatric cranial sacral therapist, it could be somebody from the Upledger Institute or biodynamic cranial, it could be, you know, somebody who’s whose, it doesn’t need to be a doctor, it could be a physical therapist could be, it could be somebody, the Upledger Institute, I did some training there, they have a worldwide network of practitioners. And you’d have to, you know, explore whether the, the therapist has worked with kids, and you know, you want to find somebody who’s, who’s like I specialize in pediatrics and just go for a session, you know, it may be 15 minutes, you know, she may move around, maybe you like, like, what I do is mom and the child lay on the massage table together. So it rebonds them. There’s a bonding that reoccurs during the sacral and it’s a way to release trauma. So trauma. That’s another specialty that I have because I’ve worked a lot with trauma and brain and eyes and kids. That trauma can be a interference in the visual development.
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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