August 18, 2022 - EyeClarity Podcast
Today’s show is about a 10-year-old child who’s been diagnosed with a condition called strabismus. So this is for all you parents out there who are frustrated when you go to the regular eye doctor and are looking for alternatives. Enjoy the show. If you want more, sign up for my newsletter at:Â www.drsamberne.com.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
reflex, moro reflex, ball, called, primitive reflexes, child, eye, vision, development, visual, exercise, movements, brain, doctors, glasses, motor, forwards, brainstem, crawling, reducing
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’d like to welcome you to another EyeClarity podcast. Well, today’s show is about a 10 year old child who’s been diagnosed with a condition called strabismus. So this is for all you parents out there who are frustrated when you go to the regular eye doctor. And he or she either recommends surgery on the eye muscle and or really strong glasses. The third option would be wearing a patch constantly over the so called good eye. And in all of those scenarios, you’re taking the child further away from improving the visual coordination. I want to give a shout out right now to my mentors and teachers. Especially the doctors who trained me at the Gizelle Institute, where we immersed ourselves in child development and learning how to evaluate and treat a child from a developmental perspective, from a holistic perspective, from a mind body perspective. And unfortunately, this particular method has been lost. In today’s I care. In fact, today’s I care is so mechanical, so I centric, that the doctors are failing to evaluate a child based on the child’s sensory motor development skills as it relates comparing their performance age to their chronological age.
And they’re also just using a robotic mechanistic way of treating. So I have brought you in to some excerpts of a session I recently gave a family they live in Australia. And this young girl was diagnosed at about 14 months with a left eye crossing. At age three, she was given really strong farsighted glasses. And now the doctors have put her in to even a stronger prescription. She’s now in a split lens, we call that a bifocal. And her mom discovered me through my social media through my content. And it’s been a breath of fresh air. Now, the first part of this session I talked about something called the primitive reflexes, many of you probably have never heard of it. Except maybe certain moms have heard of this because we know the most famous infant reflexes called the Moro reflex, the startle reflex. But the primitive reflexes are controlled in the nervous system by our brainstem. That’s the reptilian brain, the survival brain and these reflex movement patterns start developing in utero. And they should start to get extinguished when we’re born through age to age three. And many times when these reflexes are not extinguished, then the brainstem is overriding the higher centers of the brain, and it stops or impedes visual development.
04:29
Now I want to talk about my mentors. Lina and thourgh killed Rasmus in their optometrists who practice in Scandinavia. And then this podcast a little later on. I refer to them because they did a lot of study research on the relationship between the unintegrated primitive reflex movements and school aged children and how it affects their visual development. And I learned this work Through them, and through my mentor, Dr. Al Sutton, who brought them to the US. And we studied very intensely with them. And we started to bring this aspect of vision therapy into our program with kids, especially with strabismus and amblyopia. So I’m referred to the primitive reflexes as part of what we can do to help this child reduce the cross die. I also referred to the strong glasses and what we’re going to do about that, so I’ll be going in and out of the session and explaining different things.
05:48
So let’s go to the first part of the session and see what’s going on. The Moro reflex, the, the Moro reflex is these six, flexes the startle reflex and the one the one that that I do is called the starfish exercise.
06:19
Just a pause here. So the starfish exercise is done on the ground. And the inner ear, the vestibular system, the development of that is very tied into the visual coordination. So in this movement that child makes is they’re bringing their arms and their legs into the middle of their body while they’re lying on their back. And they’re also raising their head. And then they uncross their arms and their legs. And then they repeat it now there’s a certain organization where they have to put the right hand or the right arm and the right ankle over each other at the same time and then then cross and then do the left side. So it gets them to start to understand the midline, the right left integration and it’s also stimulating the Moro reflex. So using this starfish exercise on 1000s of kids, what have observed is that number one, sometimes it brings up their birth trauma. Number two, it teaches them how to move their body as a as one unit as a whole unit. And this is very powerful in the brain to recognize, I’ve got to move everything together into my middle, and then back out.
So it’s working with flexion, extension, midline. Those of you that are occupational therapists out there, you probably do the reflexes you understand. And what I’ve noticed over time is that after a few weeks, this particular reflex pattern can start to change the strabismus. In this next excerpt, I talk about how the Moro reflex affects the brain and our sensory motor development. You know these reflexes block the visual development and the visual coordination. And it’s not like you do the reflex and you’re done. There are levels and layers of how the reflex is controlled by the the brainstem. And what you’re trying to do is move the person more into the prefrontal cortex. So in strabismus therapy, at least in the way that I do it, it’s very motor driven. And vestibular driven, meaning that when I do a session we start off with the primitive reflex. And then the second exercise we do is working with this ball called the Marcin ball. Carl Marsden was an optometrist who practiced in Pueblo, Colorado, and he developed this vision training exercise where you hang a ball from the ceiling. It’s like a rubber ball size of a tennis ball maybe. And so you’re hooking the ball into the string and you do different sequences with it, you hit the ball, right hand left hand, you can do something called motor planning where you’re swinging the ball and you have to walk through the ball and dodge the ball. So that teaches a person to under Stan spatial decision making as it relates to the body, that’s what vision is.
And so I demonstrate this Marsden ball as one of the exercises to do after we’ve done both the Moro reflex, we do that one for three weeks. And then we do our second primitive reflex called the tonic labyrinth reflex, where the child has now on his belly or her belly. And he’s got to put the thumbs on the nose and lift the head up, and then track the thumb as he or she is moving the head to the right or moving it to the left. So we do those reflexes first, and then we start in with something like the Marsden ball, which is a very dynamic vision therapy exercise. Now, one of the issues with this child is that she has been prescribed strong glasses now in bifocals. And it’s really weakening her eyes. So I make a suggestion about what to do with the glasses and the exercises. We start, I would do all this without glasses. And we start off with what we call Simon’s. So what she’s doing is she’s hitting the ball. And I might say, Simon Says, with your right hand, touch your head once, and then go back to hitting the ball. Simon says with your left hand, touch your nose once and go back to hitting the ball. So we’re working with visual information processing while she’s hitting the ball. So there’s an auditory component, there’s a visual component, there’s a motor component.
11:53
Now, this is an interesting comment I make about spatial decision making, as it relates to when the eye turns in or out. That’s going to teach her about spatial decision making has instant business, when the eye turns in, she’s either in double vision, or the brain is suppressing that eye. And when you use strong glasses, you’re trying to force something external, when the change has to come from learning, and an internal reorganization. So one of the questions the mom asked me was, well, how do we work with this prescription that’s really strong that she’s really needing to see clearly. And here’s my response, to give you the same symmetrical prescription in each eye, and reduce it. So let’s say she’s wearing a plus two, I don’t, you know, these doctors want to give too much magnification, she should probably just be wearing a plus one at the most.
So you can see here that I’m really reducing the prescription because what I find is that the kids actually see very clearly with either no lens or minimal lens, and they’re way over corrected. So when you wear a strong, farsighted lens, it creates a distortion. And it’s really stunting visual development. So in this next segment, I talk about using the eye patch. And one of the mistakes that doctors make is they want to do this long term patch hours and hours every day. And it does nothing to improve the visual development. In fact, it creates more trauma in the child when they’re asked to wear a patch over the so called good eye. So I in this segment, I talk about how to use the eye patch during the vision therapy exercises. And what I would do is use the eyepatch for this Marston ball exercise. But she doesn’t equally over the right eye and left eye and just for the exercise. Now, the thing is, is that using the patch just for the exercises can start to stimulate the brain to engage the right and the left. Yeah. This is a game of getting your daughter to use both sides of her body together better. That’s what this is really about. And we need to be careful about what we put over the eyes because we don’t want to reinforce the strabismus and when Wear strong lenses, it’s distorting, and it’s also reinforcing the weakness. So in this next segment, I talk about the value of gross motor bilateral movements. This could be crawling, bare, walk, hopping, skipping. And these are essential in terms of reducing vision, the strabismus and improving visual development. There’s one other piece here that I want you to listen for. As you hear this, I want you to work with bilateral integration with crawling. So watch my, I’m doing home collateral, same site. I’ve got some collateral and I want her to go backwards in her motoring, as well as forward. So you’re going to do home collateral, and then you’re going to do bilateral. But it’s very essential that you do forwards and backwards because the backspace is going to help open the peripheral.
16:20
So she can do it crawling, she can do it with bear walk. She can do it with hopping. She can do it with gallop, she can do with skipping, she can even do it with a soccer ball. So I want a visually guided and visually directed movement through space, so that she has to look and motor her body forwards and backwards. So you got several motor patterns, hopping, skipping airwalk, crawling, galloping. If she was in my office, I’m sure there’s some bilateral confusion somewhere. Yep. So how would you test for that? Sorry. How can you say that? How would I test for that I would walk her hop forwards and backwards. I’d watch her gallop. forwards and backwards. I watch her skip forwards and backwards. And that would tell me about the confusion or bilaterally. Okay, to summarize. With this child, what we’re going to do is we’re going to have her start in the primitive reflexes. She’s going to do the first two reflex movements for three weeks, each one for three weeks, starting off with the Moro reflex for the first three weeks, and then substitute that for the tonic labyrinth reflex for the second three weeks. During that first three week segment after she’s done the Moro reflex, I’m going to have her do some things like walking on a walking rail using the Marston ball.
She’s going to use the eyepatch and do a ball bounce with catch with metronome she’s going to use juggling scarves. And then the second three weeks, she can add things like after the the tonic labyrinth reflex, gross motor visually guided and directed movements forwards and backwards in an obstacle course. So these would be the bilateral movements like crawling and bear walk and hopping and skipping. I’ve also introduced something called parquetry blocks so she’s going to work cognitively with some spatial problem solving using some blocks and making some designs and there are different sequences we can use that access visual memory, speech language and auditory processing around the vision. I also recommended that she find an osteopathic cranial sacral therapist. cranial sacral therapy can be very helpful for reducing strabismus and we’re going to check in in about eight weeks and I’m going to be giving her some other vision therapy exercises. So when you work with strabismus, it can be a year or year and a half process of remapping the brain as it relates to the eyes in the body. And it’s a very effective, organic, permanent lasting improvement that will change the child’s life in such a positive way. So if you want more information, you can go to my website and look up double visions for business. I’ve done several video blogs on strabismus and also in my books creating your personal vision. I talk about strabismus as well. And I’m sure I’ll be speaking about it again. So that’s our show for today. Thanks 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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