Dr. Berne’s State of the Union of Eye Care

Today we are talking about the state of eye care and challenges the traditional approach to eye exams. I will highlight various vision problems that are often missed during regular eye exams, emphasizing that these issues are actually brain problems that can be addressed through physical vision therapy. We’ll explore three life situations related to children’s learning, adults with diagnosed conditions, and individuals with concussions or traumatic brain injuries. Enjoy the show!

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

vision, eye, visual, therapy, access, learning, eye exam, peripheral vision, eyesight, concussion, brain, doctor, traumatic brain injury, questions, dyslexia, refractive error, problems, box stores, evidence based research, read

Hey everybody, its Dr. Sam and I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. So before we get to today’s show, I’m going to give you some ways to contact me, you can send me your questions at hello@drsamberne.com. Or you can text them to me at 1-844-932-1291. I want to let you know about my new membership program. This is an exclusive membership where you get access to my content and resources, new information, articles, videos, webinars, even a live Q&A, where I will answer your questions. So you’ll be able to access valuable information to empower you to make informed decisions about your vision and your health. I’ll be offering personalized support and coaching, giving you recommendations, helping you with goal setting accountability, so you can achieve your goals. This is a convenient way for you to access me 24/7 Without paying for appointments, or going to your doctor every week. So I’m so excited about this, I hope you can join me. And by the way, if you do join, you’ll get access to my advanced workshops in aromatherapy, color and light therapy, nutrition and physical vision therapy. So the sign up, go to my website www.drsamberne.com. Now to today’s show.

Everyone, I want to welcome you to the program today. So I wanted to talk about the state of the union of eyecare in terms of where I stand with it. And I want to start off with a question that I know a lot of my community will resonate with. And that is, what if everything that you learned about your eyes was wrong. Let’s look at some everyday life situations where you’ve all probably experienced some of these things. An increase in blurriness at distance and near motion sickness. double vision, eye fatigue, especially at the computer, peripheral vision loss maybe from glaucoma, distorted vision, maybe from macular degeneration, getting overwhelmed if you go into the box stores dry burning eyes falling asleep.

When you’re reading. Maybe you or your child is diagnosed with conditions like a DD ADHD, Asperger’s, dyslexia, confusion, vertigo, nausea, all of these are vision problems. And yet when you go for your regular eye exam, the eye doctor says you see 2020 And your eyes are healthy. So these vision problems are missed. During your eye exam, most eye doctors are motivated by just looking for disease. They’re also solely focused on getting 2020 eyesight, while eyesight is glasses. Whereas vision is brain. So the vision problems I listed above are actually brain problems that can be helped in a process called physical vision therapy. And this vision therapy can reprogram the software of the brain and help you process information much easier. So I’m going to address three different areas life situations. The first is more geared towards kids. And this has to do with learning reading and academics.

Vision is our most dominant sense. You know, when we’re very young, we’re shown how to do something. But if our visual skills are not fully developed, then we can’t meet the visual demand of learning to read reading to learn learn into right copying from the board, learning to catch a ball, and many other things, behaviors surface. And the medical world is very quick to slap labels on kids, when these are just undetected vision problems. So let’s go through some of the labels, ADD, ADHD, autism, dyslexia, minimum brain dysfunction. So when the child says, I don’t like school, and I hate to read, I don’t want to play sports. Many times, this is a vision problem.

So I’ve gotten into many classrooms, and I see kids that are squirming, they can’t attend to the task they’re supposed to be on, they can’t copy from the board, maybe they skip words, they lose their place, either words or lines, they have difficulty copying from the board. And when I administer vision therapy, these kids flower and they begin to work to their potential. So let’s go to life experience number two, and this is geared more to adults. But I’ve seen over the years, adults that are very frustrated with their eye experience, because they’ve been diagnosed with a certain condition. And the eye doctor says, well, let’s just watch it until it gets bad enough, and then we can do surgery. And in the meantime, we can give you some drugs that treat some of the symptoms. Well wait a minute, there’s a lot of evidence based research in the literature that says that if you eat a better diet, if you take some supplements, that you can actually slow down the progression of certain eye diseases. And in some cases, you might even be able to reverse them. And yet this information is not shared with the patient.

And then there’s the whole glasses and contacts conversation, where every year or two, a person’s eyes get worse. And they go from single vision to bifocals to progressive lenses. And then what happens is, the lenses get so strong, that the person can’t take them off at all, without not being able to do anything. So the physical vision therapy is a way to access brain plasticity to at the very least slow down this refractive error progression. And in some cases, you can even reverse some of the refractive errors that are going on. And yet, when you talk to your eye doctor, he or she will invalidate the eye exercise conversation. And some of them even will say, and if you do those eye exercises, don’t bother coming back to the office. Okay, let’s go to life experience number three. And this has to do with concussions and traumatic brain injury. So most of us either read in the news, or we know somebody, or we’ve experienced ourselves some type of head concussion experience. And when we do this, we start getting what we call these soft symptoms. So we go to the eye doctor, and he says, Well, you see 20/20 Your eyes look healthy. It’s in your head.

Again, we need to make the distinction between eyesight which is glasses, and vision, which is brain, many of the neurons from the eyes go to the brain. And the eyes are the only part of the cranium that sit outside the brain. So if you’ve had traumatic brain injury, a concussion if you’ve fallen, most definitely at some level, your vision is going to be impacted. And some of the symptoms you might have would be vertigo, dizziness, nausea, again, going into some of these box stores and feeling overwhelmed, getting fatigued very quickly when you’re on your screens. So if you’re able to do physical vision therapy, you can neutralize the concussion completely and return to a normal life. So I’m going to end here by saying that when you go for an eye exam, ask your eye doctor to do more tests in the area of your visual tracking your visual focusing your visual coordination in depth perception, your dynamic peripheral vision, your visual reaction time, things like cognitive processing, like visual memory. And when you start exploring these tests, you’re going beyond the eyesight model. And then you can apply physical vision therapy as a way to restore your vision.

So spread the word. I know this is a grassroots movement. And I want to thank you for tuning in today. And until next time, take good 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.