I'm Answering Your Eye Care Questions

I had a great time talking to everyone on Instagram Live the other day, and I wanted to share the mini-workshop I did there. We cover topics like cranial sacral therapy, eye care in children, ocular melanoma so much more. If you have questions you want answered, please email them to hello@drsamberne.com. Enjoy the show. If you want more, sign up for my newsletter at: www.drsamberne.com.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

eye, called, question, child, essential oil, eyedrops, vision, cranial sacral therapy, eyelids, helpful, chalet, glasses, vitreous detachment, vitreous, creates, circulation, prescribe, compresses, check, bones

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 Instagram Live. It’s great to have you in today. And I’ve got several things I want to discuss. So I want to thank everybody for joining today I’m going to jump into the first question. We got several questions here. And so I thought I would consolidate them and just see if I could give you the answer.

So somebody’s asking you a question about cranial sacral therapy. I know we have a number of cranial sacral therapists in the community. I talk a lot about the relationship between cranial sacral therapy and the stigmatism. So the question is Can cranial sacral therapy help increase blood flow to the eyes and improve eye health. It can do that and so much more. But if we want to keep it more into conversation about our eye health, all the bones here are orbital bones, our cheekbones, we’ve got our frontal bone, we even have a lacrimal bone and that ethmoid sinus here. All of those bones, support our eyes to be able to move and have good circulation. There’s another magical bone behind the eyes called the sphenoid bone. And so when a cranial sacral therapist has you on the table, and he or she is feeling into the movement of the bones in the face, the jaw, and then up into the eye region. If there’s a restriction, this is going to reduce circulation, and eventually can lead to oxidative stress and eye disease. There’s also a membrane that wraps around the spinal cord called the dura and actually runs all the way up into the base of the cranium. And it’s also wrapping itself around the optic nerve as the nerve Plexus where the retina is. And that dura also winds itself all the way to the white part of the eye called the sclera.

So anytime you can create some movement and better circulation in the dura, you’re going to have an indirect effect on improving eye health. Some other things that I’ve learned clinically in my own research is that people with double vision, sometimes they have a lock down in their cervical spine or in their occiput area and when you release either the cervical spine and or the occiput the double vision can reduce so there’s a really big connection between our neck, our cervical spine and our cranium, as it affects our vision. And so if you’ve suffered things like traumatic brain injury, car accidents, Whiplash, you could be vulnerable to not only vision problems, but just to shut down in the overall overall circulation. And then finally, we’ve got three cranial nerves that innervate the eye muscles, cranial nerve three, four and six. And if there’s a problem in how the cranial nerve is supporting the eye muscles, this can lead to conditions like strabismus, you know where the eyes cross, or uncross or there’s a vertical split. I get a lot of people with double vision and these are odd cases because one day they wake up and they have double vision and many times cranial sacral therapy can and help support and release the, the impingement of the nerves that innervate the muscles.

So to summarize, I would say yes, yes, yes, cranial is great not only for the eyes, but for the body. If you’ve never received a treatment, I would look for somebody locally in your area, get some word of mouth referrals and check it out. It’s really great with kids. I’ve worked with pregnant moms, and that the birth time. So that’s also been a very helpful modality instead of using pharmaceutical drugs. So that’s a another aspect. And then with elders with conditions like macular degeneration or cataracts, or glaucoma, cranial sacral therapy can be a great adjunct, there is a an exercise that I do with my patients, which I’ll share with you right now. And it’s about putting sound into the cranial bones. And it’s a sound that sounds like a buzzing sound is the sound J i Zi sound. And you can place your hands on your head, here’s the frontal bone and the down here in the occiput. So I’m going to do three of them so you can get the feel of it. But this, if you spent five minutes doing this practice, this would open up the bones create more circulation, and really give you a sense of, of inner peace and circulation. So it goes like this.

So basically, what I’m making is a sound and you can make it a different rhythms. And when you place your hands over the bones of your head, it creates a vibration and your hands are like tuning forks. And sound is one of the best ways to penetrate compression. So this is a way that you can do self care that you can self regulate yourself by doing this type of practice, I would call it a self regulating relaxation practice. So it’s going to affect not only your eyes, but your brain. And you know, if you’re suffering things like TMJ or blurred vision, or headaches, this would be a great practice and you do I would do eight or 10 of them. I would rest for maybe a minute and then I would do another eight or 10. And by layering the experience, you get to go deeper into your body, which will create a deeper relaxation. So try it out. And you know, you can email me hello@drsamberne.com If you’ve got any questions, and we’re doing kind of a mini workshop here, but why not? Okay, I’m gonna go on to the next question. This is somebody who had a chemical burn in their eyes. Ouch. That’s really serious. So the first thing you want to do if you’ve had a chemical burn is you want to flush it out immediately.

The best thing to use is saline solution. I don’t know whether you’re going to have that. So just use water if you need to and just really flush it out. Get yourself to an eye doctor’s office if you can, because you want to make sure there isn’t permanent damage on the cornea, Corneal abrasion could be you know, leading to an infection or just irritation. So you want to check that out some natural remedies that I like to use. Besides the saline solution would be homeopathic eyedrops called sim Eliason and Oasis artificial tears and again, you can use what I call the eye bath where you’re spraying the drops along the eyelashes back and forth and then opening your eyes. So you’re getting a lot of those really good healthy tears into your eyes. symbolizes and homeopathic has got eyebright in it which is really soothing really good. You can get that pretty much anywhere and Oasis, eyedrops are artificial tears. They’re the ones I recommend, if you’ve had like cataract surgery, or LASIK surgery, they’re very comforting. And even though they’re artificial tears, they’re not going to give you a great therapeutic value, then they’re going to be helpful to you. And last I would check out my MSM missed my MSM I made the mist in from the eyedrops, so it’s a 15% you always want to spray The mist towards your eyes with your eyes closed,

maybe three to four inches away from your eyes. So eyes are closed. But when you missed it on the eyelids, it’s very soothing. And MSM, of course is great as a collagen creator, it’s also very lubricating and moisturizing. And so that would be my, my initial head. And then finally, you could make a compress, using, what you do is you can get some chamomile tea, or you can just get some rose petals, brew up the tea, let it cool, pour it into a mason jar, keep it in the refridge and take a soft cloth, dip it in that tea, either one or both, and then place it over the eyelids with the eyes closed. That’s very, very soothing, as an herbal remedy, so that that would be another thing to do. So I wish you the best. Wow, that’s a that’s a tough one. All right. Next question is somebody’s asking about pediatrics, children and their eye exams. And the fact that you know, eye doctors want to push glasses, and are there things that you can do to avoid children needing glasses? Well, this is one of my specialty areas. And, you know, I’ve had a lot of training in this area. And also, I’ve been around the block with kids over and over again. And the bottom line is this, that any prescription that you get from the eye doctor, unless it’s somebody like me, you’re going to be treating a symptom. And so you give the child a pair of glasses. And what happens is, is that in six months or a year, they’re going to need a stronger prescription. And, you know, depending on what the demand is, how old they are, and so on. It’s much better to at the very least, if you need to prescribe something, it would be a part time prescription.

And it would just be giving enough so that the child could see in the distance, this would be more of a distance help. So we’re talking about mostly myopia here. Although, in hyperopia, farsightedness, we’ve got another thing going on as well, where there can be difficulty reading up close. But any vision problem is more than in the eyeball, it’s in the whole child. And what I mean by that is that there’s a way to evaluate a child developmentally looking at their chronological age, in terms of their sensory motor development, and then being able to assess where their performance is sensory motor wise, versus chronologically. And usually, there’s a disparity between the two. And this creates a developmental delay, at some level. Now, you would say why would there be any kind of developmental delay? Well, there are many reasons why kids have difficulty in their sensory motor development. It could be experiences they’ve had in their gestation period with mom, maybe they didn’t get enough movement or mom didn’t get enough movement, or there was some emotional stress going on while mom was carrying her baby. And then the birth is critically important. So if there was any trauma at birth, C section, breech forceps delivery, Pitocin premature baby, taken away from their mother and put into an incubator, you know, any of these and there are many other scenarios as well. This imprint affects the the infant curiosity in the sensory motor development when I think sensory, eyes ears, proprioception, and, you know, motor movement, how are they moving as they relate to their sensory systems. So as a child then goes into the bonding stage, this also can affect their sensory motor development, their social engagement, their nervous system development,

we can look at things like nutrition, we can look at, you know, there are many factors involved. So then you fast forward to age three or four and the child is then shown a book and they’re asked to read and start to read and first grade is learning to read, but their visual system is not ready to read. They don’t have the skills to learn to read yet, but you forced them into it. Yeah, you’re going to have some adaptations that the child has to make. And so you’re, you’re then creating this adaptive response, which is either nearsightedness, farsightedness, or astigmatism, and all the glasses do is reinforce the adaptive response. So physical therapy, physical therapy, a developmental vision thing. Therapy program where we work with something called the primitive reflexes. These are infant reflexes that help the brain function at a higher level, vestibular stimulation, and then doing some some things that help the child learn how to use their eyes and ears as it relates to their body through movement, through exploration through vestibular, through many different things. And so the physical therapy can be done in lieu of getting these glasses that are symptom based. And the other thing I want to say about eye exams for children is that the eye doctors tend to like to use eye drops. And when they do that they paralyze the focusing muscle of the eye. Now, why in the world would you want to paralyze the focusing muscle of the eye and then prescribe a lens based on that, you’re always going to prescribe something that’s way too strong and very distorting. And yet, that’s the standard level of care. Because that’s what is being that’s what was taught in school. But you don’t want to be prescribing any glasses to a child after you put those paralyzing eyedrops in the eyes.

So I would seek out a holistic practitioner, somebody who’s got some interest in a developmental approach, a holistic approach. And again, you can send your questions to me hello@drsamberne.com, and I’m happy to advise you. Okay, the next question I want to take is on ocular melanoma. And this is a very serious condition. It’s an eye tumor. And it’s fact it’s the most common eye tumor in adults. There are three main places that the tumor can grow in the center of the eye, the middle in the back of the eye or in the front of the eye. And people get these freckles on the eye. These are called Neva eyes or Naevus. And this is not a melanoma. However, there’s some risk factors for ocular melanoma if you have bleak blue, green or light colored eyes, if you have been exposed to a bright say welding situation or even sunlight, you know, if you’re looking at the solar eclipse, be very careful about that. And even certain medications can start to trigger melanoma to grow. One is Parkinson’s, there are medications that are used in Parkinson’s disease that can cause melanomas that usually there aren’t any symptoms, it’s something that your eye doctor can pick up, by, by doing an exam, sometimes ultrasound is done. You can also do different kinds of scanning tests, like an O CT, which is one of my favorites or not toasts to test, these can scan the eyes and they can pick up a lot of things. So again, your doctor can biopsy it if need be. And you know, the the

the form of treatment that I would recommend would be radiation, or sometimes surgery. So it is a very serious condition is something you want to stay in contact with your ophthalmologist or neuro ophthalmologist. And it’s serious. So be careful with that one. And, you know, again, if you do have that condition, really get on it. Alright, I want to take a question from a listener who has heard me talk about a condition called hydrosols. And a hydrosol is a form of water based essential oil. Let me explain. So when we, I’ve done this myself, I collect and make my own essential oils. So in the spring, I went up to North of Taos and did some ceremony and I was able to harvest some sage so I was brought some sage plant home, and I have a steamed distiller, so when I, when I put it in my distiller you have to heat heat it up, there are two places where the essential oil goes, the water vapors and the essential oil go to a place where you collect it, it’s called a hydrosol. And then the second is more of just the essential oil of sage, which we get a lot less essential oil than we do hydrosol. But the thing is, is the hydrosol is a mist, and it has the water molecules, the water vapor and the essential oil in it. So you still get the energetic signature of the essential oil and you get the benefits of it, but it’s not going to burn. It’s not super strong and concentrated. So the reason I bring in hydrosols is because one of my favorite hydrosols display on the eyelids is something called Helichrysum. Helichrysum is an essential oils come comes from a flower and it’s in many skin products. It’s such a it’s such a great Essential Oil, if you’ve got a skin issue or you want to rejuvenate your skin, well, the skin around the eyelids gets a lot of abuse, especially because we’re on screen time all day. And this really dries our eye out. And it’s almost like going to a tanning salon, but you’re going all day. So there are many things that you can do to

let’s just say improve the skin health around the eyelids, but the Helichrysum hydrosol couple sprays on your eyes a few times a day is so rejuvenating, you can get a rose hydrosol and the rolly you can also get a lavender. So there’s a lot of different ones out there. Today, two companies I like which are both tea companies, Lotus garden botanicals and Stillpoint aromatics. Both excellent companies, I use both of their hydro cells and essential oils. But check it out. I think hydrosols are a way that you can gently inter introduce yourself to the plant world and why not the plants are here to help us. Alright, I’m gonna go here and let’s take a question on different treatments for long dated chalet zijn in the lower lid, well, it depends on how close the social LeSean is to the eyelashes, but a treatment that you could do that works but it’s very, very intense as you get a Q tip and you put just a spray of apple cider vinegar on it, just the tiniest amount, and you can just place it even right below the chalet Xion if you do that, say once a day for four or five days it will start to dry out the chalets in and will actually go away. So it’s it’s a definitely a you know, a warrior warrior plus, it’s, it’s intense, it’s confrontational, and it will sting and burn and you don’t want to get it in your eyes of course. So it depends on where that chalets in is.

Now some other treatments that you could use would be a combination of hot and cold compresses and I would like I would recommend using either an eyebrow T or say goldenseal something like that. And doing those compresses a few times a day can be very helpful. You don’t want to exercise the chalets him or try to squeeze it. But using the the herbal teas with the compresses and I like to do hot and cold hot and cold because it creates an expansion and a contraction which creates movement in the eyelids. Now another thing that you could do is find an acupuncturist who could determine what meridian that chalet Xion is on. So it could be the spleen meridian, it could be the large intestine. So the meridians are the acupuncture meridians there are many of them that run to the eyelids and the eyes, the internal part of the eyes. So good acupuncturist can actually and not that you would put needles around your eyes, but because the meridian runs all the way to your feet. By placing acupuncture meridians, acupuncture needles, in different parts of the body, you can sometimes move the energy because of sheer laziness, basically congested energy. So there’s more equal distribution and the sheer lazy and will go away. I’ve also had good success with things like intermittent fasting. liver cleanses, you know, these are also things that can be helpful, but it’s it’s the long game because it’s really difficult to get rid of Szalay Xeons once they’ve been there for a while. So you have to really look at it with a combination of systemically metabolically maybe with endocrine support, and then maybe doing some topical things to see if you can move it as well. So I hope that’s helpful. Thank you very much.

All right, so somebody’s writing in. Born with a lazy eye, no glasses can make me see clearer. I’m not sure exactly what that means. But here’s the deal. You know, it’s really does your eye a disservice when you call it lazy. Okay, it’s the eye that sees in a different way, a different perspective. You know, when somebody is called lazy, what do they do? They kind of cower, they go, Yeah, I’m lazy. I’m just going to stop working. So I would probably reframe that into the eye that sees more intuitively or in another dimension. And then I would go on my website and I would look up lazy eye and start doing my 90 Day eye clarity program and one of the first exercises is talking to your eyes, I know that sounds kind of weird, but it actually works well. And it’s called the eye dialogue and you’re, you’re talking to each eye. And you’re gonna start to get have develop a relationship between your right eye and left eye that’s very different than maybe what you have right now. And you’re going to get some insight into that. Also, if

you continue to go through my exercises, like the eyes stretching, and some other tracking exercises with each eye, by itself, then you’re going to find that the eye that sees differently is going to start to improve. You know, there are things like color therapy, you can use red light therapy, I mean, there’s so much here, and you need to be very conservative about what kind of prescription you’re going to put on. Because usually when you do a prescription that doesn’t, it doesn’t really work that well. I mean, in certain cases it can, but you know, really, in most cases, it doesn’t do much. All right, I’m gonna take one more question. This is on posterior vitreous detachment. So if you go on my YouTube channel, and you type in posterior vitreous detachment, I did about a six minute riff on PVD. But I’ll simply say this, that the vitreous is the gel like part of the eye, where it’s made of mostly collagen and protein. And what happens in a posterior vitreous detachment, the vitreous, the gel sack begins to either get larger, more watery, loses its collagen integrity that way, or it begins to shrink. That’s usually what happens and it starts pulling away from the retina. So you need to do some college, college and creating things maybe bone broth, MSM eyedrops, maybe highly erotic eyedrops. I also would really take a look at your diet and make sure you’re getting a lot of antioxidants.

So the red, orange, yellow, green vegetables, berries as fruit, especially this time of year, that would be wonderful. And then my eye exercises for floaters that would also be very helpful to you. There’s a lot more to it your dental health if you have mercury amalgams or root canals, if you’ve have closed head trauma, some cranial sacral can be helpful. Acupuncture sometimes can also be helpful wearing blue blockers, for all your screen time is also great. So there’s a lot of things you can do to slow down this detachment, this deterioration. I’ve had some patients that have actually had a great rejuvenation in their vitreous health. But it just depends on how healthy you are systemically and metabolically and what kind of stress you have. So ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for joining me today. It’s been a real honor and pleasure. I certainly love Instagram and I love the posts that we do. And so I’ll be I’m sure I’ll be visiting you again at some level. And again, if you have any questions, feel free to send us an email Hello at Dr. Sam byrne.com. Don’t forget about my blue blocker sale this weekend. Jump on that that’s a good deal. And until next time, everyone. 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.