I'm Answering Your Questions

Here is a post Whole Health Summit Q&A I held recently. We covered everything from dry eyes to eye health to whole health. Be sure to listen and keep an eye out for the next time I go live to get your questions answered. Enjoy the show.

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

eye, lens, vision, summit, astigmatism, question, prescription, peripheral vision, distance, dry, called, myopia, lenses, people, dry eye syndrome, develop, wear, creates, age, glasses

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@drsamberne.com.

Hello everybody, it’s Dr. Sam, and I want to welcome you to this special q&a tonight. I have a few opening remarks. I’ve got some questions that I’m going to get to in terms of the participants. If you have questions, you can either put them in the chat box, or you can come on live with me whatever you’d like. So I’m going to stay until we answer all the questions. And I want to start here. So recently, I had a colleague of mine asked me to come to his office. And he wanted me to observe some of his patients. He’s got a couple of associates and he wanted me to, to watch what he was doing. So I was sitting in the exam room. And I observed patient after patient was getting the following information. The and these people were somewhere in their 30s 35. And basically this doctor was saying the same thing over and over again to his patients. This is a an ophthalmologist and he was this was his line. Well, Johnny, or Well, Julie, at age 40, you’re going to start needing reading glasses.

And at age 50 You’re going to start needing bifocals. At age 60 You’re going to need trifocals you know we’ll put you into those progressive lenses that work great. And you’ll also be getting floaters at age 60 and probably a posterior vitreous detachment, everybody gets those at age 60. And then at age 70, you will be scheduled for cataract surgery. And also, that’s when you start getting glaucoma. So we’ll probably end up putting you on some eyedrops pharmaceutical eyedrops, and you will eventually need a laser procedure called an iridectomy. And at age 80, you’ll be developing age related macular degeneration first, the dry kind, then the white kind, we’ll be doing injections monthly, and you’ll eventually lose your eyesight and your driver’s license. And you’ll end up in a nursing home. So I heard this over and over again. And I was like, wow.

And this is what’s happening in most eye care offices. And I’m here to say that you don’t have to live out your doctor’s diagnosis. And one of the missions that I developed very early was to promote how to help people improve their eyes and vision as they get older. You know, just so happens today. I was seeing an 83 year old patient she’s gonna be at four in March. And I met her when she was 80 years old and she was scheduled for cataract surgery with both eyes she was in trifocals. She was really having a hard time with her knitting. So it may be three both of the cataracts have dissolved completely. Her prescription has reduced multiple times. She’s out of the progressive lens trifocal lenses, and now she’s just using a pair of computer blue blocking glasses for digital time. And she uses some glasses for her reading and for knitting. And she was so excited because here she is going to be at turning 84 and her eyesight is getting better. I’m not making this up folks. And I probably at this point helped hundreds maybe 1000s of people achieve this amazing breakthrough and you can do that too.

Which brings me to The Summit, because many of you on this, on this broadcast, have just finished devouring the whole health summit. This is my second annual, and was interesting because if I compare it to last year’s summit last year summit was focused on eye health and eyes and I invited experts in their field to come and talk about eyes and vision. Well, this year, what I decided to do is invite leading cutting edge, holistic health practitioners to talk about their specialty as it relates to our overall health and wellness. And some of the topics included things like sleep, How does sleep affect our health, big time, toxicities in the body, especially mold exposure? But even things like heavy metal toxicity?

How does that affect our health? Or just how do we cook better? How do we shop better? You know, there’s a whole specialty in culinary medicine, culinary nutrition, that I had one of the speakers, Dr. Vinod, she spoke on that I’ll ever be indebted for her to do that. That was a great lecture that she gave. Or what about. I had another eye doctor on the summit, who actually said yes, you can improve your vision as you get older. In fact, he increased and improved his vision when he was diagnosed with glaucoma in his 30s. And then, of course, the power of the invisible that we can’t forget about the psycho emotional and the spiritual aspects of our health. What about aromatherapy, using essential oils to boost our immune system, our respiratory health, our energy, our digestion, our sleep.

So I invited all these people, and they delivered. And those of you that have received the gold package in terms of the the registration for the summit, you’ll be able to go back and I would definitely watch these presentations two or three times. Those of you who couldn’t make the summit, you can still post Summit, purchase it if you want to. Alright, so that’s kind of a little bit of the backstory on why I did this. Submit this year and I’m going to move to some questions that people who could not be here have emailed me so I’m going to go through those. Anybody that’s live on the broadcast. Again, if you have a question, you can certainly type it in on the chat. And again, we will go until all the questions are answered. So the first question I get this question a lot. What causes dry eye syndrome? You know, one of the speakers at the summit. His name’s Dr. Driven Patel, he is the CEO of the company, aka shield. He gave a just a fabulous presentation on blue light and how blue light not only affects our eyes, but it affects our sleep. And I think that you know being on screen time is one of the biggest reasons why we are developing dry eye syndrome but I want to run through the list. This is my list of some of the causes of why we develop dry eye syndrome. The first one is if we have gone through LASIK surgery now this is a refractive surgery. There are many different types of LASIK surgery, you know back 20 years ago, the type of LASIK surgery that was done was more

basic. And now today there are different types of LASIK surgery that are being done. But it comes down to the same thing whenever you start putting laser on the cornea. You are setting up the situation where you are going to probably have some problems with tear coverage or tear evaporation. So LASIK surgery is one reason why people develop dry eye. The second reason is cataract surgery and I know cataract surgery is a very successful surgery. But still one of the side effects that I see quite a bit from cataract surgery is Dry. Another one is the state of the health of your eyelids. I can’t say this enough, but if your eyelids are inflamed if you’ve got conditions like blepharitis, meibomian gland dysfunction, Szalay, Xeons styes. And anything that blocks the ability of the glands to produce the tears, you’re going to be developing either a evaporation problem with your tears or a poor combination of the tears.

They’re made up of a few layers of aqueous mucin sebaceous level layers of the of the tears, that they’re going to have very poor coverage on the cornea. And the cornea is the clear window of the eye where we’ve got all those tiny little blood, not blood vessels, but nerve endings, that if our tears are not covering the cornea, every time we blink, it feels like we’ve got grit or sand in our eyes. And this is a chronic issue. As we talked about digital time, screen time is going to automatically Dry your eyes out. Again, the blue light, especially coming from screens and LEDs are going to naturally dry out all the eye tissue. So this is another reason why we develop dry eye. Low thyroid thyroid disease is a major culprit for dry eye. Adrenal imbalances, especially adrenal insufficiency where we are pumping out a lot of cortisol as a way to kind of deal with either acute or chronic stress. This will dry out all of our mucous membranes including the eyes, women’s hormonal issues, so women in their menstrual cycle this can cause dry eye syndrome. post menopause, this is another reason why we can develop dry eye smoking, drinking coffee, so lots of caffeine, this can cause dry.

So now I’d like to move to well, what are some of the strategies? Well, I got I get a message here. What about drugs? Yes, drugs, pharmaceutical drugs can dry your eyes out. So things like any anti biotics, anti histamines, blood pressure medications, anti diuretics, and even over the counter drops that you get at the drugstore that get the red out. These can all lead to dryness also. Vitamin D deficiency is another reason why we develop dry eye. So the first thing to note is that you want to use natural eyedrops. One of my favorite is Optique eyedrops. These are a type of homeopathic eyedrops. Obviously, the 5% MSM is another support for dry eye, making sure you’re getting the healthy fats and oils, Omega three, six and nine, there’s a new one that’s come out called omega seven. And that is a promising.

Sea Buckthorn is another term for omega seven, making sure you’re getting enough vitamin A and zinc in your diet. You know, zinc helps in the metabolism. And the absorption of vitamin A most people are deficient in zinc, and avoiding things like trans fatty acids, inflammatory foods, and even taking a look at your intestinal health. You know, I have found that when there’s an inflammation in the intestinal tract somewhere, this actually eventually is going to affect our eye health or eye tissue, especially in the dry eye world. And then you can add some things like N acetylcysteine, coenzyme, q 10, curcumin, resveratrol, all of things, all of these things are very beneficial. And even the try the triad, lutein z is Anthon. And as to xantham.

These are the carotenoids that help support the macula the retina, but they also have a very positive effect on the cornea and the eyelids. So that’s my take on the dry eye world. I think, again, I can make a statement that any eye problem has its roots systemically metabolically energetically, toxicity wise microbiome wise in the body, and we can’t just look at the eyes in isolation. Okay, the second question I want to take this from from one of the participants who has decided to do cataract surgery, and she wants to know, what are the best inter ocular lenses to use, she’s overwhelmed with what the surgeon has offered her. And she would like my advice. Well, here’s the deal with cataract surgery, you know, we have to take into account the brain eye connection, it’s pretty obvious that the brain has a very big influence in our perception and our vision, what we see what we target, our guidance system, our movement, our balance our processing of information.

You know, some studies say that 50% of the vision takes place in the brain, I think it’s even higher, maybe 90% of vision is in the brain. And so when you start putting new lenses, new refractive things in front of the eyes, you now are setting up a situation where the brain and the body have to make some kind of an adjustment to be able to adjust to the new prescription. And when you start getting into inter ocular lenses, that we are called multi-focal, they’re like bifocal, they’re splitting the eye into two or three parts, that becomes very confusing for the brain to have to figure that out. Because it’s a very fixed system in the eyeball. Another aspect is eye doctors want to correct one eye for distance. And one eye for near we call this monovision. And this is a disaster, when you start correcting one eye for distance one eye for near this is this is what happens, the brain starts suppressing one of the eyes based on where it is not being used. So let me illustrate this for a second. Let’s say this lady decides that she’s going to go have cataract surgery. And in the right eye, she’s going to correct the surgeon is going to correct that for her distance, because that’s her dominant eye. And then he’s going to correct the left eye for the reading. So it creates, you see my hands here, a kind of a split in the focal distance of the vision. And so it’s she’s fine using the right eye for distance. But what’s happening with the left eye, the

left eye is focused or fixed at 14 inches. So since the left eye is not going to participate, the brain begins to shut off that eye to avoid double vision and confusion. So you lose your depth perception, you lose the peripheral vision on that side. And it creates a lot of confusion. At the same time, let’s say she’s on the screen, or she’s on her Kindle. And she’s reading with the left eye. The right eye is somewhere out in in 20 feet or infinity. It cannot come into focus with the left eye. So again, that’s the place where the brain starts to suppress the right eye. You see where I’m going with this when you start putting the eyes at different distances, it creates a mismatch. And the only thing the brain can do at that point is shut down the other eye. So, multifocal lenses, bifocal lenses monovision. Here’s the third lens astigmatism. So let’s talk a bit about what astigmatism is. Astigmatism means there’s a warp or a twist in the eyeball. And so it’s shaped more like a football as opposed to a tennis ball. And so this creates an irregular blur and irregular shape that you need a kind of two types of lenses to correct for the astigmatism. And this twist, many times this warp begins to develop because there’s a posture problem in the body.

Yes, the body and the eyes are very related. And they inform each other based on our posture based on our movement. And when there’s an asymmetry in the body when there’s a twist in the body, especially in the spine and the hips and the pelvis, we start seeing the astigmatism in the eyeball. And this is why, when you start doing body work, and you want to twist the body, a lot of times the astigmatism in the eye will go away. Or if you take the astigmatism out of the prescription in the eye, a lot of times the body will release, and when it releases, the astigmatism goes away. Now if we fast forward to an astigmatism, cataract lens, you are now fixing the astigmatism for life. And so even if you untwist the body, you’re going to have this fixed lens, inter ocular lens in the eye, that’s going to create this irreversible warping.

So I don’t recommend the astigmatism correction in the eye. Unless it’s over, say one or 1.25 diopters, and even then, I would be very cautious about correcting for the astigmatism. Some other things that happen when you do correct for the astigmatism is that it creates this kind of shimmering in the side of the lens, so that if you’re looking over here and looking over there, you’re looking towards headlights in a car, it can create this distortion or glare from the light that strikes in because the lens is twisted or turned. So now we’re down to the simplicity answer, which is you want to match the right eye with the left eye. So it sees as similarly as possible. Okay, in the distance, and then you just get a pair of reading glasses to put over the the distance correction, this by far is going to be the best chance for you to be able to see clearly in the distance, and use both eyes together. And it’s what I suggest and recommend. Now, before the surgery, prepare yourself, boost your immune system, lubricate your eyes a lot, make sure you’re getting a lot of eye nutrients.

You know, you can even do things like acupuncture or cranial sacral. In other words, get the stress off of you away from you. So that when you go in for that surgery, your body can absorb it, it can receive it and after the surgery, then you can start using the natural eyedrops. Make sure you continue to take your supplements and do the eye exercises. There’s an eye exercise that I recommend. It’s on my websites called the Yin Yang peripheral vision exercise. And that’s a good one to get your eyes to coordinate together. The last thing I would say about the cataract surgery is asked your surgeon if the interocular lens has a blue blocking agent. And if it doesn’t ask him if he can put one in now if he cannot put one in, then you need to get both protection on your screen. This is where aka shield comes in. Get get their coverage. And also make sure you get some blue blocking glasses. And make sure you supplement with your your macula, affirming supplements like lutein, zeaxanthin, and asked is Anthon. So I want to thank you for the question. I’ve got one more question. This is from a gentleman who took the summit. He loved it. He said he learned a lot from it.

And he wants to know ABC. How does he reduced his myopia? Well, I can speak firsthand about this because in my early years, I developed a moderate amount of myopia about three diopters of myopia. It’s the way I got through my high school and college and professional school. By the time I was done, I was needing my contact lenses full time, and I was kind of boxed in a corner. However, I met a holistic it doctor and he was able to help me completely reverse my myopia. I haven’t worn any corrective lenses in three decades. So if I can do it, you folks can do it as well. So how do you do it? Well, the first thing to note is that you have to understand that myopia is about pulling the world in. It’s tightening up, it’s a defense strategy. It’s the sympathetic nervous system. overworking It’s an attitude of mental hyper vigilance, getting addicted to detail, tightening up holding your breath. And so to understand the cause of why you do that, the first thing you have to do is become desensitized to your aversion to blur. Now, of course, this is done in your locked bedroom.

So you get the opposite lens prescription, the far side of prescription, which is going to give you nothing but peripheral vision. And as you wear it, it’s gonna soften your eyes, and eventually soften your attitude to relax into the blur to dissolve your vision into the blur is the formula for reducing myopia and my exercise the plus lens, the blur, can, you can find that online, you would want to do that exercise for about a month, I would also go to your eye doctor and get a reduced prescription, you can either get it in a way that would correct you for 2040 in the distance. Or another way to get around that so you don’t have to confront him about a reduced prescription. Just ask him for a reduced prescription for the computer, he’d be happy to give you that prescription. And I want you to wear that indoors, wear it around. Notice how it starts to relax your eyes when you wear that versus the strong prescription. Again, I would start with my 90 day I clarity program for myopia so that your every day you’re working with your vision, to disrupt, to interfere to create a momentum that opens your vision that relaxes your vision. Get some bodywork, get get some things around, maybe psycho emotional healing around your myopia. Get body

work, nutrition is another piece, maybe start doing some intermittent fasting. We had one of our speakers, Megan Ramos, talk about the the great benefits of fasting and intermittent fasting when your glucose levels start to go up, and you’re not able to regulate them sugar and eyes. Myopia is one of the culprits of it, you know, boost your nutrients, get more natural sunlight, go without your lenses some of the day when you can. And you’ll find over a period of a few months, your prescription is going to keep reducing and reducing and reducing just like I did. And there you go. You’re on the track to be able to reverse the need for your glasses or contacts. How empowering is that? To take back your vision? How empowering? Well, I can tell you, it’s extremely empowering. Because you are now doing something that most AI doctors say you can’t do. And you want to be able to do it without the surgery because the surgery is only fixing the eyeball, not the programming behind the eyes, which cause the prescription to begin with. So that’s the simple formula. I wish you the best.

Okay, I’m going to check in one more time and see if any of the people online here have questions. You’re all very quiet tonight. You’re probably just soaking it in. And let’s see if we have any more questions. Oh, okay. We have a question from somebody from the summit, who has a peripheral vision loss in the right eye? And he wants to know, what do I think what what do we do? Well, first of all, you know, whenever there’s a little bit of a peripheral vision loss, it can either be functional. So that’s how we bring our vision to the world. It can be biochemical. And so to take a look at both of those things, because you’re probably looking at some kind of vascular interference, which is creating the peripheral vision change. Now is it glaucoma, you’d have to get your eye pressures check. You’d have to look at the optic nerve. You didn’t have to do some visual fields testing. I’m not going to make any diagnosis here. Sometimes the peripheral vision can you know change it can fluctuate based on stress, sleep, toxicity release. So there’s a lot of, you know, moving parts in the peripheral vision. But one thing to note is that sometimes if you wear what we call a homeo Pathak lens, this is a lens that’s a very low magnification lens, you put it on and it begins to open your peripheral vision and relax your eyes. This would be a great technique to use. Whenever you’re on any screen time. We might even add what we call base down yoked prisms, which really expand your periphery. I use this a lot with people diagnosed with these retinal conditions like retinitis pigmentosa or glaucoma, or any retinopathy is like hypertensive retinopathy, or diabetic retinopathy. So these, these lenses really push your vision in the periphery. And so the more you stimulate your retinas with these techniques, the better chance you have of regaining your peripheral color therapy is another experience. And I combine that with pranayama breathing. So we had Gabrielle berish Teichman, who was from Austria, she gave us a great lecture on color therapy. Oh, I loved it. And so bringing in different colors into your vision is another way to open up the periphery. And then of course, on a nutrient level, we want to stimulate things like the nitric oxide, that’s a vaso dilators of beats is one form of away from through food to get nitric oxide, you can also you can also I’ll get to your question in a minute.

The, the supplement that I like is called L arginine, which is an amino acid and that is also evasive. dilator so that would also be something to take your things like gingko, resveratrol, curcumin, and then obviously the the other nutrients as I talked about, the vitamin A beta carotene, and also your lutein, zeaxanthin and acid Xanthine. So if you’re using those things with those techniques, you have a great chance of expanding your peripheral vision. Okay, this is a question. I ordered the blue blockers congratulations. Later I saw your post about the Harmon distance being about 12 inches. I have to hold my phone closer than that to read about eight to 10 inches. Am I stressing my eyes? I thought it would be beneficial to not wear a prescription. But now I’m not sure. Oh, this is a great question. Alright, so let’s bring in the Harmon distance. This was designed by a vision scientist and engineer Darryl Boyd Harmon. And he did some studies at Ohio State on what’s the optimal distance to hold your at that time it was books. Now it’s your phone at measured from the knuckle to the elbow. So it can be anywhere between eight to 10 to 12 inches. The good news about what you’re talking about, which can be very simply remedied is that one of the ways to avoid starting to wear magnet magnification glasses is just to increase the font on the phone. And this is something over and over that I harp on with people because if you are able to increase the font size, then you will eliminate the need for magnification. Even holding it at that say 10 inch mark because here’s the rub.

When you start wearing a magnification lens, you are now going down a road that’s very difficult to reverse. And I’m talking about farsightedness, I’m talking about the need for reading glasses. And in that particular case two ways we’ll talk farsighted or nearsighted because it could be in both both worlds. But when you start wearing a plus lens, you go to the drugstore and you get a plus one plus one and a quarter plus 150, you’re gonna find that the more you wear that lens, the harder it is for you to be able to see the print. Because what those glasses do is they disconnect you from all of your eye muscles. Because the the lens makes things artificially larger than they really are. So you stop working, and your eye muscles start working, stop working. So the thing is, is that you then start wearing those reading glasses, and then that turns into well, now I can’t see the computer. So now I can’t see in the distance. And just like that eye doctor said, when you hit 60, and you start needing, you know, trifocals, you’re done. I mean, you’re, you’re in big trouble at that point. Yes, you can reverse it. But it’s a long road. And it’s a lot harder to do. Now, the other thing that could be happening for you, I don’t know, is if you’re near sighted, you didn’t say that. But let’s just take that scenario, if somebody is nearsighted, sometimes, the nearsightedness will show them that the focal distance where they hold their phone, is the same amount of nearsightedness that they need to see in the distance. So as an example, let’s say somebody,

yeah, let’s say somebody like yourself is near sighted, then the key is, you need to do some things to reduce your eyes stressed. The end palm hum, the animal eye chart, the Yin Yang, peripheral vision exercise, see, these are all exercises that reduce the stress from the near side of this, and then allow you to push the object a little further out, because the other side of it is, then if you’re starting to say, well, maybe I should get a lens for the phone, what power do we give you, you know, do we give you a minus two, A minus three, a minus four. And so you start down this road of having to reach for different prescriptions based on the distance on where you’re focusing. And I’m not saying that you can’t do it. But it’s going to be very difficult for any eye doctor to come up with a, a stable prescription for you to handle that. This is why I recommend to just increase the font size. And that is going to reset the eye muscles to work at that eight to 10 inch 12 inch distance. And that would be something that I would play around with. I know on the phones and the iPads, you can adjust the contrast, the font size, the night shift, you know, all of these things are variables. And I would work with that and see if you could solve the problem. Because otherwise you’re looking at getting multiple blue blocker prescriptions based on what you might be doing. But it’s such a great question. Thank you. I’m so glad you asked. Okay, so any other questions here? Going once, going twice, going three times. Okay, so I think then I’m going to call it a night. I want to thank you for tuning in. Thank you for tuning in to the summit. We will definitely be sending this out to everyone who registered for the summit for that high level. And I want to thank you for for joining us and supporting us and I look forward to seeing you at the next workshop. Facebook Live. Definitely digest my content. And thank you so much. Take care everybody.

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.