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Keywords

Kid Power, child development, vision therapy, learning disabilities, trauma, craniosacral therapy, nutrition, primitive reflexes, holistic approach, ADHD, nutrition, child development, strabismus, amblyopia, screen time, vision therapy, mitochondria, eye health, functional medicine, holistic approach

In this conversation, Sam Berne discusses the multifaceted approach to understanding and supporting children’s development, particularly in relation to vision and learning. He shares his personal experiences with learning disabilities and emphasizes the importance of a holistic view that includes trauma, nutrition, and primitive reflexes. The discussion highlights the need for individualized care and the integration of various therapeutic modalities to help children thrive. In this conversation, Dr. Sam Berne discusses the critical role of nutrition in child development, the complexities of vision issues such as strabismus and amblyopia, and the detrimental effects of excessive screen time on children’s eyesight. He emphasizes the importance of a holistic approach to therapy that includes understanding the child’s unique needs and the role of mitochondria in eye health. Dr. Berne also provides practical advice for parents and practitioners on how to support children’s visual development and overall well-being.

Understanding each child’s unique needs is crucial.

Sound Bites

“Cracking the code with each child.”

Sam Berne (00:00)

30 years but there’s two younger therapists that just took over. I didn’t know that. Well but yours has his parents if you know. yes. Yeah we’re yeah that’s why we’re here is because we have all the grandchildren and so we thought this would be good information for all of them in case they don’t zoom in. Right. And so we wanted to get what we could for them for us for everybody.

Wow, well welcome. It’s so nice to meet you. Hi Deb and Dave and I just met her husband a couple weeks ago. So that’s so sweet because I knew the whole story but I hadn’t met him yet. So you know one of our therapists is married a gentleman and they both together combined have seven children all under the age of 15 is the oldest 15 and younger. Yeah. Yeah.

15 down to. my god, it’s quite the Brady Bunch. Yes. And then we have our other four-year-old, so we take care of four years old up to. So yeah, yeah. Yeah, three-year-old is well not quite right. The two-year-old is in Denver. we don’t see him as often, but the information is something that I know they’d be interested in. So I had Cassie send the family group Zoom.

text so that she could let them know up in Denver so that they could watch. That’s terrific. I wish I thought of it sooner and she wishes she had thought of it sooner but she’s a little busy. I think most parents are. Yeah they don’t have time for this. yeah it’s great that they’ll be able to do it and stop it and start it and watch that night when the kids go to bed or whatever. It’s just I think it was a great idea that you

Hey everyone, I want to welcome you to my talk today here at Kid Power in Albuquerque. Kid Power is near and dear to my heart because it’s a place I’ve been coming for, I don’t know, over 20 years and I help the kids with their vision. So I’m going to talk about that today. And to begin with, what I want to do is I want to talk about a core issue

that has been coming up in the context of working with kids. And that core issue has to do with cracking the code, cracking the code with each child. What is it going to take to turn the switch on so that they are thriving? And when I see a child here in Kemp Power or in my practice,

That’s my biggest curiosity because usually, you know, parents are coming in and we know as parents, we’re really struggling with what’s going on with my child and why are they struggling in school? And how come they’re not reading? And we just went to an IEP, you we did the testing and now they may end up in a special education class.

So I have to say I have some personal experience because I was one of those kids. I grew up in the Northeast and I came from a family that really stressed education. And my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, a bunch of intellectuals. And so I remember my uncle going to his house and he had like all these books on foreign language he actually spoke.

five different languages. And my mom and dad, I mean, they just stressed college and grad school. But the thing was, is I was eight years old and I was diagnosed with a learning disability. And as I think about it now, it’s kind of a painful time because I didn’t want to read. I didn’t like reading. I wasn’t a good reader. School was really challenging for me. And so my…

My mom took me to a lot of places and we actually ended up like a lot of the kids here at Kid Power, I ended up at an eye doctor’s office. And he said to me, well, you’re nearsighted and let’s give you some glasses. And so I got these lenses and I started to memorize. That’s how I got through school. And I never was a good test taker and I just worked really hard.

And I was able to do pretty well in high school, college, and got into professional school, graduated. And I met a, what we call a developmental optometrist. This was an eye doctor who looked at vision in a more holistic way. And I was 28 years old and he had a course that he was offering. And he also was offering his services.

as a doctor and as me as a patient. So I started going with him and he diagnosed me with a condition called convergence insufficiency, meaning my left eye used to wander out. would see double vision. I couldn’t focus. I had a little bit of impulsivity, a little bit of hyperactivity and sounds like ADHD, right? And that’s kind of what I had. And so through his physical therapy exercises, I was able to

heal that condition and because of my pretty extreme nearsightedness that completely dissolved. So I didn’t need my lenses anymore. so today I’m on my fifth book that I’ve written and I read voraciously and my learning is incredible. But when I see kids, I have a lot of empathy for them and their parents because I was the puzzle. I didn’t…

you know, the first thing that my mom didn’t know at that point that there were other resources like this. And so when I meet a child and meet a family, I’m not just looking at the eyeballs, you know, and in traditional eye care, you know, we’ve all been gone to an eye for an eye exam. And what happens, you sit in a dark room and the doctor is flipping lenses. You’re looking behind the machine and

you know, especially in children and then they use eye drops and it’s a pretty traumatic experience, right? And, and I just, I just kind of go, look, there’s more to this than trying to figure out a lens prescription and use eye drops to figure out, you know, something that’s going on that maybe is a learning issue, a developmental issue that’s much more than in the eye.

And one of the places that I studied was a place called the Gazelle Institute. So, Gazelle, Arnold Gazelle was a physician who in 1948 started this institute. At that point, it was affiliated with Yale University. And being a developmental specialist, he brought in a multidisciplinary group of professionals who would evaluate children. It reminds me a little bit of kid power in the sense that

This is a multidisciplinary clinic where the therapists and the professionals are studying a variety of different things. Well, I went there in the mid 80s, I spent a year there and I learned how to evaluate a whole, the whole child, the whole person, not just the eyeballs. And so we looked at speech and language. We looked at actually primitive reflexes. We looked at nutrition. We looked at

the stipular health, we looked at trauma. There were many things that we did at that Institute, which helped me understand about seeing the whole picture, seeing, okay, what is the time we should be introducing this activity or this modality? And it was really a profound training. And it launched me, along with my personal healing, into my, you know, my current

professional state and of course I’ve had many lifetimes in it studying many different things but the point is is that with a child that is struggling and you know by the way you know the diagnosis of ADD, HD, ADHD and the whole spectrum disorders is off the charts you know back in 2016 there was an article that was published in one of the medical journals

that said about 15 % of all kids who are diagnosed with ADHD have vision problems. And maybe right here I should make a distinction between what is a vision problem? Can you define that? So when you go to the eye doctor and they have you read the eye chart, that’s called 2020. That’s your eyesight.

Vision is how the eyes and the brain and the body work together. It’s a developmental skill set that we actually start learning. I say we, because all of us started learning while our mother was carrying us in gestation. That’s when we start to develop our peripheral vision, living in the amniotic fluid. Or the birth experience coming out of the birth canal. There’s signals, cues and signals that the infant needs to have.

in order to have their sensory motor systems turned on. And then the bonding period is also critical in, remember, establishing eye contact with your mom and dad, breastfeeding, exploring your environment on the floor, creeping and crawling, doing tummy time. See, all of those fundamental experiences affect our sensory motor development, our brain function.

And I just want to say that the eyes are the only part of the brain that sit outside the cranial vault. But the eyes are brain tissue. And because they are brain tissue, they fall under the category of something called neuroplasticity. And all of these kids, one of the main things they have going for them is they have a plasticity in their

nervous system, their fluid body, their movement, their emotional body, and so on that can be repaired, can be stimulated, it can be improved upon. And the problem that I see in traditional medical care is that number one, all the medical practitioners are staying in their little world.

And so if you go to a certain doctor, they’re going to diagnose you with that particular thing that they’re specializing in. And so then parents go to three or four of these specialists and they walk away and they’re totally confused with, what do I do with my child? Where do I plug in? How do I do this? And I remember when I first met Carla and we talked about, you know, children and learning. We were so

in resonance about with these families understanding that there’s more to it than treating the symptoms, instead getting to the root cause and understanding the global situation with how to unlock the blocks that these kids maybe have come in with and it’s part of their process.

So in the exploration in my part of it, in vision, I’m gonna talk a little bit more about the difference between visual acuity and visual processing. So if you think about this particular contrast, seeing things clearly is a static experience. I see it clear at 20 feet, I see it clear up close, and that’s…

static. But in vision, it’s so related to our movement, our balance, our orientation, our ability to see the parts and make a whole. Perception through your ground, when I see the detail and make a relationship with the whole picture. Visual memory, recognizing shapes and forms.

You know, I know in my case when I was back to that eight-year-old, one of the things that I knew is I was able to see patterns. And I see some kids here that, okay, they may have some confusion going on, but if you can set up the environment in a way that’s supportive, then you start to see some of the view this time through. And each one of them has an individual walk.

and see that we have to put together some vision of the public health. This is another issue I’ve seen in some of the big medical practices is one size fits all. And this is certainly coming from the school system, especially in the public schools, and understandably so because they’re overwhelmed with the public schools, they’re starting to have the staff, running out of money. And then these schools get put in in special education classes.

and they get lost. And that’s why I’ve always said to parents you have to do the school’s deal, you have to ask for more services, you may have to step outside your normal, your everyday public school experience to get some help. So that being said, when I am evaluating a child, one of the things that I’m looking at is

in their visual system, how connected are their eyes to their body and their movement? And I would say the fundamental theme that I see over and over again, whether it’s here at Kid Power or in the bigger stage with kids along the spectrum disorders, is that their eyes and their vision are developmentally

behind some of their other sensory motor skills. And when you think about any person, we think about their nervous systems, right? We call that the fight, flight, breeze response. One of the people that’s really done a lot of great research and writing on it is a man named Stephen Porges. And he came up with a theory called the polyvagal theory. I would recommend looking at that. It’s a very complex

theory, then I want to give Dr. Porges full kind of honoring in what his writings are and his teachings are. But one of the aspects that I really take away when I study Dr. Porges is trauma. And so I want to take a moment and I want to talk a bit about trauma. Gabor Mate has written a lot about trauma. I highly recommend him. He’s a very well-known psychiatrist.

He’s written a number of books. wrote a great book on ADHD many years ago. And he’s talked a lot about trauma. I have personal experience with trauma in that when I started my first practice in the Philadelphia area, I associated with another developmental optometrist. His name was Dr. Ellis Edelman. And for five years, I apprenticed in his office. And it was probably one of the most…

deepest experiences I had in learning how to work with kids. Dr. Elman was amazing. He was in his 60s when I was in my 20s. And I was so grateful that he took me in and we actually ended up becoming partners that built up a very big practice in Philadelphia, which I sold and moved out to New Mexico about 25 years ago. But the point that I’m trying to make is that in

this trauma situation, one of the things that I had to do to build my practice in Philadelphia, because I couldn’t get any patients, because we were in a very conservative area, is I went to some of the hospitals and I volunteered to help their traumatic brain injury patients. And over a period of about three months, I was able to help hundreds of people heal their double vision, their blurred vision, their

brain fog, their memory issues through the physical eye therapy techniques that I learned at the Gazelle Institute. And it launched me into a position where I became very well known in Philadelphia because of my traumatic brain injury work. And the regular eye doctors, they had no interest in working with these kinds of patients.

but the physical therapy was the thing that brought them back. Now in that process, I also recognized there was a whole population of kids in the Philadelphia area that were special needs. And these were Down syndrome, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, obviously the spectrum disorders. So I focused on that community and I said, I can really help this community. And between working with those kids,

and working with the traumatic brain injury, they kind of came together and it’s how I built a very successful practice. And I got my name out there and it was very well known and I did some research and writings on traumatic brain injury. And so I really understood how trauma affects our nervous system and even more deeply our brain, our cerebral spinal fluid, our

connective tissue, or fascia. And with the visual system, when we are exposed to trauma, because the eyes are kind of a soft tissue, doesn’t show up on the MRI scan. So it’s soft symptoms like, as I say, double vision, blurred vision, focusing issues, memory problems, issues with vestibular imbalance and orientation. And so…

through the physical therapy, I was able to help people heal and release the trauma. And it kind of catapulted me into this next phase is when I moved out to New Mexico and I started working with birth trauma. I started working with kids who were along the spectrum disorders. And I remember working with an OT up in Santa Fe where I practice and live.

And she said, you know, I think you ought to go back to massage school and learn craniosacral therapy. And this was a major breakthrough for me because I spent about two years studying craniosacral and I started to apply it with these kids who had birth trauma and it unlocked the developmental delays that they were going through. It not only did it improve the visual system, but it seemed to balance out their nervous system. And it also

helped their ability to sleep better, to function better, to learn better. And so I recognize this is a great modality in releasing trauma. So one of the things to note in this whole population is what was the birthmark? And this is such a pivotal question to be asking. And it’s kind of weird.

When I go to conferences and I might start talking to other doctors about birth and the importance of birth, deer in the headlights. They have no concept, relationship or interest in how our birth imprint affects us. But if you think about things like forceps delivery, you think about the suction or breech birth.

or cesarean. When I did my cranial training, we worked with pregnant moms. We worked with women giving birth, doing craniosacral right after birth. It was mind blowing to see how those kids launched differently by removing those early impediments. So that’s why the birth is so important.

in this conversation. And then the next conversation to have is bonding. So many of these kids are taken away from their mom at the most essential time when they need to bond, which is right after birth. You’ve heard of the hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin is one of those love, I love you hormones.

that mom and her newborn get to have that experience. Now, sometimes in premature babies, we have to put them in the incubator or again, they’re taken away or mom is completely knocked out because of pitocin or other drugs. These are the issues that later on start to affect our eye brain connection.

more than that, speech language auditory or motor and and so on, even our biochemistry which I’ll get to in a minute. So the point of the story is trauma. Trauma creates a paralysis in our system. It also reduces those good brain hormones that we need like dopamine and serotonin which are critically important in our circadian rhythms and our moods and those kinds of

So when I studied craniosacral, I started to understand how much trauma impacted a child’s sensory motor developmental arc. And then I got introduced to something called the primitive survival reflexes. And here at Kid Power, they have…

They have dove deeply into how critical the primitive reflexes are. You know, when I’m on social media and I’ll mention primitive reflexes, most people have not even heard of them. And sometimes moms have heard of the moral reflex. But these primitive reflexes are motor patterns that start occurring in utero and they help set the stage for a child’s

visual thinking, motor, speech, language, auditory integration with the brain. It’s really a reflection of their nervous system. And when you combine the craniosacral treatment, which is more of the fluid health with the nervous system health, so you’re doing craniosacral and you’re doing primitive reflexes, what you’re doing is you’re releasing so many of those restrictions and obstacles that then catapult the child

into a developmental space that then they can reach their full potential. I learned my primitive reflex therapy from a group of optometrists in Denmark and Sweden, and they’ve been doing primitive reflex therapy since 1975. And when I brought that back to the US with my mentor, Dr. Al Sutton, we started to teach seminars to eye doctors and they didn’t want it. thought getting on the

was absurd with kids. What does that have to do with the eyeball? So today, fast forward, I see more and more behavioral optometrists at least knowing about primitive reflexes. So things have changed. But in the OT world, and then what KidPower has done is they’ve studied a variety of different teachers in primitive reflexes. And when I come here and evaluate,

I’m looking at the visual component of the primitive reflexes. And it’s amazing that when we work together, there’s this synergy where we then come up with a plan that helps these kids integrate those primitive reflexes, which then allows them to start to understand their inner ear, their vestibular system more. And the visual system and the vestibular system are married. They’re parallel to each other.

vision stimulates vestibular, the vestibular stimulates vision, and the primitive reflexes are a component that influence both. And if you saw one of the exams that I do, we actually use these special gilked prisms, these special prisms that we have the child wear, and we have them walk the plank. We have them walk

And you can see in their posture and their movements where those primitive reflexes occur, which ones are there. And it gives us a roadmap that unlocking of what it’s going to take to help this child thrive. And talk about an eye exam that tests the whole child. This is to me the future of what we need to do.

to help these kids and realize that it’s an individual by individual situation that we can’t give the child the same thing. Every child gets the same thing. It just doesn’t work that way. So the next topic I want to move to is our nutrition. And this is a hot topic. In my process,

One of the specialties that I really admired and I started to study was functional medicine. And I’m thrilled that there’s so many naturopaths, chiropractors, physicians that are now embracing functional medicine, functional nutrition, that people are becoming awakened to the importance of what we eat and how it affects

our brain, our emotions, our cells, our aging, and in kids, they’re learning in concentration. So I remember one of my mentors, I want to give him credit for helping me understand this principle that I’m going to share with you. His name is Dr. Al Sutton, and he was another one of these just world-renowned developmental optometrists, and he was practicing in Miami Beach.

When I met him, he was also a professor at Berry College and he was teaching teachers and educators and psychologists this form of developmental optometry. And one day I was at his clinic in Miami and he pulled out a lab test and it was a pair mineral analysis. And he said, you know, this particular test is a reflection of a person’s ability

to deal with their stress. So that makes sense, right, okay. So we were looking at mineral ratios and the minerals in our body, they kind of get ignored, but they’re so important because they’re the spark plugs. They keep our pH levels as they are, they help us with dietary absorption, they help us with detoxification, they balance our pH levels, they influence our inflammation. So there’s a lot of things that happen

when we start analyzing the body. And one of the things he taught me, which I still think about today, is that when a child is diagnosed with a developmental delay, whatever it is, it could be speech language, could be visual, it could be whatever, the thing is, is that on a cellular level, they are probably in a depleted state at some level.

And the reason they’re into the plebiscite is because somewhere along the line, and this is if they’ve had a normal development, they weren’t given lots of antibiotics for ear infections or they had colic or they were in the hospital or whatever it was, these are the normal kids that if they’re not getting enough energy into the cell,

then they’re not gonna have the energy to absorb the therapies that we are giving them. And it’s why over and over and over again, and I get communications from many parents around the world, again, because of my social media presence, where they go, you know, I’ve done the DOT, I’ve done the counseling, I’ve done the tutoring, and my child is in exactly the same place.

So my next question is, well, have you ever done a biochemistry analysis? What’s their diet like? If you took them into a grocery store, what foods would they be attracted to? And every time there’s a disconnect. I never thought about nutrition and diet in this equation. And that’s the place I feel we need to start. So with these kids, if you can give them more energy, then they’re going to absorb

the therapy much better and they’re going to grow, they’re going to develop in a much greater accelerated way. And that’s the linchpin. That’s the starting point. And where you start sometimes is really important. Where are you going to plug in with this child? And you really have to be adept as a practitioner, as a therapist to understand that concept and not just think, well, hey, I learned this

technique, let me give this kid my technique and I’ll give every kid the same technique. You’re not going to get anywhere. I mean, you might make a lot of money. You might have, you know, whatever, whatever it is, but you’re not really dialing into, where is the place that I can start in with this child to help them flower? And so with the nutrition part, and I know you’re all the time here with Kid Power.

When I asked the parents, have you looked at the nutrition? Not really. You know, we go to McDonald’s, we, it’s a lot of fast food. We don’t have a lot of time. I said, okay, so what we need to do right now is we need to do some kind of a biochemistry analysis to get a baseline. And then based on that baseline, then we can start giving your child the nutrients that they’re missing. And what you’re going to see is this expansion.

in their energy, which then when they start doing whatever the therapies they need, they’re going to really take off. And parents kind of buy into that. And so the point of what I’m making about nutrition is that it’s more important than you think. And it can be your kind of health care, especially if you eat foods that are non GMO that are pesticide.

free, that are organic as best as you can. And I know they cost more, but in the long run, when you eat in a more conscious, mindful way, where think colorful vegetables, you know, think low sugar, think good fats and oils, good protein, think about ways to support the digestive tract. You know, these are all strategies.

in functional medicine that we talk about, that we think about. And I think it’s an essential component just as important as physical vision therapy, pre-esacral therapy, primitive reflexes, auditory therapies, and so on. So I really want to implore parents to take stock in

what is their nutrition and what is their nutrition with their child and what are some things they can do to up the bar so that they can give their child a better opportunity to develop their learning and their skill set so that just like I did, they flower in a way so then they can have the expression on what they’re supposed to be doing in this life. Instead of…

maybe withdrawing or having some mental or emotional challenges, addiction issues, you know, it just goes on and on and on. And there isn’t a simple formula, but this is a roadmap that I’m talking about in our process. So there’s a couple of other things I wanna speak about today. The first is more vision related.

And this has to do with a condition called strabismus. So strabismus is a condition where we see a child and their eye is either turning in or it’s turning out and it may be an alternating situation or it may just be on one side. And it’s interesting, I want to give a plug here. I was just on a podcast that’s very well

attended and received Katie Wells and Wellness Mom. And I just did a podcast, she interviewed me about how to do a proper vision exam with a child. And since that podcast, I’m getting so many parents calling me saying, well, I went for this exam, they did the drops, they gave us a really thick, strong prescription, my child doesn’t want to wear it, I’m concerned because the eye is turning in and turning out, what should we do?

So it’s perfect for me because I will share with you what we’re going to do. Now, another thing about this is that in the strabismus world, the tendency is for the doctor to want to possibly get really strong glasses or do eye muscle surgery. And both of those are very

symptom based. Let’s fix the symptom. And again, it’s back to Gazelle, which is Gazelle would say, treat the whole child. When there’s a vision problem, it’s not just in the eyeball, it’s in the whole child. So the strabismus pattern is in their movement, their posture, probably their emotional reactions. Why in the world would you want to give strong glasses? That’s only going to stunt

the visual development and reinforce the eye crossing. Or if you do the surgery, you’re going to change the length of the muscle, but the brain is going to get very confused because it’s the brain that directs the eye muscles to begin with. And so what you do is you cut the muscle and so the eye will look straight for a little while, but then it’s going to revert back. So the success in that, in that

surgery is very, very low. And it’s also very traumatic. So we talk about trauma, we don’t want to create more trauma than these kids. This is where the physical vision therapy works so beautifully as an organic method to help the child understand integration. How to get

both sides to talk to each other because when an eye is turning in what the child is saying is

It’s too stressful for me. I’m scared. I’m vulnerable. Or it may be if the eye is turning out, they’re saying, I can’t focus on all this. I got to space out. Now the thing is, is that that is a symptom of my middle. Where is the midline in myself? And how can I learn how to use both sides together? So they’re going to be in the school of vision, which is

How do I learn to use these two eyes with my brain and with my body? And this is where radio sacral therapy can be beneficial, the primitive reflex therapy, the gross and fine motor things that relate to vestibular stimulation. All of these things give the child the power for them to start to explore, okay, what is it like for me to be simultaneous, to use both sides together?

And there’s a learning curve. doesn’t happen overnight. And one of my big counseling points to parents is some days are going to be better than others. Some moments are going to be better than others. Keep the big picture. And if you see the eye turning, it’s just a signal your child may be getting sick, may be fatigued, may be stressed. Time out is necessary, but don’t get hooked into, my goodness.

there’s a problem because as long as you kind of access this plasticity that I talked about at the beginning these kids can change right away and when you put strong glasses on them you are stunting their potential being able to make the changes they need to make and that’s really for any glasses prescription which I’ll talk about in minute.

So in strabismus, we want to create more integration. Now, the other side of that is what we lazy eye or amblyopia. And what this means is that one of the eyes is seeing much more blurry than the other eye. And it could be because of many reasons. Birth trauma, some kind of injury. It could be that that eye is just developmentally behind the other.

to be how they were in utero, how they came out of the birth canal. There’s many reasons why we develop this lazy eye where we’re not stimulating. So the last thing you want to do, classic approach is, well, let’s patch the good eye for eight hours a day. You never want to do that because that is going to create more trauma. The child is going to be more confused. And it really doesn’t solve anything in creating an environment

which is the environment is how can I set up some conditions so that this child can learn and problem solve in being able to use their visual system in a better way? And that’s really what I learned in physical vision therapy is setting up the conditions that’s a problem for them to solve. And the way they solve it is they have to use that eye more. We have to stimulate both eyes together. And in our visual system,

There are certain skills like visual tracking, visual focusing, visual coordination, hand-eye coordination. They’re probably all familiar to you. Innately, you adults, we know how to use those skills. But this is what’s missing with these kids is their visual skills have not come online to their brain. And so this is where stimulating their physical vision.

in different experiences through movement and balance and catching a ball and jumping on a trampoline and many, many things like that, the child then begins to have the experience of what am I supposed to do with these two eyes and how am I supposed to use them? And this is the baseline of men organically then learning how to use their vision through their brain and through their

And doing this a long time, I have seen so many success stories with kids who have gone through this and then what they’ve done with their lives. It’s been pretty profound for me and that’s why I keep doing it. So that’s Strabismus and Amblyopia. But let’s talk about the conditions like nearsightedness, barsightedness, and astigmatism. So my latest book, it’s one of the reasons why I’m doing this,

this recording is called vital vision, clear-eyed solutions for the life and beyond. But in the book, even though I’m talking more about adults and eye disease and how to improve eye disease through more functional medicine methods, the fundamental things that happen when we go to the eye doctor because our eyes are blurry in near-sightedness, which is the inability to see far away,

We are reaching an epidemic. And the reason we’re reaching an epidemic is that, and I just read this statistic, 94 % of all public schools are now using a computer in the classroom. digital devices and our eyes. Do you know how many questions I get a week from parents? How is this impacting my children’s lives?

And obviously COVID was a real game changer because that’s when the schools went online and these five and six and seven year olds were being asked to stare at a screen for much of the day to learn the curriculum. But the bottom line is that our eyes are not made to look at the screen for long term. This is not what we’re made to do.

Now we’re adapting and one of the adaptations we’re making is that we’re giving up our distance acuity. We’re becoming nearsighted. So our vision is now all in our phone, our tablet, our screen, our computer. And not only are dealing with the, you know, the pulsing of the screen, but we’re dealing with the blue light, the artificial blue light. And this is a whole other topic because

Artificial blue light is a very chaotic frequency that does some very damaging things to our body. Number one, and this happens especially after 6 p.m., it begins to fool the pineal gland, it tricks it, so that it’s not producing the melatonin that’s needed to help us with sleep. So it’s affecting our sleep profoundly. Now sleep is so important in our regenerative.

capability. If we don’t sleep well, we’re not going to heal. Sleeping is so important. So with the blue light situation, we’re not sleeping as well. There’s more disturbed sleep. Next, because we’re in this visual confinement, our eye muscles are not able to move beyond that 14 to 16 inch range. Number three, because of the blue light, this flies our eyes out more.

creates more inflammation, it’s affecting the brain. And overall, whether you’re learning or you’re gaming, there’s a lot of the kids that I see on TikTok and I’m talking to them, they’re doing video gaming. And hours upon hours a day with their vision, well, how is that affecting them? They’re all people in their sight. Another piece of this is astigmatism.

where the eye begins to change its shape. So it becomes more egg-shaped. And this is stigmatism. It is another factor with the nearsightedness that’s creating all this blurriness. And so instead of dealing with the problem here up close, the eye doctors have decided to say, let’s just correct the distance, which is treating a symptom. But what it’s doing is it’s reinforcing the problem. And this is why

kids get stronger and stronger and once this is what happened to me, I became nearsighted. I began reading and my eyes just getting progressively worse. So I know the drill. I know what happens. So we’ve got that side of the aisle and then we’ve got the far side of kids. And these are kids that maybe they tend to want to be more out into the bigger picture. Nearsighted they look good here.

far sighted, the more distance based and focus is hard for them. It’s hard for them to come into the computer to focus. So they get a magnifying lens, which makes things artificially as bigger, but it shuts off their focusing, responsive, and muscle. And so they start wearing that magnification lens and guess what happens? It gets stronger and stronger and stronger. And then they’re wearing this big magnification lens and it’s very distorting.

but it’s shutting down their accommodating ability, their ability to focus. And one of the things we do in our vestibular therapy is we actually have people balancing, changing their focusing. So focus here, focus there, focus there. This is one of the best ways to integrate the visual vestibular system. But if you’re farsighted and you’re wearing this magnification lens,

you have lost your ability to change your focus because you’re now dependent on the fact that the lens is making things artificially large. So you go, I don’t have to do it because the lens is doing it for me. And so this in both scenarios, near sighted, far sighted, what’s going on is these descriptions are now becoming the fabric of the visual system. And that’s okay, know, glasses are fine.

But the thing is there are other ways that you can work with the vision so they don’t have to have this disability, this weakness. And the way we’re going with screens, I don’t see it changing. I see the trend continuing along that we’re going to have more and more and more vision problems. So beware with the screen time. There’s some great research I want to share with you.

about this particular topic. And what it is is this. Researchers say that if you can take a 30 to 60 minute break from your screen time, go outside, go outside into the sunlight, especially in the morning, what it does is it creates a rebalancing in your circadian rhythm. It increases your mental

capability or mental focus, and it also ups your dopamine levels, your mood. So you need to spend time outside every day, preferably more in the morning. And when you get that natural sunlight, it can offset some of these negative things that you get exposed to in these artificial environments, whether it’s fluorescent lighting, whether it’s screen time.

And all of these things come together, which is now creating another downward spiral and the kids are paying the price for it. So sunlight is very important for these kids to get out there. 30, 60, 90 minutes a day is really what the researchers are saying. And since we’re on the topic of light, I want to talk about one more thing. And this has to do with

something in the body, very high concentration in the eyes, called mitochondria. Mitochondria is a buzzword right now. And I think it’s partly because mitochondria are organelles that live in almost every cell in the body, and they are responsible for energy production that helps us absorb better nutrients.

get rid of toxins, reduce inflammation, reduce oxidative stress. Now, one of the conversations that is really going on is the mitochondria that exist and live in the eye. So let me explain. You know, in neuroscience, there has been some incredible research on the regenerative capability of our eyes.

But if you go to an eye doctor’s office down the street, that concept of neuroplasticity is non-existent. It’s not there. And in fact, and I was trained this way as well, so I’m guilty of it as well, is that looking for disease is the goal for the eye doctor. You walk in, they immediately are looking at two eyeballs and they’re looking for the disease.

And they’re really looking forward to kids as well, even though the percentage is pretty low. So there’s no talk that you can regenerate your eyes, that you can improve your vision. In fact, if you actually met some of these folks, these professionals, they would probably either laugh at you or invalidate it or just say it doesn’t work. And it’s too bad because

In the body of research that’s in Harvard, Stanford, some other very well-respected journals, neuroplasticity is something that’s talked about a lot. And especially with conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia and aging, the fact that there’s this kick of anti-aging. So whatever it is, the mitochondria is the key.

Well, it just so happens there was a study done by an ophthalmologist at the University College of London, where he took a group of adults between the ages of 40 and 70 who had degenerative retina diseases like macular degeneration, drusen, other retinopathies, maybe due to diabetic retinopathy or hypertensive retinopathy. So he took these subjects and he applied

red light to their eyes every day. So only a few minutes in the morning, we did this for 12 weeks. And in his published report, he said, these people increase their ability to read the eye chart by 22%. Now, that is an astounding number, because if you look at eye research, whether it’s stem cell, whether it’s, you know, whatever the nutritional therapy,

The most, the best code that we can have is maybe a two to 5 % increase. 22%, that’s huge. Just by looking at red light, what’s the story? So the story is, is that there’s some reason the mitochondria like the red light. And after about age 40, we begin to lose

our resiliency in the retina with our eyes. They start to age.

When they age, we start seeing oxidative stress, we start seeing inflammation. This leads to conditions like cataracts, glaucoma, macular degeneration, whatever it is. And so what the Jeffries lab, the guy’s name is Dr. Jeffries, what he wrote in his paper is that this red light stimulates the mitochondrial and it reduces

the negative things that get produced when the mitochondria stop producing their energy. And so as the mitochondria get better and it produces more energy, all of these conditions fade away, or I would say most of them. So we’re back to light therapy. And the eyes are one of the main portal, portals into our body and our skin is as well. Here, kid power.

What I’ve taught the therapist to do is something called color therapy. So we use all the colors of this vector because it’s a language that the kids understand. You want them to fixate, you start shining a red or a blue or a purple and you keep tracking with them. You’re going to start to see some things around their visual engagement. So with the red light now, this is highly therapeutic.

in being able to increase the mitochondria function. And increasing the mitochondria function, the cells are going to work better. There’s more vitality. There’s more resiliency. In fact, in some of the research I’m looking at right now, if you use like a red box, a big red LED lights, they’re saying that it can reverse conditions like arthritis, fibromyalgia, can include the immune system. This is systemically.

And more and more functional medicine doctors, more and more naturopaths are using red light as a way to create more vitality and resiliency in the body. And remember, this is done without pharmaceutical drugs. This is done without surgery. And I bring this into the circle here today because I want you to understand the therapeutic value

of natural sunlight, using different types of color therapy, and understanding what we call photobiomodulation, which is the red light.

So there’s a lot to unpack here and I think we’re gonna end here. Maybe if there’s a question or two, you can take that. But this is a lot of information for you to digest. And I wanna leave you with three things. The first is number one, and this is for the children. You don’t have to live out of diagnosis.

So even if you are diagnosed with ADD or autism or Asperger’s or whatever it is, that that is a diagnosis. can be advantageous in terms of an insurance reimbursement, but we don’t want you to live out that labor. You don’t have to do that. Number two, that understanding the

importance of nutrition as the building block that if you can create more energy in a person they are going to absorb the therapy much better much faster and You’re gonna get much fun Okay, and number three Understand find a practitioner that can help you unlock the code of

Where can we start with this child? Where is the opening? And it’s so interesting with Yi, when I first meet a child, when they get on the forum with them, and I chat with them, and I’m scanning and tuning intuitively, where is there an opening? What is their hot button? What is it that where I can create some kind

commonality and within that it’s going to start to create a trust and a relationship where then they’re going to feel safe in their vulnerability and then they’re going to start to buy in. And I think that’s so important to establish that bond of trust and not come with such an agenda or

a prejudice or a preconceived idea. I mean, obviously there’s a certain direction we want to go. But I know in my case, what these kids have taught me is the places where I have let all that go. And can I just meet them, meet them as a human being? And when we do that and we create a resonance, the magic happens. And

That’s really important and it’s less about the technique and it’s more about how we’re showing up.

to that child in a way that creates safety. Because I can tell you when I have observed my colleagues and they go to these very sterile offices, they’ve lost the child before they come in. And it’s interesting when they come and see me for the first few minutes, we have to kind of get rid of the trauma of what’s happened with these other offices. Because they think, my goodness, this is the same thing.

So we start our eye exam getting a ball or playing with some blogs or whatever it is just to take that trauma piece off so that then they can follow. So any questions here is not taking the end or we’ll be open a lot of questions. If you want to, can always email me hello at DrSanBurn.com and

My team and I will definitely answer your questions. can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, pretty active on those. yeah, so thank you very much for your attention. It’s been a while to be able to speak to you today.

That’s a meatball sandwich, huh?

Keep Up with Dr. Sam

Dr. Sam Berne has been in private practice in New Mexico for over 25 years and where he works with patients to improve their vision and overall wellness through holistic methods. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Pennsylvania State University, Doctor of Optometry from Pennsylvania College, and did his postdoctoral work at the Gesell Institute in collaboration with Yale University. He has been awarded The Special Awards for Service from the Behavioral Optometrists in Mexico for his innovative and holistic work with children.

His protocols take a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to health and wellness. He understands and treats the body as one integrated system rather than a collection of independent organs in order to identify and address the root causes of disease. His whole health protocols improve vision and wellness by healing the mind-body-spirit through nutritional protocols, vision therapy, and self-care techniques. This views each person as genetically and biochemically unique and enables the individual to make lifelong improvements to their well-being.