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Keywords

Summary

Sam Berne (00:00)

There are three main colors in the iris. There’s brown where it’s like really dark brown. Then we have the mixed, which most of you said you were, and we have one that’s like blue-gray, blue, it’s called blue. So there are three, those are three different constitutions that we look at in iridology. So the iris is this part, so we’ve got the pupil, which is controlling the light.

So we’ve got the pupil and then we’ve got the iris which are nerve fibers and those three colors. And there’s a genetic blueprint that we inherit based on our ancestors, our mother, father. So the left eye is more of the feminine mother, grandmother side and the right is more of our father, grandfather side, okay?

So I’m going to go through just generally since you know what the color of your eyes are, what are your tendencies? Okay. And there’s a lot of different ways to read the iris. So first of all, when we do iridology, we’re not diagnosing. I can’t tell whether you’re pregnant. I can’t tell whether you have cancer. I can’t tell whether you have a disease. Okay. So there, this is not a diagnostic tool. Also,

The goal is not to change the color or the pigments by taking supplements. If you’ve ever known of anybody who’s done iridology or ⁓ had a reading and the iridologist says, the goal is to change your color, so buy these supplements, you don’t want to do that. Because the people that are really doing iridology

and I got trained very intensively in it. I had to take all kinds of tests to get certified and the people that trained me, where I learned it, basically ⁓ that’s not the goal of changing the color of your iris. So there’s two main things in what we’re looking at. Number one, the color of the iris and number two, if you have any pigments in the eyes. So I could

kind of go around with my magnifier and I could look to see if you have any pigments. Okay. Now the iris is a map of the body. How many here have heard of reflexology? Okay. So you see a map of the bottom of the foot and this part of the foot is the liver. That part of the foot is the gallbladder and so on.

Over hundreds of years of doctors making diagrams of the iris based on health conditions, we can pretty much tell based on the markings of your iris what your genetics are saying. And number two, what are your own health concerns that you should be nurturing?

Now more specifically, what are we talking about health concerns? Okay, we’re talking about endocrine health. We’re talking about connective tissue in the body. We’re talking about your mental focus, your emotional patterns, your personality. So there’s a lot of different levels to reading into a person’s iris. In fact, the pupil

If the pupil isn’t completely round, like let’s say part of the pupil is cut off or it’s flat. The pupil maps perfectly to our spinal health and we can actually see based on where the pupil is not completely round. What part of the spinal cord is having a problem and chiropractors then can use I use it when I do cranial work.

The pupil can tell us about the spine and then the inside part here tells us about our digestive health. So that’s another thing. Do we have inflammation? Do we have a tendency towards autoimmune conditions? What’s our digestive health like? What kind of foods should we be eating? Not so much supplements, but foods. Also in the markings, we can see liver health.

We can see thyroid health. We can see heart health. We can see pancreas health. So by looking at the markings, we can really assess individually, like making it very individualized, this is what you should be doing. This is why you go on the internet and you go, for eye health, I should be eating carrots. Okay, that’s a nice general thing. But what’s going on?

in your specific liver. If you’ve got a brown pigment, that’s a liver sign. So that means that you’ve got to nurture your liver. So probably doing a liver cleanse once or twice a year would be a really good thing, not only for your eyes, but for your body. You know, I was trained by naturopaths. There was not one eye doctor in my iridology class, not one. You go to eye doctors, right? They’re looking at the iris. They have no

idea on the mapping of the iris as it relates to your health. That’s why the eyes don’t lie.

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.

Set up a free discovery call with Dr. Berne to learn more about his practitioenr’s training: [email protected]

Keywords

macular pucker, holistic eye health, peripheral vision, vision therapy, liver health, eye nutrition, nearsightedness, eye exercises, vision programming, eye care

Summary

Takeaways

Transcript:

Sam Berne (00:01.326)

This may be worth watching listening again, anything you can do to improve your macular health is really important, especially if you work on screens. So I hope you enjoy the show. Thanks for tuning in. Wow. And my perspective on vision is more whole body. Love me. Just say that holistic. And so whenever I see an eye problem,

I try to look at the root cause or root causes and so some of the things I’m going to be saying to you are going to be a little different in the sense that we’re not here to necessarily treat symptoms. We want to get to the root cause, you know, what has caused this macular shift and it just seems like it’s it’s in the right eye, not the left eye. At least that’s what

Your report says so to define a macular pucker. Sometimes it’s called an epiretinal membrane problem or a cellophane maculopathy. So this is a condition where a thin layer like a scar like tissue forms on the macula and the macula is the center part of the retina, which is responsible for your detailed sharp eyesight.

And the fovea is a little bit bigger and then the macula sits in that. It’s a very high concentration of cones. It’s also where we get our color vision, but it makes up less than 1 % of the real estate of our retina. But it’s very important because it helps us with identification and details. So when you have a macular pucker,

Sam Berne (02:26.918)

some of the cells that grow into the membrane. It contracts and this causes this wrinkle or pucker and it causes distorted again, acuity and blurriness. Now, it’s a little different than macular degeneration. Whenever I see a macular problem, I’m looking at the OCT scan which you had done and that

kind of gives a determination on the the health of the macula. But what are the what the symptoms really show would be the straight lines become kind of curved. There can be a gray or cloudy area in the central seeing sometimes you have to move your eyes around to be able to see the print and so the conventional treatment. That’s why I asked you about vitrectomies because what they do is they remove the vitreous gel sack.

or they do a membrane peel to remove the pucker which can smooth out the retina. But the success rate that of that is is limited and that’s why I asked you so I’m glad that you’re not doing that now some of the holistic therapies to support the macula you’re already doing the keys would be reducing inflammation supporting retinal metabolism mitochondria function.

And then you want to start developing more peripheral vision in your seeing and we’ll talk a little more about that in a minute. And then there’s the nutritional protocols, which you’re already doing, you know, beta-carotene E zinc lutein zeaxanthin. I probably would add astaxanthin if you want to get a little even more esoteric saffron.

Sam Berne (04:53.996)

a drop or two in a glass of water and then 20 or 30 minutes later you apply your red light therapy. And so it’s a synergistic way to really target the macula and get the the mitochondria working better. Methylene blue wait 30 minutes do the red light therapy. The other thing we’re finding that’s very helpful is hydrogen water and hydrogen water helps you absorb

The water molecule better. So it’s hydrating which again one of the reasons why the vitreous changes its composition is because there’s a dehydration element and if you’ve had Lasik surgery there can be a tendency towards dryness blue light can lead towards dryness. So with the hydrogen water, you can actually get a canister that you pour the water into which makes it hydrogen water.

And it’s something that I’m just putting on your radar screen. I mean, again, it reduces inflammation. It oxygenates and hydrates and you know, if you want to go that extra yard, you could certainly do that. So those are some of the, you know, some of the basic things I would say, you know, like adding you could do a saffron. You can get saffron capsules.

Or you can cook with saffron. There have been some good studies on saffron improving macular health. Curcumin is another one. So if you cook Ayurvedic leave to your discussion around myopia and Lasik surgery, so you may have seen in some of my content or not that why do we become nearsighted? Okay, one of the reasons why we become near sighted is how we are using our eyes.

Sam Berne (07:20.555)

And the higher the number of your prescription, the earlier you began developing myopia. And the other thing is the higher the number could suggest some perceptual. And again, this could have just been some perceptual thing that like, wow, there’s a lot of energy coming at me. I don’t know what to do with it. Maybe it feels invasive. Maybe it doesn’t.

So we develop nearsightedness as a defense strategy and nearsightedness starts in the mind and in the brain. We want to blame the faulty vision on the eyeball, but it’s really the programming behind the eyes that creates the prescription. Now, the reason why I’m emphasizing this is that when a person becomes nearsighted, they become macula centric.

In other words, the main part of their eye that they’re relying on is their macula because the whole thing about being nearsighted is I’ve got to keep it clear. If I don’t keep it clear, I could get hurt. There’s some hyper vigilance at least deeply buried mentally. Okay. Now when you get Lasik surgery, you’re changing the prescription in the eye.

but you’re not changing the programming that created the prescription. And this is an important point because okay, the Lasik surgery is going to work for a while, but the programming is much more powerful than the Lasik surgery, which is why some people start reverting back to their myopia because the programming is just stronger.

Sam Berne (09:45.843)

the macula like gripping the world through the macula. Now, I’m being a bit dramatic here and it’s not something that you may at all be aware of but there are three things here that on a functional level. I want you to at least know about one of the best ways to start reducing the macula stress.

is really engaging more peripheral vision stimulation and we think that with contact lenses that we’re doing that but we’re actually not what contact lenses do is give us kind of a denial attitude like yeah, I got a lot more peripheral and I would say you have more peripheral in context than glasses. But here’s the rub when you go for an eye exam.

You’re sitting 20 feet away in a dark room with a machine usually behind your face or they’re doing some kind of a computerized calculation whatever they’re doing. It’s very mechanical that prescription that the doctor gives you is designed for you to use only at 20 feet. And if you start using that anything closer than 20 feet, it’s going to be too strong of a lens.

And it’s really again stressing the macula. So the distance prescription needs to be reduced in some form or fashion. If you’re in contacts, what I recommend is with your blue blockers, you can get a very small farsighted prescription put in there and it reduces the prescription. So let’s just do a little math here. Let’s say you’re

Sam Berne (12:12.613)

which reduces the prescription and that prescription then becomes your computer prescription. Now one of the great things that that plus 50 is doing over the contacts is it’s spreading the light away from the macula and it’s softening your vision and opening up your peripheral, which is a really good thing. It also with your nervous system very subtly starts activating the parasympathetic nervous system.

That’s the part of the nervous system. That’s our relaxation response and I can tell you that with all the things that you’ve shared with me right now is that you tend to like to live or you’re familiar with living in the sympathetic nervous system state, which is our fight-flight freeze and what the glasses will do immediately is it will soften

your visual focus. It’s not going to blur it. In fact, it may even make it clearer, but you’re going to feel more relaxed. Your parasympathetic nervous system is going to be more activated and we’re moving you away from being exclusively macular centric. So any stress that’s on the macula we’re moving it away, but you’re not going to lose

visual acuity or clarity. If anything, you get more clarity, but you’re going to get relaxation and you’re going to get more rejuvenation. Now, there’s a couple of other things that sometimes I do and you and I can kind of negotiate this because some of them are a little harder to do and some of them are a little easier to do. So the second thing that sometimes what we’ll do is on the

Sam Berne (14:39.324)

anybody that kind of over focuses. So by nasal occlusion is another possibility. Another possibility is putting something in the lens besides the plus 50 which is called a yoked yoke Ed prism. Now when you hear the word prism most conventional doctors are forcing them. They put a prism over one eye to force the muscles to work which doesn’t really

help but because of my experience now on my hat the hat that I’m wearing is I am now a physical therapy optometrist. I’m speaking to you as a physical therapist eye doctor and because of that I’ve worked in the hospitals for many years for people with very unusual eye problems and the yolk prisms what they do especially for the macular pucker

is they take your peripheral vision and they give you about 30 % more. So it spreads the light out much more into your peripheral. So it’s going to give you an improvement in your spatial awareness and your light distribution in the retina. And so, you know, step one would be at the very least get the plus 50s. That’s a no brainer with the blue blockers.

If you want to get a little more confrontational and go, okay, I really want to move out of this. Then you do the binasal occlusion with the scotch tape. And then if you really wanted to, you know, go for it, then you do the yolk prisms with the plus 50 and that’s going to give you more peripheral vision. Now a couple other things with that. There is an exercise.

Sam Berne (16:59.879)

And you get three-dimensional vision. So what this is doing is this is giving you more peripheral, but it’s integrating the two eyes in the brain because you’re getting depth perception. So this would be an exercise that you might do three times a day. Keep the chart by your computer. You do it 30 seconds to a minute and then you put that down and you do my palm hum exercise. So the palming humming exercise.

cupping it over your eyes and your humming on the exhale is one of the best ways to dilate the blood vessels in the eye. It creates something called nitric oxide. You’ve probably heard of it’s an ingredient that dilates the blood vessels. So humming has been shown to do that. And when you apply the hands over the eyes and you’re humming for maybe six or eight humps on the exhale

The hands are like tuning forks and you’re putting that sound into the eyes and you’re you’re getting that that nitric oxide push which is going to dilate the blood vessels and create some better relaxation and better breathing. So I will I will send you the jelly beans picture with a set of directions and I’ll send you the palm hum exercise. That would be great.

a combination to do as a physical therapy either without any lenses in or with your contacts in and then the plus 50 and so, you know, it’s like you’re you’re in a physical therapy setting using some support system, which is going to give you more peripheral and then you’re doing this active exercise which can which is going to give you even more peripheral.

Sam Berne (19:24.571)

And the way it shows up in the iris is they’re like these. I don’t know. I would call them like ditches or channels that it’s like you you’ve kind of rubbed these these these they’re called contraction furrows and they’re right. They go right through your eye and your brain area, which says you’re the kind of person where you’re growing edge is doing things like

soft open focus Chi gung be instead of do you know like you your tendency is to want to do do do until you drop that’s kind of until until there is a an obstacle put up that forces you into it, which was kind of this macular pucker situation among other things. So knowing this

Your tendency is being that so doing focus and it’s it’s your gift, but it’s too much. You’ve got to balance it out with doing some of these other softer things which may not be always comfortable for you, but it’s a life’s a lifestyle decision that will actually give you longevity better vision better health and

You know, again, it’s your growing edge. It’s a nurturing that you’re being asked to do. Okay, and we all have it. So your eye is showing a couple things. First of all, it’s showing your brown. Okay, you’ve got what’s called a brown eye. There are three main types of colors. There’s the blue eyes, there’s the hazel and there’s the brown. You are definitely proud.

Sam Berne (21:49.638)

They’re always it’s either anemia. It’s a blood clot. It’s some blood kind of thing that’s that’s going on and then beside that around the edge of the the brown of the eye. You have something that shows the I would say the nurturing that you need to do around your liver health your liver health and your gallbladder.

Now, there’s a lot of levels and layers to this. First of all, the liver in Chinese medicine rules the eyes. The meridian is and the gallbladder and the liver work together. The second thing that’s important about the liver gallbladder is it helps you digest and absorb the eye fat soluble nutrients and here are the three main ones.

vitamin A, it’s fat soluble, lutein and zeaxanthin, those carotenoids that protect the macula. So you’ve got some liver signs here that say, hmm, it might be supportive for you to do either a liver cleanse or some liver support because there’s also the toxicity part of it as well. And of liver,

governs our cholesterol levels also and you’ve got several signals that would say hmm the liver gallbladder need to be attended to and so I can give you some ideas. There’s some really basic things with the liver that you can do number one. You just use warm water in the morning with some with lemon in it. That’s a great way to

Sam Berne (24:14.565)

cloth, a hot washcloth and put that over the liver and we call that a castor oil pack. And I do. I do regularly and so yeah, good. Good. So now if you want to get a little more dialed into it, there are three herbs that are really great for the liver. The first is milk thistle. The second is yellow dock.

And the third is burdock root and you can get these either separately. You can get them in a formula. There’s a company in California called Young Jevity and they make a liver gallbladder formula. And what you do is you take a dropper full and you put it say you get your hydrogen water.

Put it in a glass of hydrogen water and you sip it before you eat at that time. Take your omega-3s. Take your dietary enzymes. You’re doing it before you eat and that’s going to create your liver enzymes to work better and just do it once a day. Maybe just do a month of it. It’s a very gentle but direct cleanse of your liver gallbladder. Those three herbs.

Are really good. think burdock root also helps the blood which you could use and the yellow dock is is great for the liver. And so it’s milk this like your liver definitely needs some ongoing support and this is not a an indictment against you or something is wrong. It just this is this is what you need for your

Sam Berne (26:39.15)

of other things that I think based on your iridology reading. I want to make you aware of the first thing is there is a tendency for you to get drained from your essential minerals because of your stress. I also think you’re going to get drained on your B vitamins. I also think that you are going to need some more glandular support.

especially thyroid adrenals. I have a question mark around your pancreas, your liver gallbladder and spleen. Okay, that’s again based on those contraction furrows that you’re showing. You know, your minerals, you’re not holding your minerals and your B vitamins and that was kind of showed in the Dutch test around the bees.

Do you know about B3? So niacin is fantastic for your circulation. my God. It will dilate your blood vessels really, really nicely. But I think the point here is looking for maybe you’re taking this already a really good B complex and you’ve got to take more than the

the regular level building blood your berries blackberries cabbage grapes.

Sam Berne (28:46.743)

Probably never heard of it. Oat straw tea is good for your bones. It’s got silicon in it. It’s good for your hair, but it’s a calming tea. And so as an example, you could brew that up, which is hot. You could add a little ginger and turmeric and lemon into your Vitamix. Beets are really good for the liver.

And then you can add like celery and cucumber. Cabbage would probably be good for you. So you’re getting a lot of really good plant enzymes, which is going to help your absorption and reduce your inflammation. know, probably cleansing your lymph would be helpful.

Well, we dry brushing walking. You could do a slant board where your head is below your feet or like a supported shoulder stand. Obviously things like, you know, massage or craniocic roll jumping on a rebounder, you know, whatever your exercise is.

You know, probably a combination of manual things and too much sitting is really bad for you. Like in your job. That’s again, your your edge is you got to keep your lymph moving because if you don’t it’s going to create this puddle in your body, which is all inflammation, you know, and that’s a killer, you know, so

Sam Berne (31:12.748)

is critically important. Also the lenses that you wear, you know, if you are wearing a distance prescription and you’re near sighted, you definitely need to wear something less when you’re working on screens and you know, so there’s a lot to this. So I hope you enjoyed the show. Thanks for tuning in. Take care everybody.

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.

For even more from Dr. Sam, check out his new exclusive membership where you get access to my content and resources, new information, articles, videos, webinars: https://drsambernesmembership.com/

Schedule your free discover call with Dr. Berne to learn about his practitioner’s training. [email protected]

Keep Up with Dr. Sam

Keywords

holistic vision care, eye health, functional medicine, nutrition, antioxidants, blue light, eye strain, vision improvement, myths about eye health, grounding

Summary

Takeaways

Chapters

Sam Berne (00:00.12)

Welcome, Dr. Byrne. Thank you. Great to be here. So as I mentioned, you know, we’ve had so many speakers speak about whole food plant based nutrition. We speak about it all the time and we’ve kind of ignored eye health, kind of just taken it for granted. I guess I started this when I was in my 40s and my eyes were pretty good. we didn’t really think about it, but for anyone that’s having challenges with their eyes,

That’s really a huge concern. we certainly would rather be proactive than reactive on this subject. If you could just take a minute maybe just to introduce yourself and tell us what you’ve been doing with your career for the last, you know, 10 years 20 years and then I’ll start asking you questions. Okay, thanks. So for the last 20 years, I’ve been doing patient care research and teaching.

And my mission is to bring holistic vision care to the mainstream. I have a pretty active social media following also have a podcast and I’m just inspired to help people take back their vision.

Great. Okay. I’d like to try if it’s okay with you to ask you quite a number of questions. So instead of feeling like you have to cover everything on every question, I’ll ask you a lot of questions. You can answer just that and then we’ll go on to the next question. So you have a chance to talk about a lot of things. Does that sound good? Yeah, fire away, Steve. Here we go. So could you elaborate?

Sam Berne (02:19.992)

affects the micro capillary circulation and the mitochondria function in the eyes because after about age 40, we start developing oxidative stress and inflammation and then we go to a traditional eye doctor and he starts diagnosing with a variety of conditions or you know, if you wear glasses or contacts your eyes get progressively worse. So in functional nutrition, I’m looking at

What are the best foods we should eat the best best lifestyle practices? And so that’s the first category. The second category is, you know, when you get your exam where most eye doctors just have you read the distance chart and that’s really your eyesight. It’s not vision. Vision is how the eyes in the brain and the body integrate and work together. So it’s a brain experience.

So how you use your eyes functionally affects the structure anatomy of the eyes eventually. So if you’re in a repetitive state of movement with your eyes and vision or you’re wearing glasses or contacts that perpetuate or reinforce a weakness, then it just gets worse and worse. So in functional vision therapy.

What I’ve developed is a way to help re-educate the habits and bring people to a better space around their vision functionally and this reverses the structural deterioration.

Sam Berne (04:21.549)

And then number three is to protect yourself from the damaging blue light emitted from our screens and using iridology, you know, analyzing the patterns of the iris. We can look at your constitutional type to see whether or not, you know, what

What specific health practice you can do to mitigate any deterioration and then in addition to the Constitution, we can look at the different patterns genetic tendencies and nurture points and our glands organs and digestive areas and then we can really fine-tune and pinpoint what foods you should eat what lifestyle changes you should make and in all of

the cases, I recommend boosting mitochondria function in the eye either through red light therapy. could also do methylene blue, which is kind of an it kind of amplifies the red light therapy or you can do certain foods that stimulate mitochondria function. So if you do all those things, you are being proactive in interrupting and in many cases reversing the deterioration in these eyes.

diseases. Say one more thing with cataracts. If you catch it early, if you increase your glutathione and vitamin C, those two ingredients have been found to be really potent for slowing down the aging process in cataracts or macular degeneration.

Sam Berne (06:31.809)

The intraocular lenses don’t even have any blue protection in them. So this is where lutein and zeaxanthin become even more important. Now dosage on a daily basis. You should be doing about 16 milligrams of lutein and about four to six milligrams of zeaxanthin daily.

Couple things though. These are fat soluble vitamins. So you want to make sure your liver gallbladder are working well because you can be either taking the supplements or eating the you know, the rainbow vegetables. But if you’re not absorbing the fat soluble vitamins because the liver gallbladders is not working are not working well, then what’s the point? So you’ve got to make sure your liver gallbladder are

working properly so you can.

Absorb them. There’s one other one that you haven’t mentioned, but I think I should mention it. It’s called astaxanthin. So astaxanthin is a third carotenoid. It’s actually a marine carotenoid. You can get that from wild-caught salmon, you know, the pink seafood. You can also if you’re vegan or vegetarian, you can get it from algae. So you want to get four to six milligrams a day of the astaxanthin. The astaxanthin along with the lutein and the

Sam Berne (08:19.439)

considered a crucial antioxidant for eye health and what dietary sources or supplements might you recommend? So glutathione is a powerhouse antioxidant. It’s produced in the liver and some of the best foods that you could get glutathione from would be either the cruciferous vegetables or garlic onion.

those things or I would recommend a liposomal glutathione. So that means that it’s kind of fat molecule and it’s sublingual and so I’m not recommending any companies but you can do your research, but you want to get a liposomal

glutathione because it’s going to be protected in a fat molecule. So when you swallow it, it’s not going to get, you know, eaten up by digestive enzymes. So either or another thing you could do is get IV glutathione, although it doesn’t stay in the body that long. But certainly I’ve had many patients going for IV glutathione and they will say immediately their eyesight is much clearer. So

glutathione is one of those really power houses of antioxidants and it’s in a high concentration in the lens of the eye as is vitamin C. So if you’re developing cataracts, you’re probably low in those two antioxidants. I would start boosting them either through supplementation and or foods. Okay, you might have just answered this but how do omega-3 fatty acids and DHA

Sam Berne (10:18.745)

It is a requirement that if you’ve been diagnosed with glaucoma, you should start taking at least two to 3000 milligrams a day of a really high potency DHA EPA primarily DHA and then with any kind of retinal disease. Again, omega-3 is critically important as an anti-inflammatory agent, but also just feeding the retina. Also omega-3 has been shown to

help mitigate some of the dry eye symptoms. Now dry eyes a complicated condition. We can talk more about that because there many levels and layers on why we develop dry eye. But you know, I think that everybody should be on a good omega-3 because we don’t produce it in the body and you know, you need to do your due diligence on companies that do their third-party testing, but it’s certainly it’s essential.

For high health. Thank you. What are the primary metabolic factors contributing to cataract development and how can these be addressed holistically? Well, one of the main ones and I’ve heard some of your speakers talk about it is the process called glycation. So in the lens what happens is the glucose molecule binds itself to the protein molecule of the lens and this creates cloudiness.

And you know, in all the patients I’ve seen over the years, and this is also in the literature, if you have a difficult time with glucose metabolism, you’re probably going to develop cataracts and possibly even, you know, diabetic retinopathy or wet macular degeneration. So the key here is that you need to really take care of your pancreas health.

Sam Berne (12:46.029)

because that glycation molecule will attach itself to the protein molecule of the vitreous the gel sack and this also is a creation of floaters. So glycation wreaks havoc on the eyes as it does on the body and it really accelerates the aging process. So we’ve had a lot of speakers talk about diet and we’ve asked them a lot of questions. And when it comes to supposedly healthy fats meaning raw seeds.

nuts, raw organic seeds, nuts, avocados, olives. Those four things, that’s question one. And then question two would be olive oil, hemp oil, flax oil. So question one, seeds, nuts, olives, avocados. Question two, supposedly healthy oils such as hemp, flax, olive. How do these affect eye health?

Well, it’s obvious big time, know, when we do seeds and nuts again, you know, I like to do dehydrated and organic if possible chia seeds are a great source of omega-3 and of course walnuts. You know, we’ll recommend something like a smoothie where we’ll use a few seeds and nuts and cacahuas 70 % and that’s a nice way to get

your fats and all the great stuff that’s in cacaua avocados. You’ve got lutein in in avocados, which is great. And you know, when I travel, I always bring an avocado on the plane and that’s one of my snacks. And in terms of the fats, you know, three six and nine again, I’ve heard some of your speakers talk about how we get too much six or nine and not enough three. I think it’s a balancing act.

Sam Berne (15:09.863)

So I, you know, I’m with most of your speakers around. need more healthy fats three, six and nine and you know, you’ve working with a functional medicine doctor that can help fine tune, you know, exactly what you need. But you know, it’s essential for your eye health. You challenge, thank you. You challenge the idea that the vision must deteriorate with age.

What are some fundamental strategies to maintain or even improve vision in older adults? Number one only wear your glasses when you need them take them off and go without your glasses and non demanding and non threatening situations. Number two get morning sunlight at least 30 minutes every morning number three limit your screen time.

Take frequent breaks. If you’re on screens phone tablet or computer number four, your lifestyle is such where you want to get out into nature and get away from the EMFs because that actually affects your eyes and number six heal your emotional health because emotions definitely have an effect on the eyes and number seven.

cultivate your liver gallbladder thyroid and pancreas health and we see this again in our iridology readings and we can tell if there’s you know, genetic tendencies or nurture points, but you know doing a liver cleanse once or twice a year is awesome for for clearing up your eyesight and reversing the aging in your eyes.

Sam Berne (17:24.301)

Those are really simple practices for supporting liver health.

Sam Berne (17:59.772)

That blue light is an issue when you need special blue light blocker glasses. What is blue light? Why is it a concern? What should we do? Not all blue light is bad. But if you look at the nanometers between 405 and 455, that is a chaotic blue wavelength. And when that blue wavelength touches your eyes, it creates dryness. also can over time.

create eye strain or eye fatigue. And so on the in the short answer is that when you expose yourself to the 405 to 455, you’re setting yourself up to have this I call it a neurotoxin that’s coming into your eyes. And the French government did 400 page paper on the ill effects of blue light.

from children to adults in the US and I just attended a conference. It was a mainstream allopathic eye conference. They did not really think blue light has some issues. However, blue light definitely is going to affect your pineal gland. It tricks the melatonin and it can create sleep problems.

The thing with blue blocking glasses is that it’s in the marketplace. So there’s a lot of predatory products out there that say, you know, they do this and they do that even the best blue blocking glasses only only cut out about 30 % of the blue light. So it’s not a hundred percent. That’s where you have to take your carotenoids. You have to you know, get out in the natural sunlight. I do think that blue protecting lenses.

Sam Berne (20:17.227)

So there’s some things that you can do functionally. There’s some functional vision therapy exercises that you can do obviously nutrition and diet and it’s just like anything else. You don’t want to be running marathons with your eyes and that’s what people do on their screens. So it’s all moderate, but I would say that blue light definitely has an ill effect. And if you’ve had cataract surgery, you want to definitely protect yourself from blue light.

because the IOL they’re putting in doesn’t correct you or protect you and you’re not told that in in the surgery. So those would be some of the things I would spotlight and blue light. It’s definitely an issue. the way, how many eye doctors in the country have your knowledge base? Is this there a lot of people that know this or is this unusual because I haven’t heard

I wasn’t I’m not aware of that many that speak with the wealth of knowledge on this that you have. Well, I you know, I can’t speak for for others. I am doing a practitioner training now. So I know that the people that I’m training they’re going to they’re going to get my knowledge. There is an organization called covd.org and there are a group of behavioral optometrists who do some form of vision therapy to what

A degree. I don’t know. There’s also a group called the College of Syntonic Optometry and they do light therapy. Again, I don’t know what their database is. I know for me, I had some really great mentors who aren’t alive anymore who really, know, I was 28 years old and I had five 70 year old behavioral optometrist developmental optometrist.

Sam Berne (22:39.833)

You know, that’s that’s what I do and I’ve been doing it 40 years. So I’ve got a big base of patients and you know, that’s why I keep doing it because it’s great and on social media, you know, we have over 280,000 followers. So something is getting struck there on the cord of you know, the information I’m conveying. Thank you. What are some common myths about eye health that you frequently encounter and would like to dispel?

Number one, you don’t have to live out your doctor’s diagnosis doctors allopathic diagnosis number two, your eyes don’t have to get worse as you get older. They can actually get better and number three, you can improve your vision at any age. I have patients between 85 and 90 that are improving their vision. They’re either reducing their prescription their

getting their driver’s license renewed, even if it’s just daylight. They’ve had pretty severe diagnoses that we’ve been able to reverse in terms of diseases. So, you know, when you go to the regular doctor again, if they don’t see it in their mind that you can improve it, then of course they’re going to stay in their indoctrinated ways. I’ve had the good fortune to see a lot of healing with people’s eyes and vision.

So I can recognize if somebody is open to do it and their body intelligence says, hey, I want to do this. I’m doing it in other areas. We find this all the time that even giving somebody a reduced prescription can actually improve their eyesight and vision and this happens all the time. And then if they want to go deeper, you know, the longer they work with me the more benefits they get.

Sam Berne (25:01.465)

Okay, so a disclaimer. I do not distribute any products because the product markets that I see do not meet my criteria for safety and protection of the consumer. So that being said, I’m just going to speak generally here. And what I would say is that you know number one

And I’m to go in a little different direction here. I think the thyroid health is really important. A lot of people have low thyroid. So seaweed, dulse and kelp are really important in terms of liver health. The three herbs that I love. So I’m going more herbal than just, you know, vitamins and minerals. Burdock root, yellow dock and milk thistle that combination. If you want to do a really good liver cleanse, that’s a great

combination. I think that if you can, you know, do like eye compresses things like dandelion, rude or golden seal, chamomile, eye bright, although that’s hard to get even colloidal silver. If it’s a really high quality that can be really good at, you know, as an antibacterial agent. I also do a lot with essential oils and my number one

essential oil is frankincense and I’ll put it on the temples massage it on the back of the neck and on the third eye. We did a we did a post on Facebook on frankincense that very thing and we got over 1 million views. So something is is resonating with people using frankincense as a way to improve the vision. Obviously, we talked about Omega 3’s those are really good.

Sam Berne (27:09.775)

and rainbow diet. I love doing smoothies like vegetable smoothies like using ginger root, turmeric root, beets, celery.

cabbage, wheatgrass, you know, and use a hot tea. So if you’ve got, you know, say issues with your bones, I would do something like oat straw tea. You’ve got respiratory issues, Mullen tea, and that’s a hot tea that you would put in the blender or the Vitamix. Getting those plant enzymes is really, really important in the morning. I find that people aren’t getting enough really good enzymes and you know, you can take supplemental enzymes, but

It’s not the same as you know, getting into your Vitamix and working that way. So I don’t know if I answered your question, but those are that’s my that’s my perspective on on what you asked. Thank you. What are your thoughts on wearing contact lenses full-time versus allowing the eyes periods of rest without them? Well, I definitely think contacts are great part-time sports and social.

You don’t want to for near-sightedness. You don’t want to get over corrected for distance with contacts because then you’re going to need reading glasses over the contacts. So tell your doctor you want to be a little bit under corrected for distance and near-sightedness in far-sightedness. If you were contacts again, you don’t want to wear something so highly magnified because then you’re going to lose your distance.

Sam Berne (29:16.229)

You get to allow your system to relax and your point is well taken around the contacts because it can create a dryness. It can affect the ocular microbiome. That’s right. We do have a microbiome and so taking the lenses off allowing your eyes to breathe and just being moderate when you wear the contacts. I think they’re a great, you know, a great optical system to use.

Just as a general answer, not best case scenarios, how likely is it that we can improve our eyesight? I know a lot of what we’re talking about is how to prevent our eyesight from getting worse, but in your experience, not the couple of cases where everything went great, the average person who’s using glasses and contacts, are you saying that we can maintain our eyesight or are you saying you could actually have better vision? What are we, what is the, end?

New York Spurgeon. So who who’s the population? it in this conference or is it more in the general mainstream where they’re not in this conference? Who who are you targeting here? A motivated person that was saying I would be very interested in. Okay, if they’re motivated and they have some, you know, background in holistic health.

Then I would say it’s probably a 95 % chance that there can be some improvement. And what I see with people when they when they take that on the release around them actually experiencing the improvement reduces their stress by about 250 % and I see it all the time like people come in. I don’t know exactly what you do. I’ve heard good things.

Sam Berne (31:38.637)

Thank you. Tell me or tell us about LASIK or the equivalent of LASIK. What you know what it is how well it works if there are side effects and also for someone who’s already undergone LASIK and is experiencing returning vision issues. What holistic strategies you might recommend. So LASIK is a refractive store refractive surgery and a long line of refractive surgeries that used to be called PRK back in the day.

Basically, what the surgeon does is he’s changing the shape of the eyeball, the front of the eyeball to reduce the prescription in the eye. And one of the sayings we have in our practice is it’s not the eye that causes the prescription. It’s the programming behind the eyes that causes the prescription and that’s an important point because if you do believe that it’s the

Programming that causes the prescription. Well, what you’re changing is just the end result symptom, which is the prescription in the eye. That’s what you’re doing with lasik, but you’re not going back to the operating system and reprogramming that so now you have the lasik surgery and the operating system is still operating in the old model, which is I’m going to still

have the same programming and then you’ve got this new hardware. That’s like it’s not fitting. So what you have to do is you either have to ignore the programming and then you’ll probably stay more in a success space. You know that sweet spot where you go. Hey Lasix great. There’s no problems, but you’ll see it in other areas either in the body intention that you carry or other weird.

Sam Berne (33:53.612)

that can help people post surgically integrate what the lasik surgery has done to the eye. You know, we have eye surgery, but we never do physical therapy after it. In fact, it’s invalidated. It’s taboo. If you bring it up with your surgeon, they always say, that doesn’t work. It’s, you know, mumbo jumbo, but you go have a knee operated on or a shoulder and you go to physical therapy.

Remember, I said about 10 minutes ago, I’m a physical therapy optometrist. So when somebody is at surgery, we need to do surgery. We need to do physical therapy afterwards so that they can integrate the programming the operating system with the new information that’s in the eye. If you do that, you can mitigate a lot of the deterioration that comes in the last point. I want to make and I mentioned this at

class is that in 2018, the New York Times did an expose on the FDA FDA and Lasik surgery and actually the person who helped approve the Lasik surgery worked for the FDA was quoted in the article saying that he probably wouldn’t approve of the surgical procedure today because he’s seen so many horror stories and that article really reveals the shadow side of Lasik surgery.

Even though you know on the mainstream media, it’s really, you know, very popular and celebrities and athletes that do it and it really can create confusion between the eyes and the brain.

Sam Berne (36:06.869)

Well, grounding and earthing is an opportunity for you to get into the energy fields of the earth and all our shoes are rubber. We don’t walk barefoot anymore and we’re spending all of our time either in cars or cement. We’re not in nature. And so the emf’s build up and

One of the places that I see emf’s really cause problems is if you wear metal glasses. Sorry Steve. It conducts emf’s into the ice. So you want to go more with a plastic frame and taking your lenses off. We use grounding. We have mats that you can, you know, actually put your feet on when you’re working on the computer. We also have it on our massage table.

When I’m doing crania sacral, you can even put a grounding mat on your bed if you want to so kind of depends on your environment. I mean if you live in a city where there’s a lot of wireless and you can’t get yourself into a barefoot place in nature that I would definitely get grounding and earthing in your apartment or your house definitely helps. Now if you can get out into nature and you can get into the Schumann wave, which is a very slow

Frequency that comes into our body and resets us if you can do that and you can meditate and you can walk in bare feet and then, you know, you don’t need the grounding map. But I think it’s really important. A lot of holistic health practitioners talk about it. It’s the real deal.

Sam Berne (38:05.547)

But that prescriptions for 20 feet and so when they use it at the computer, it’s going to create eye strain. It’s too strong for them. That’s on the near-sighted side on the far-sighted side. If you’re wearing reading glasses, like when you look at your phone, that magnification is going to be too strong for you at the computer so that you want to get a weaker magnification lens at the screen distance. I think it’s important to at the very least take

frequent frequent blade breaks set up things where you can deflect the EMFs whether it’s crystals or you can get these EMF protectors. Very important. I think getting out in the morning natural sunlight is also critically important. Of course, blue protection is part of it and hydrate hydrate hydrate hydrate. I don’t know if anybody at your conference has talked about

the benefits of hydrogen water. We’re using it now to be part of the support of macular problems and cataracts. So hydrogen water, structured water, I’d be drinking really high potency water, really, really good. And, you know, I use essential oils. We might distill those in the environment. So you’re oxygenating and hydrating.

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.

Schedule a free discovery call with Dr. Berne for his practitioner’s training:

For even more from Dr. Sam, check out his new exclusive membership where you get access to my content and resources, new information, articles, videos, webinars: https://drsambernesmembership.com/

Keywords

Summary

In this conversation, Dr. Sam Berne discusses various aspects of eye health, including the importance of eye coordination, the benefits of sunlight exposure, and the role of full spectrum lighting. He also explores light therapy and color therapy, emphasizing their impact on overall wellness. Additionally, Dr. Berne explains iridology and how it can provide insights into a person’s health. He concludes with practical advice for maintaining eye health and resources for further learning.

Takeaways

Sound Bites

Sam Berne (00:00.238)

But what I’m finding is that when they look at the certain picture their brain is suppressing the left eye. So the right-handed the right eye dominant. Okay, so we we are able to identify that the left eye is suppressing and the right eye is doing more of the work unless you do a test like that. You’re never going to discover that issue, but it means that the right eye is carrying the load. Okay, so there’s a great exercise that I recommend called

This the brock string. This is a string if you can visualize it. It’s got three beads and a string and you tie one end of the doorknob and you spread the three beads. So the first speed is about 12 inches from the eyes. The second bead is 24 inches. The third bead is say 36 inches. So one end of the string is on the doorknob. The other end is at the nose and the first bead say is here the second bead the third bead.

This is a great way to have them focus both eyes at the first bead and they might say something like, my goodness, the left string is fading out on me. When I look at that close bead. now understand that my left eye is shutting off. So we ask them to go into their breathing to blink to feel their body to relax into it. now the left string is coming in with the right string. I see if I relax now, my two eyes are working together.

Now I look at the second bead. my this left string is shutting off again. If I relax and blink and breathe and maybe I have to touch the bead now that left string is coming back and then I do the third bead and then the second bead in the first speed. So I’m going to do this exercise for one minute three times a day and what will happen over a few days that left eye starts to turn on and when it turns on it will start to work with the right eye.

Sam Berne (02:22.402)

one example of a physical therapy exercise.

a general thought if someone was again highly motivated, what should our relation with the Sun be? Is this something where you’re saying get sun in the early morning? Are you saying get 20 minutes an hour six hours 12 hours? What would be perfect if someone was motivated regarding our relation with sunlight? Well, just the general mainstream person what I would say is that getting third 30 minutes of natural sunlight in the morning as long as it’s not

triggering a blink reflex. So you don’t have to look directly in the sun. Even if it’s cloudy outside, you’re still getting the sun. You can wear a hat. You can you know, you don’t want to look directly at the sun go walk. You know, that’s a good time to do it. The more advanced people I would say end of day is also great. We get color therapy at that time because usually around sunset. Sometimes we get the different colors and our eyes need different colors.

Red is more stimulating. Violet purple blue green is more relaxing. So that would be a way to get color therapy, but I think we’ve been taught to be afraid of the sun. I think there’s a lot of fear out there and I think it’s really overblown. Yes, UV and high amounts can change the lens health, but we actually need trace amounts of UV. One of the people that I love mention this book.

Sam Berne (04:25.249)

bad vibes. So one weekend I went in and I changed the the light bulbs to full spectrum fluorescent lights and I didn’t tell the staff so about a week later, you know, we had a meeting and they said, geez, you know, did what did you change? We’re feeling so much better in the front office and I told them and they said, that makes sense. Now we’re now in natural full spectrum lighting and our bodies are less stress. We’re more open to it. So

Full spectrum lighting is like full spectrum living and we need to get away from artificial light. We need to get away from the digital and we need to go into a space where we’re getting the natural sunlight. Is it bad if you’re a gardener and you spend all day outside? Is that a good thing or a bad thing to your eyes? Well, if I was a gardener, a forest ranger or a lifeguard, I would certainly be investing in a good pair of sunglasses.

And a lot of it depends on my, you know, my skin health, how sensitive I am to the sun. I think using sunglasses is actually a really good thing. I think you want to get a good neutral brown or neutral gray, pay a little bit more and get a high quality sun lens. But again, we’re talking moderation. You get that natural light in the morning 30 minutes.

You know, I know for me, I like to hike. sometimes today was hiking with my dog and for part of the time I was wearing sunglasses because I was right in the sun and then we were up at a stream playing up there and the sun was indirect. So I took my sunglasses off. I do a lot of skiing. I ski up in Taos and I wear sunglasses, you know, I go out in the ocean and I wear sunglasses. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Sam Berne (06:51.146)

But the fear part of it changes the neurochemicals in the brain and that’s where the issue comes in. You know, I want to have good levels of serotonin dopamine and oxytocin. I want to embrace the sun and I also want to be sensible about it. As soon as I go into my fear, what happens? My cortisol levels go up my dopamine and serotonin go down. So be aware of what your mind is doing and understand that

Basically, we’re heliocentric. We go towards the sun just like the plants and then we just have to moderate how much and how long.

And if we every day want to take a three or four hour walk outside, we seem to like the sun. We don’t really want to wear sunglasses. Are you comfortable or are we doing damage to our No, we’re comfortable with that. We’re comfortable with that. And you know what? You can always check in with your eye doctor and eye health see what’s going on with your, you know, your macular health and your lens. I’d recommend routine exams so you can monitor that. So if you start developing a cataract, you can go, okay, why is that? it because of the sun?

Is because of my sugar. So, you know, I think it’s really important to check in and go to your doctor, whoever that is and just get get a baseline on what is going on in your health. I know a lot about health. I know a lot about nutrition, but I do not prescribe for myself. I go to doctors and they tell me what I need. So I am not, you know, an ego about that saying why no.

Sam Berne (08:58.124)

Well, I think you know, we’ve got the LED conversation and that’s the blue light. I would say in as many cases as you can get full spectrum lighting, you know, kind of depends again. Like if you’re in an apartment and you don’t get a lot of natural light, I would probably focus in on getting more full spectrum lighting. That would be my intention. You know, if you live in a place where you’re getting

natural light in the windows then it’s it’s less of an issue. I think that you know again a lot of it depends on the toxicity of where you live and you know go from there. That’s how I would navigate that. Well what it what it means is my primary would probably be incandescent and getting full spectrum.

You know, there’s things called the aught lights. You can go online and now they’ve got a lot of different full spectrum lights. I would probably move away from LEDs if I could. Another thing you got to consider is winter and again, if you’re sensitive sad, I would get yourself a full spectrum light box where you’re treating yourself with that. That’s another piece to the puzzle but full spectrum incandescent and

See what you can do.

Sam Berne (10:46.252)

Say full spectrum on them or not? Yeah, you can you can you can again go online type in full spectrum light bulbs and see what comes up. Sometimes they’re compact fluorescence. Sometimes they’re incandescent. They come in different ways. But the reason why it’s full spectrum is that you’ve got again, you can eat food artificial food or fast food. That’s like the the light that is artificial light.

Or you can eat a full spectrum food diet and light is basically a food. It’s just in a different form. So you want to look for the term full spectrum indoor lighting. That would be what you want to look for and see what see what comes up. You know, I think that’s a really good thing to think about.

Thank you. In terms of light therapy, have you…

Sam Berne (11:57.929)

That’s a pair of glasses and you can control the brightness of the light source that works really well. So that’s one form of the red light therapy. There’s also another form of light therapy where you’re using all the colors of the spectrum and you know, we want to put down blue light. But once you get up to like 475 nanometers, that blue light actually is really good to re release trauma and also it stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system. There’s a

color therapy treatment protocol, which I’ll share with you. We actually did it the other day. You can either get this do this by getting all the main colors of the spectrum Roy G Biv in glasses and the way it works is you’re going to treat yourself with the rainbow of colors. So you start off with the red glasses. You put them on you ask yourself. What do I see and how does it make me feel and that particular red?

May stimulate the root chakra. It may bring up some memories again color and light trigger the hidden energies behind the eyes. That’s one of the things that that’s why color therapy is so amazing. You wear that for two minutes. Take that off. Then you put the orange on same thing. What do I see? What do I feel and the feeling the emotion is very important to connect to it again two minutes move to yellow and the green then the blue green then the blue.

Then the violet. So if you do that spectrum of rainbow colors, I did research on it using a special energy field camera and chakras when I was at the Esalen Institute and we did a study where we measured people doing that very treatment before we measured their energy and then after and we found their chakras were much more lined up. Their energy fields were much bigger and their acupuncture meridians were much more balanced. This was

Sam Berne (14:25.523)

all the disharmony if there’s a color or colors. You don’t like you probably have a color allergy. So that color you want to treat yourself a little more so that you would release whatever the the disharmony was and then you’d be more full spectrum yourself because whatever wherever you’re not receiving that color, you’re probably attracting that life experience into your life.

That’s kind of what we do. We attract what we need to heal. So the color therapy in that way works really really well. And again, you can get these glasses on Amazon or you you can look for a rainbow color machine. It’s wonderful. You can also do with each eye separately. You can also intuitively say, I think I need green today. So you could do 10 minutes of that if you’re in eye pain or you’re dealing with traumatic brain injury. I would do a blue or blue green.

That helps reduce trauma. If you’re low energy or you want to cleanse your liver, I would do a yellow or yellow green or an orange. So, you know, you can work with it intuitively. You can do all the colors. You can start with the indigo violet and work your way back to the red if you want 30 day challenge do it for 30 days and you will see differences in your vision, your awareness, your consciousness and it’s a it’s a really cool way.

to balance your health. Thank you. Your lecture title, The Eyes Never Lie, suggests a strong link between vision and overall health. In your experience, what is one of the most surprising systemic conditions you’ve identified through an eye examination?

Sam Berne (16:44.424)

And I look at their iris readings depending on what the markings say. I can pretty much tell they’re probably going to get osteoporosis or osteopenia. They’ve got a lot of inflammation in the digestive tract. Their pancreas is not working very well. Their liver and gallbladder are not working well. Their connective tissue may be weak in certain areas, which leads to things like hernias and

You know, hiatal hernias and hemorrhoids and things like that. So there’s so many levels and layers that you can look into the eyes and you can see all the mapping systemically, metabolically, even spiritually. And from that you can start asking questions and fill in the blanks and then come up with a protocol to help the person. That’s why I call it whole health. It’s not just the eyes.

Yes, the eyes are going to benefit but the whole health is involved. Again, that’s part of my naturopathic optometry hat that I wear. What is iridology and is that something that you believe in with?

Give a full breakdown on your health. that something you believe in or support? Well, I got trained in it certified in it. So yes, so the iris, you know, if we think of reflexology the feet, know, you there’s a map on the feet. So the iris over, you know, hundreds of years of different doctors categorizing. have a picture right here. This is

Sam Berne (18:55.537)

And by the way, we don’t diagnose and we don’t treat with iridology and the goal is not to change the color of your eye or the pigment that anybody that says that that’s not really iridology. Herodology is analyzing the colored part of the eye. take very detailed pictures put it up on a big monitor and from that we can be proactive in talking about different health patterns and you know, we ask history so

Maybe it’s not affecting them, but there’s a genetic tendency. So the right eye is the father lineage and the left eye is the mother lineage. And so we can tell was there diabetes on the father’s side was there thyroid issues on the mother’s side. So based on you know, the genetic tendencies and what I call nurture points. So nothing is wrong here. We’re not diagnosing cancer or whether somebody is pregnant or anything like that.

We’re just looking at nurture points. and then based on that using herbs using functional nutrition using color therapy and many different my in my toolbox. It’s another tool that can help us really individualize a person’s treatment.

Could you if someone was on a computer, could you look at their eyes through the computer and understand their health? Sure, sure. I mean I could both on how the eyes look and also how they’re using their eyes and also the responses they’re giving based on certain prompts and probes. So for example, if somebody is near sighted, I’ll have them put on a far sighted prescription prescription.

Sam Berne (21:11.333)

They’re spending a few minutes relaxing into the blur and when they do that their hypervigilant attitude relaxes and then their eyesight clears and it becomes like wow, I see that I’ve been doing this to myself. It’s that programming behind the eyes that creates the eye problem.

Thank you. How far should we be from our TV and just TV damage?

Sam Berne (22:09.127)

So as long as you’re far enough away from the TV, you’re fine. And then whether you want to wear blue protection, that’s kind of individual based on what your your health situation is like. What if we have these new large 75 85 inch TVs? Is that concerning you? It depends on how close we are to the TV. But yeah, I mean, you’ve got EMFs. You’ve got blue light.

So you need to protect yourself by sitting farther away from it. So you’re not as bombarded by the energy that comes off those. I mean the way you could check it is get yourself an EMF measure and just see what’s coming off the screens and that’ll tell you.

Sam Berne (23:28.761)

Definitely take somebody with you as a witness so they can take notes because it’s going to be a scary situation whenever we have some health issue come up and whatever they say you want to make sure that the overall goal would be okay. My mindset is I believe in mind body medicine. I believe in holistic health. So can my doctor give me something?

in that genre to help me with that. Now, if they cannot do that, then the best case scenario is you get the information and you go, okay, I’m going to start working on this. on my website, drsamburn.com, I have over I would say 400 free videos. Okay. And if you go to learn

the drop down menu and you click on podcasts, for example.

You see the categories you can scroll on that and click on anything that you would like and that will take you to video blogs written blogs podcasts and that’s all free. There’s no charge for that. Now if you want more exclusive content, what you can do is you can go to my membership site. So I guess if you click on Dr. Burn again.

Sam Berne (25:35.011)

My customer service is really good, so if you have any problems, we’re very honest, we’ll whatever you need, we’ll help you with. So that would be another way you could connect with me. And the third way is that if you want to do a private session, even if it’s on Zoom, you can. Usually what I recommend is sending some iRecords to me and then I can look at those and then we can do a Zoom appointment.

And of course, if you’re local and you want to travel here, we can do that as well. Last thing, if you’re any kind of a practitioner, I’m doing practitioner trainings now and you don’t need to be an optometrist or ophthalmologist. You’re just going to be more of a coach and we gear it towards what your professional background is. Massage therapy, occupational therapy, naturopathy, acupuncture, whatever.

I need to share this information. I’m on the shady side of the mountain. I’m not going to be here forever. I need to pass this information on to health practitioners. The eye doctors aren’t interested. So this is why I’m going this route. So you got lots of ways. I’m also on Facebook Instagram, Tik Tok and YouTube. I put out a podcast once a week. I’ve been doing that a long time. So lots of ways to to get a hold of me.

There you go. Fantastic. Dr. Burn really really appreciate you sharing this. really like we’ve stumbled on some great information. So yeah. Well, thank you. Thanks for what you’re doing. Good luck and wish you a great spring and summer. Okay. If we could unmute everyone so everyone could thank Dr. Burn themselves.

Sam Berne (27:58.549)

For even more from Dr. Sam, check out his new exclusive membership where you get access to my content and resources, new information, articles, videos, webinars: https://drsambernesmembership.com/

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Keywords

holistic vision care, eye health, functional medicine, nutrition, antioxidants, blue light, eye strain, vision improvement, myths about eye health, grounding

Summary

In this conversation, Dr. Sam Berne discusses the importance of holistic vision care, emphasizing the role of nutrition, antioxidants, and lifestyle changes in maintaining and improving eye health. He challenges common misconceptions about aging and vision deterioration, advocating for a proactive approach to eye care. The discussion also covers the impact of blue light from digital devices, the significance of grounding, and practical strategies to mitigate eye strain.

Sound Bites

00:00Introduction to Holistic Vision Care

Sam Berne (00:00.12)

Welcome, Dr. Byrne. Thank you. Great to be here. So as I mentioned, you know, we’ve had so many speakers speak about whole food plant based nutrition. We speak about it all the time and we’ve kind of ignored eye health, kind of just taken it for granted. I guess I started this when I was in my 40s and my eyes were pretty good. we didn’t really think about it, but for anyone that’s having challenges with their eyes,

That’s really a huge concern. we certainly would rather be proactive than reactive on this subject. If you could just take a minute maybe just to introduce yourself and tell us what you’ve been doing with your career for the last, you know, 10 years 20 years and then I’ll start asking you questions. Okay, thanks. So for the last 20 years, I’ve been doing patient care research and teaching.

And my mission is to bring holistic vision care to the mainstream. I have a pretty active social media following also have a podcast and I’m just inspired to help people take back their vision.

Great. Okay. I’d like to try if it’s okay with you to ask you quite a number of questions. So instead of feeling like you have to cover everything on every question, I’ll ask you a lot of questions. You can answer just that and then we’ll go on to the next question. So you have a chance to talk about a lot of things. Does that sound good? Yeah, fire away, Steve. Here we go. So could you elaborate?

Sam Berne (02:19.992)

affects the micro capillary circulation and the mitochondria function in the eyes because after about age 40, we start developing oxidative stress and inflammation and then we go to a traditional eye doctor and he starts diagnosing with a variety of conditions or you know, if you wear glasses or contacts your eyes get progressively worse. So in functional nutrition, I’m looking at

What are the best foods we should eat the best best lifestyle practices? And so that’s the first category. The second category is, you know, when you get your exam where most eye doctors just have you read the distance chart and that’s really your eyesight. It’s not vision. Vision is how the eyes in the brain and the body integrate and work together. So it’s a brain experience.

So how you use your eyes functionally affects the structure anatomy of the eyes eventually. So if you’re in a repetitive state of movement with your eyes and vision or you’re wearing glasses or contacts that perpetuate or reinforce a weakness, then it just gets worse and worse. So in functional vision therapy.

What I’ve developed is a way to help re-educate the habits and bring people to a better space around their vision functionally and this reverses the structural deterioration.

Sam Berne (04:21.549)

And then number three is to protect yourself from the damaging blue light emitted from our screens and using iridology, you know, analyzing the patterns of the iris. We can look at your constitutional type to see whether or not, you know, what

What specific health practice you can do to mitigate any deterioration and then in addition to the Constitution, we can look at the different patterns genetic tendencies and nurture points and our glands organs and digestive areas and then we can really fine-tune and pinpoint what foods you should eat what lifestyle changes you should make and in all of

the cases, I recommend boosting mitochondria function in the eye either through red light therapy. could also do methylene blue, which is kind of an it kind of amplifies the red light therapy or you can do certain foods that stimulate mitochondria function. So if you do all those things, you are being proactive in interrupting and in many cases reversing the deterioration in these eyes.

diseases. Say one more thing with cataracts. If you catch it early, if you increase your glutathione and vitamin C, those two ingredients have been found to be really potent for slowing down the aging process in cataracts or macular degeneration.

Sam Berne (06:31.809)

The intraocular lenses don’t even have any blue protection in them. So this is where lutein and zeaxanthin become even more important. Now dosage on a daily basis. You should be doing about 16 milligrams of lutein and about four to six milligrams of zeaxanthin daily.

Couple things though. These are fat soluble vitamins. So you want to make sure your liver gallbladder are working well because you can be either taking the supplements or eating the you know, the rainbow vegetables. But if you’re not absorbing the fat soluble vitamins because the liver gallbladders is not working are not working well, then what’s the point? So you’ve got to make sure your liver gallbladder are

working properly so you can.

Absorb them. There’s one other one that you haven’t mentioned, but I think I should mention it. It’s called astaxanthin. So astaxanthin is a third carotenoid. It’s actually a marine carotenoid. You can get that from wild-caught salmon, you know, the pink seafood. You can also if you’re vegan or vegetarian, you can get it from algae. So you want to get four to six milligrams a day of the astaxanthin. The astaxanthin along with the lutein and the

Sam Berne (08:19.439)

considered a crucial antioxidant for eye health and what dietary sources or supplements might you recommend? So glutathione is a powerhouse antioxidant. It’s produced in the liver and some of the best foods that you could get glutathione from would be either the cruciferous vegetables or garlic onion.

those things or I would recommend a liposomal glutathione. So that means that it’s kind of fat molecule and it’s sublingual and so I’m not recommending any companies but you can do your research, but you want to get a liposomal

glutathione because it’s going to be protected in a fat molecule. So when you swallow it, it’s not going to get, you know, eaten up by digestive enzymes. So either or another thing you could do is get IV glutathione, although it doesn’t stay in the body that long. But certainly I’ve had many patients going for IV glutathione and they will say immediately their eyesight is much clearer. So

glutathione is one of those really power houses of antioxidants and it’s in a high concentration in the lens of the eye as is vitamin C. So if you’re developing cataracts, you’re probably low in those two antioxidants. I would start boosting them either through supplementation and or foods. Okay, you might have just answered this but how do omega-3 fatty acids and DHA

Sam Berne (10:18.745)

It is a requirement that if you’ve been diagnosed with glaucoma, you should start taking at least two to 3000 milligrams a day of a really high potency DHA EPA primarily DHA and then with any kind of retinal disease. Again, omega-3 is critically important as an anti-inflammatory agent, but also just feeding the retina. Also omega-3 has been shown to

help mitigate some of the dry eye symptoms. Now dry eyes a complicated condition. We can talk more about that because there many levels and layers on why we develop dry eye. But you know, I think that everybody should be on a good omega-3 because we don’t produce it in the body and you know, you need to do your due diligence on companies that do their third-party testing, but it’s certainly it’s essential.

For high health. Thank you. What are the primary metabolic factors contributing to cataract development and how can these be addressed holistically? Well, one of the main ones and I’ve heard some of your speakers talk about it is the process called glycation. So in the lens what happens is the glucose molecule binds itself to the protein molecule of the lens and this creates cloudiness.

And you know, in all the patients I’ve seen over the years, and this is also in the literature, if you have a difficult time with glucose metabolism, you’re probably going to develop cataracts and possibly even, you know, diabetic retinopathy or wet macular degeneration. So the key here is that you need to really take care of your pancreas health.

Sam Berne (12:46.029)

because that glycation molecule will attach itself to the protein molecule of the vitreous the gel sack and this also is a creation of floaters. So glycation wreaks havoc on the eyes as it does on the body and it really accelerates the aging process. So we’ve had a lot of speakers talk about diet and we’ve asked them a lot of questions. And when it comes to supposedly healthy fats meaning raw seeds.

nuts, raw organic seeds, nuts, avocados, olives. Those four things, that’s question one. And then question two would be olive oil, hemp oil, flax oil. So question one, seeds, nuts, olives, avocados. Question two, supposedly healthy oils such as hemp, flax, olive. How do these affect eye health?

Well, it’s obvious big time, know, when we do seeds and nuts again, you know, I like to do dehydrated and organic if possible chia seeds are a great source of omega-3 and of course walnuts. You know, we’ll recommend something like a smoothie where we’ll use a few seeds and nuts and cacahuas 70 % and that’s a nice way to get

your fats and all the great stuff that’s in cacaua avocados. You’ve got lutein in in avocados, which is great. And you know, when I travel, I always bring an avocado on the plane and that’s one of my snacks. And in terms of the fats, you know, three six and nine again, I’ve heard some of your speakers talk about how we get too much six or nine and not enough three. I think it’s a balancing act.

Sam Berne (15:09.863)

So I, you know, I’m with most of your speakers around. need more healthy fats three, six and nine and you know, you’ve working with a functional medicine doctor that can help fine tune, you know, exactly what you need. But you know, it’s essential for your eye health. You challenge, thank you. You challenge the idea that the vision must deteriorate with age.

What are some fundamental strategies to maintain or even improve vision in older adults? Number one only wear your glasses when you need them take them off and go without your glasses and non demanding and non threatening situations. Number two get morning sunlight at least 30 minutes every morning number three limit your screen time.

Take frequent breaks. If you’re on screens phone tablet or computer number four, your lifestyle is such where you want to get out into nature and get away from the EMFs because that actually affects your eyes and number six heal your emotional health because emotions definitely have an effect on the eyes and number seven.

cultivate your liver gallbladder thyroid and pancreas health and we see this again in our iridology readings and we can tell if there’s you know, genetic tendencies or nurture points, but you know doing a liver cleanse once or twice a year is awesome for for clearing up your eyesight and reversing the aging in your eyes.

Sam Berne (17:24.301)

Those are really simple practices for supporting liver health.

Sam Berne (17:59.772)

That blue light is an issue when you need special blue light blocker glasses. What is blue light? Why is it a concern? What should we do? Not all blue light is bad. But if you look at the nanometers between 405 and 455, that is a chaotic blue wavelength. And when that blue wavelength touches your eyes, it creates dryness. also can over time.

create eye strain or eye fatigue. And so on the in the short answer is that when you expose yourself to the 405 to 455, you’re setting yourself up to have this I call it a neurotoxin that’s coming into your eyes. And the French government did 400 page paper on the ill effects of blue light.

from children to adults in the US and I just attended a conference. It was a mainstream allopathic eye conference. They did not really think blue light has some issues. However, blue light definitely is going to affect your pineal gland. It tricks the melatonin and it can create sleep problems.

The thing with blue blocking glasses is that it’s in the marketplace. So there’s a lot of predatory products out there that say, you know, they do this and they do that even the best blue blocking glasses only only cut out about 30 % of the blue light. So it’s not a hundred percent. That’s where you have to take your carotenoids. You have to you know, get out in the natural sunlight. I do think that blue protecting lenses.

Sam Berne (20:17.227)

So there’s some things that you can do functionally. There’s some functional vision therapy exercises that you can do obviously nutrition and diet and it’s just like anything else. You don’t want to be running marathons with your eyes and that’s what people do on their screens. So it’s all moderate, but I would say that blue light definitely has an ill effect. And if you’ve had cataract surgery, you want to definitely protect yourself from blue light.

because the IOL they’re putting in doesn’t correct you or protect you and you’re not told that in in the surgery. So those would be some of the things I would spotlight and blue light. It’s definitely an issue. the way, how many eye doctors in the country have your knowledge base? Is this there a lot of people that know this or is this unusual because I haven’t heard

I wasn’t I’m not aware of that many that speak with the wealth of knowledge on this that you have. Well, I you know, I can’t speak for for others. I am doing a practitioner training now. So I know that the people that I’m training they’re going to they’re going to get my knowledge. There is an organization called covd.org and there are a group of behavioral optometrists who do some form of vision therapy to what

A degree. I don’t know. There’s also a group called the College of Syntonic Optometry and they do light therapy. Again, I don’t know what their database is. I know for me, I had some really great mentors who aren’t alive anymore who really, know, I was 28 years old and I had five 70 year old behavioral optometrist developmental optometrist.

Sam Berne (22:39.833)

You know, that’s that’s what I do and I’ve been doing it 40 years. So I’ve got a big base of patients and you know, that’s why I keep doing it because it’s great and on social media, you know, we have over 280,000 followers. So something is getting struck there on the cord of you know, the information I’m conveying. Thank you. What are some common myths about eye health that you frequently encounter and would like to dispel?

Number one, you don’t have to live out your doctor’s diagnosis doctors allopathic diagnosis number two, your eyes don’t have to get worse as you get older. They can actually get better and number three, you can improve your vision at any age. I have patients between 85 and 90 that are improving their vision. They’re either reducing their prescription their

getting their driver’s license renewed, even if it’s just daylight. They’ve had pretty severe diagnoses that we’ve been able to reverse in terms of diseases. So, you know, when you go to the regular doctor again, if they don’t see it in their mind that you can improve it, then of course they’re going to stay in their indoctrinated ways. I’ve had the good fortune to see a lot of healing with people’s eyes and vision.

So I can recognize if somebody is open to do it and their body intelligence says, hey, I want to do this. I’m doing it in other areas. We find this all the time that even giving somebody a reduced prescription can actually improve their eyesight and vision and this happens all the time. And then if they want to go deeper, you know, the longer they work with me the more benefits they get.

Sam Berne (25:01.465)

Okay, so a disclaimer. I do not distribute any products because the product markets that I see do not meet my criteria for safety and protection of the consumer. So that being said, I’m just going to speak generally here. And what I would say is that you know number one

And I’m to go in a little different direction here. I think the thyroid health is really important. A lot of people have low thyroid. So seaweed, dulse and kelp are really important in terms of liver health. The three herbs that I love. So I’m going more herbal than just, you know, vitamins and minerals. Burdock root, yellow dock and milk thistle that combination. If you want to do a really good liver cleanse, that’s a great

combination. I think that if you can, you know, do like eye compresses things like dandelion, rude or golden seal, chamomile, eye bright, although that’s hard to get even colloidal silver. If it’s a really high quality that can be really good at, you know, as an antibacterial agent. I also do a lot with essential oils and my number one

essential oil is frankincense and I’ll put it on the temples massage it on the back of the neck and on the third eye. We did a we did a post on Facebook on frankincense that very thing and we got over 1 million views. So something is is resonating with people using frankincense as a way to improve the vision. Obviously, we talked about Omega 3’s those are really good.

Sam Berne (27:09.775)

and rainbow diet. I love doing smoothies like vegetable smoothies like using ginger root, turmeric root, beets, celery.

cabbage, wheatgrass, you know, and use a hot tea. So if you’ve got, you know, say issues with your bones, I would do something like oat straw tea. You’ve got respiratory issues, Mullen tea, and that’s a hot tea that you would put in the blender or the Vitamix. Getting those plant enzymes is really, really important in the morning. I find that people aren’t getting enough really good enzymes and you know, you can take supplemental enzymes, but

It’s not the same as you know, getting into your Vitamix and working that way. So I don’t know if I answered your question, but those are that’s my that’s my perspective on on what you asked. Thank you. What are your thoughts on wearing contact lenses full-time versus allowing the eyes periods of rest without them? Well, I definitely think contacts are great part-time sports and social.

You don’t want to for near-sightedness. You don’t want to get over corrected for distance with contacts because then you’re going to need reading glasses over the contacts. So tell your doctor you want to be a little bit under corrected for distance and near-sightedness in far-sightedness. If you were contacts again, you don’t want to wear something so highly magnified because then you’re going to lose your distance.

Sam Berne (29:16.229)

You get to allow your system to relax and your point is well taken around the contacts because it can create a dryness. It can affect the ocular microbiome. That’s right. We do have a microbiome and so taking the lenses off allowing your eyes to breathe and just being moderate when you wear the contacts. I think they’re a great, you know, a great optical system to use.

Just as a general answer, not best case scenarios, how likely is it that we can improve our eyesight? I know a lot of what we’re talking about is how to prevent our eyesight from getting worse, but in your experience, not the couple of cases where everything went great, the average person who’s using glasses and contacts, are you saying that we can maintain our eyesight or are you saying you could actually have better vision? What are we, what is the, end?

New York Spurgeon. So who who’s the population? it in this conference or is it more in the general mainstream where they’re not in this conference? Who who are you targeting here? A motivated person that was saying I would be very interested in. Okay, if they’re motivated and they have some, you know, background in holistic health.

Then I would say it’s probably a 95 % chance that there can be some improvement. And what I see with people when they when they take that on the release around them actually experiencing the improvement reduces their stress by about 250 % and I see it all the time like people come in. I don’t know exactly what you do. I’ve heard good things.

Sam Berne (31:38.637)

Thank you. Tell me or tell us about LASIK or the equivalent of LASIK. What you know what it is how well it works if there are side effects and also for someone who’s already undergone LASIK and is experiencing returning vision issues. What holistic strategies you might recommend. So LASIK is a refractive store refractive surgery and a long line of refractive surgeries that used to be called PRK back in the day.

Basically, what the surgeon does is he’s changing the shape of the eyeball, the front of the eyeball to reduce the prescription in the eye. And one of the sayings we have in our practice is it’s not the eye that causes the prescription. It’s the programming behind the eyes that causes the prescription and that’s an important point because if you do believe that it’s the

Programming that causes the prescription. Well, what you’re changing is just the end result symptom, which is the prescription in the eye. That’s what you’re doing with lasik, but you’re not going back to the operating system and reprogramming that so now you have the lasik surgery and the operating system is still operating in the old model, which is I’m going to still

have the same programming and then you’ve got this new hardware. That’s like it’s not fitting. So what you have to do is you either have to ignore the programming and then you’ll probably stay more in a success space. You know that sweet spot where you go. Hey Lasix great. There’s no problems, but you’ll see it in other areas either in the body intention that you carry or other weird.

Sam Berne (33:53.612)

that can help people post surgically integrate what the lasik surgery has done to the eye. You know, we have eye surgery, but we never do physical therapy after it. In fact, it’s invalidated. It’s taboo. If you bring it up with your surgeon, they always say, that doesn’t work. It’s, you know, mumbo jumbo, but you go have a knee operated on or a shoulder and you go to physical therapy.

Remember, I said about 10 minutes ago, I’m a physical therapy optometrist. So when somebody is at surgery, we need to do surgery. We need to do physical therapy afterwards so that they can integrate the programming the operating system with the new information that’s in the eye. If you do that, you can mitigate a lot of the deterioration that comes in the last point. I want to make and I mentioned this at

class is that in 2018, the New York Times did an expose on the FDA FDA and Lasik surgery and actually the person who helped approve the Lasik surgery worked for the FDA was quoted in the article saying that he probably wouldn’t approve of the surgical procedure today because he’s seen so many horror stories and that article really reveals the shadow side of Lasik surgery.

Even though you know on the mainstream media, it’s really, you know, very popular and celebrities and athletes that do it and it really can create confusion between the eyes and the brain.

Sam Berne (36:06.869)

Well, grounding and earthing is an opportunity for you to get into the energy fields of the earth and all our shoes are rubber. We don’t walk barefoot anymore and we’re spending all of our time either in cars or cement. We’re not in nature. And so the emf’s build up and

One of the places that I see emf’s really cause problems is if you wear metal glasses. Sorry Steve. It conducts emf’s into the ice. So you want to go more with a plastic frame and taking your lenses off. We use grounding. We have mats that you can, you know, actually put your feet on when you’re working on the computer. We also have it on our massage table.

When I’m doing crania sacral, you can even put a grounding mat on your bed if you want to so kind of depends on your environment. I mean if you live in a city where there’s a lot of wireless and you can’t get yourself into a barefoot place in nature that I would definitely get grounding and earthing in your apartment or your house definitely helps. Now if you can get out into nature and you can get into the Schumann wave, which is a very slow

Frequency that comes into our body and resets us if you can do that and you can meditate and you can walk in bare feet and then, you know, you don’t need the grounding map. But I think it’s really important. A lot of holistic health practitioners talk about it. It’s the real deal.

Sam Berne (38:05.547)

But that prescriptions for 20 feet and so when they use it at the computer, it’s going to create eye strain. It’s too strong for them. That’s on the near-sighted side on the far-sighted side. If you’re wearing reading glasses, like when you look at your phone, that magnification is going to be too strong for you at the computer so that you want to get a weaker magnification lens at the screen distance. I think it’s important to at the very least take

frequent frequent blade breaks set up things where you can deflect the EMFs whether it’s crystals or you can get these EMF protectors. Very important. I think getting out in the morning natural sunlight is also critically important. Of course, blue protection is part of it and hydrate hydrate hydrate hydrate. I don’t know if anybody at your conference has talked about

the benefits of hydrogen water. We’re using it now to be part of the support of macular problems and cataracts. So hydrogen water, structured water, I’d be drinking really high potency water, really, really good. And, you know, I use essential oils. We might distill those in the environment. So you’re oxygenating and hydrating.

For even more from Dr. Sam, check out his new exclusive membership where you get access to my content and resources, new information, articles, videos, webinars: https://drsambernesmembership.com/

Join his practitioner’s program: https://www.drsamberne.com/practitioners-training/

Keywords

holistic optometry, vision health, eye care, Sam Berne, trauma, stress management, visual processing, integrative health, eye conditions, functional vision

Summary

In this enlightening presentation, Dr. Sam Berne discusses the profound connection between vision and overall health through the lens of holistic optometry. He shares his personal journey of overcoming vision challenges and emphasizes the importance of understanding how our eyes reflect our physical and emotional well-being. Dr. Berne explores various aspects of holistic eye care, including the impact of stress, trauma, and nutrition on vision, and offers insights into common eye conditions and their integrative solutions.

Takeaways

Sound Bites

Sam Berne (00:00.106)

few words about him dr burn received a bachelor of from penn state university a doctorate from the pennsylvania college of optometry and a post-doctoral advanced degree from the gazzal institute in child development aside from having a private practice he’s done clinical research been a faculty member at the es salon institute and authored five books he’s a member of both the new mexico optometric assuming optometric

Association and the American Optometric Association. is licensed to practice optometry in New Mexico and Hawaii. Did I say that right? You were very close. You got a gold star. was that was was. There you go. All right. Well, welcome. Thank you. Very excited to have you here today. OK. For everything I have to say, you go ahead and begin your presentation.

Well, thank you so much for inviting me and I’ve been looking forward to this. And so we’re going to start off with a quote and I want to give you my interpretation of it. You probably can have your own. We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are and one of my intentions about this presentation today is to help you see through your eyes.

And we’ll get more into that. But I want you to have ownership of your eyes and vision. Now in this next quote that I put up the eye is the window to the soul, but it’s also the mirror of the body. And today I’m going to connect the dots on how our eyes affect our metabolic and endocrine health and I’ll get into that in a few minutes.

Sam Berne (02:13.303)

non-eye doctors. There’s a way that people can use this method and they don’t have to be eye doctors and they can really help their clients. And then the lower right corner is me reading one of my books, my latest book vital vision and I’ll talk about my books at the end of the lecture today. But I thought I would start off about the question that I get a lot and that is how did I get into this?

How did I get into this optometry specialty? Well, it started when I was about eight years old. I was diagnosed with a learning disability and my parents took me to a lot of different professionals. You know, I grew up in a family that really stressed reading and intellectual thinking and I couldn’t read. I didn’t know how to read. So we ended up after

visiting several different professionals at an ophthalmologist office and I got a pair of nearsighted glasses and I became a memorizer in school. That’s how I got through school. I got really good grades. I worked really hard and every couple of years my myopia got worse. I had progressive myopia and I got to the point where I couldn’t see the biggie on the eye chart and I was really

Dependent on my lenses. Well, after I graduated optometry school, I met a developmental optometrist. name was Dr. Albert a shankman and he practiced in Connecticut. I was living in Philadelphia at the time. So I started to go to him as a patient and he said two things to me. He said number one, I think your myopia your progressive myopia is due to tension that you’ve been carrying in your eyes since you’ve been a child.

Sam Berne (04:37.899)

And I’m going, my God, I forgot to put my contact lenses in and I can see the road signs. I couldn’t believe it. It was really a shocking moment, but it was amazing. It was an amazing healing and I had been reducing my prescription, but this was amazing to be able to see clearly without my lenses and we fast forward 40 years later and I don’t wear any lenses for distance or reading. So I experienced

a shift in being able to completely reverse my progressive myopia. The second thing that happened to me was that I began to use my two eyes together and I stopped seeing double vision and I became a voracious reader. So with those two things impacting me in my practice that I opened up and I actually affiliated with a another developmental optometrist. His name is Dr. Ellis Edelman in Philadelphia.

I started a practice where I was very inspired to help people improve their vision. But the problem was I was in an area that was very allopathically centered a lot of ophthalmology hospitals and clinics around our office and I couldn’t get any patients. It was very frustrating. So one day I went to one of the hospitals nearby and I met with the physiatrist and the physical therapist and I said, you know,

I know how to do this rehabilitative optometry physical therapy on your patients. Could I come and try for three months and see if I can make any, you know, improvements. So, of course, after a month, these people who were suffering double vision vertigo and balance issues focus and concentration issues. These are people with traumatic brain injury stroke, you know, brain insults all kinds of things.

Sam Berne (07:03.648)

So going after those two population groups, I built up a successful practice which I sold about five years later and I moved to my present home Santa Fe, New Mexico and I opened up a holistic integrative practice and you know, never looked back very successful at it. So that’s my beginning and now I want to bring you into what is exactly that I do.

So before we get to that, I want to give a disclaimer that the information I’m sharing today is only educational that this is not a substitute for medical care. It’s not a substitute for your eye physician. This is just education. Okay, and so I am not diagnosing or treating in this. I’m only sharing information.

I want to give a shout out to my mentors and my teachers. I have several of them in optometry and also in the world of body centered healing also in nutrition, craniosacral therapy, aroma therapy and iridology. So really grateful that I had these people really touch me and I wouldn’t be here today without them.

Sam Berne (08:58.795)

I number two, no, number one, number one. think number one, they’re so close. So the optometrist will probably say, well, let me show you three and four. This is number three. This is number four, four, I think four. The optometrist may say, well, you’re, you’re pretty definitive there. He says, well, you know, I think I really screwed up because I still messed up because of number one. And so this goes back and forth.

And let’s say you’re having a stressful day and you choose a lens. And then the next thing is you you get the prescription and you go back to the doctor and you say hey doc, you know, I’m I’m kind of seeing out of a fishbowl and he says, that’s that’s normal. You know, that’s you know, you’ll just get used to it. And actually in six months, you’ll come back and we’ll make the prescription stronger and no problem or the other thing is you get the glasses or the contacts and go.

Why is the world slanted and the optometrist will say, well, that’s just your stigmatism. You know, just tilt your head a little bit. You’ll get used to it and you know, six months, you’re going to get a cataract anyway. No worries. Well, no, we don’t want to adjust and get used to something that’s creating some kind of disharmony in us. And this is how the eye exams regularly go. So in mainstream eye care,

It is dominated by reactive symptom-based experiences. I’m sure many of you have had that you have going with the symptom and you leave and you know, maybe the symptoms a little better, but you’re not really getting to the root cause and usually, you know, whether it’s, know, farsightedness or nearsightedness myopia hyperopia astigmatism cataracts.

Sam Berne (11:22.952)

giving you a full prescription, but then we might give you a vision improvement prescription that you can work with in a non demanding and non threatening situation. And over time your eyes can flex into the weaker prescription happens all the time for us. Also in mainstream eye care, basically it’s pharmaceuticals needles surgery and you know, one of the big moneymakers today. If you have wet macular degeneration as an example.

is the the shots of Avastin the anti-VEGF and we’ll go into some of those things. What are alternatives to getting the injections month after month? You know, I’ve had a lot of patients over the years that have been doing those injections for a long time and they’ll come to see me and within three to six months using my method. They’re able to completely get off the need for injections and their eyes get better. They return to health.

Obviously surgical invention interventions are very common and sometimes you do need surgery. I’m not against cataract surgery. It’s actually, you know, one of the safest surgeries out there, but there might be alternatives that you can you can do that instead of doing surgery. So we’ll go into that.

The other thing that mainstream eye care does is it treats the eye as a mechanical structure and it often ignores the deeper connections to the brain to our systemic health our trauma lifestyle and stress. You know, one of the things that I did after I had my experience working in the hospitals is I published an article on research on the relationship between traumatic brain injury and vision. And by the way, if you

Sam Berne (13:41.937)

So what is the science of holistic optometry? Well, there is definitely peer review literature in vision science. The journal behavioral optometry, optometry and vision development have published many articles on case histories and outcome-based reports on things like visual processing problems, convergence insufficiency, which is an issue with

coordinating your eyes together, it’s what I have.

Sam Berne (14:41.864)

I’m looking at things like behavioral neuroscience. We’re going to do an exercise a little later in this presentation on how to increase our neuroplasticity. And because the eyes originate from the brain, the eyes are the only part of the brain that sit outside the cranial vault. But the eyes do come from the brain very early on in utero. So when we start applying new

Stimulations to the eyes. We can make changes and some of those changes can really affect our behavior. That’s why there’s a term that sometimes used in holistic optometry called behavioral optometry. And that means that if we change the way we’re seeing we might change the way we respond to ourselves in the world and we’ll talk a little more about that.

Another thing that I do in holistic optometry is something called somatic movement body movement. Well, you know, we don’t just see with our eyes. Our eyes are actually our GPS system that guide our body through space and our peripheral vision our depth perception all of those skills that interface with the brain gets stimulated through movement and so movement and vision work hand-in-hand with each other.

I don’t know. I don’t think I have to say much about nutrition. mean in this conference, everybody’s talking about eating, you know, in a healthier way. And certainly if we change our diet, if we eat more antioxidants, you know, the eyes have one of the highest metabolic needs of the body. And so if we give it healthy clean food, non-gmo organic, you know, we prepare it. Well, that’s going to improve our eyesight.

Sam Berne (17:04.667)

This creates the deterioration. You’re in for a treat today because we’re going to talk about light and color therapy and I’ve set it up. So we’re actually going to all get a light and color therapy treatment. So that’s going to come towards the end of my presentation. So stay tuned for that. And then finally visual processing and integration therapies. I do this a lot with children. I’m in the process of producing directing and producing a new documentary that’s going to be coming out this summer.

And it’s my work with the spectrum disorder kids that I’ve been, you know, helping for over 40 years. And so, you know, get on my email list because this this documentary is really fabulous and I’ve been working on it a long time. We’re kind of in the final stages of it, but I want to bring awareness to the general public that vision and learning and the brain.

are very interrelated and it can really affect our learning and processing of information.

Alright, some other things that affect our vision. I referred at the beginning of my presentation astigmatism and astigmatism means there’s a twist in the body a twist in the eyes and this creates an imbalance in our posture.

Sam Berne (18:57.735)

at least 30 to 40 % less after doing an hour of craniosacral therapy and that’s what I would prescribe and people were thrilled. They love that prescription. So the point of it is is that what prescriptions we have in our eyes can really impact our neck our head our body our spine our sacrum and if we give a lens that’s too strong. I’m telling you that the cervical spine

the thoracic, the sacrum, the pelvis is all going to feel it. And I’ve had a number of cranial osteopaths that refer patients to me because they say, you know, this guy’s prescription is way too strong. I can feel it in his cranial rhythm. This happens over and over again. So posture the body how we hold ourselves.

Based on what prescription we’re worrying in our eyes. It’s going to affect our posture. What about emotions? Is there any relationship between emotions and how we see well with 40 years of patients telling me this so this is coming from patients. They’ll say something like my nearsightedness my myopia is related to fear and I’ll then talk to farsighted people.

hyperopia and they’ll say my main emotion is anger. So if we relate that the Chinese medicine what is fear is in the kidneys and anger is in the liver. I’m going to talk about the liver kidney relationship in a little bit. So our emotional body definitely has effect on our physical vision. And once you start uncovering what’s behind your eyes.

Sam Berne (21:21.486)

Vision is how the eyes and the brain and the body work together. So the more seamless you have that eye brain body connection that’s going to improve your learning. mean, I experienced it firsthand. I was a terrible reader for 20 years and when I met Dr. Shankman and I went through his vision therapy program and I healed my visual coordination problem. No problem in reading. I can read and write and

So it was a real epiphany in me and again over the years helping thousands of kids regain their vision which really impacts their learning and then finally the nervous system regulation. So our eyes reflect our sympathetic nervous system and our parasympathetic nervous system. So how does that work? So we have something in our eyes called our pupil and the pupil is I call it the the light.

gatekeeper like for example, you go outside and your pupils should get small. They should constrict because you want to protect yourself from the light. You don’t want to have light sensitivity like you come inside and you come inside and the pupils dilate because you need more light. Okay, so that’s a nervous system autonomic nervous system response. When you have too much sympathetic nervous system.

in your vision. Guess what happens your poop. Your pupils are dilated all the time. So you’ve got light sensitivity, your sensitive to glare. You get eye strain, eye fatigue. Another thing you do is you tunnel your vision. This is the start of myopia. So your nervous system is a reflection of how your visual system is working and how you’re working. You can’t really separate it out.

Sam Berne (23:50.051)

And eye movements are very important in terms of our reading our tracking. And so there are physical kind of standardized tests that you can do to measure the effects of the physical therapy. And not only are you seeing subjective changes, but you’re also seeing objective changes. Now, what about vision mirroring stress? I talked a bit about stress and stress management.

There are scientific findings out there that the sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive and just like I talked about we go in our fight-flight-freeze response. This increases pupil size. If we’re in chronic stress, it’s going to affect our accommodation, which is our focusing muscles, our vergence is our coordination. And the other thing that we measure is the relationship between visual stress and cortisol levels. We’re not surprised by that.

So we go into adrenal fatigue and I’ll kind of bring those things together a little later. How does vision mirror trauma? Well, in some of the scientific reports early trauma can lead to disorganized visual processing. So this would be birth trauma and any kind of c-section or breach or forceps delivery will affect something called

primitive reflex retention. So now we’re kind of in the world of occupational therapy and physical therapy and I had the good fortune with one of my mentors. Dr. Albert a Sutton who was a world-renowned developmental optometrist. He brought a group of optometrists from Scandinavia and they taught us the primitive reflex integration therapy. So the primitive reflexes are early movement patterns that start in utero.

Sam Berne (26:12.932)

But what we learned was these school-aged children that have learning problems. It was because they didn’t integrate their primitive reflexes. This is what these optometrists from Scandinavia taught us. So what we found was is that if there was early trauma could have been in utero could have been at birth could have been at the bonding period. These primitive reflexes got stuck and they’re controlled by the reptilian brain our survival brain.

So our survival response and so by doing this primitive reflex therapy on them, it released the brainstem. They integrated the primitive reflexes. Then they could then move to the higher brain centers and this actually had an effect on their processing. So it’s a long answer to it’s one way that you can heal trauma. Probably another way you can heal trauma that I use in my practice, especially with the kids.

Is craniosacral therapy. I feel that craniosacral combined with primitive reflexes is a really great foundation for helping children heal trauma. And I would say craniosacral works on the fluid body and primitive reflexes work on the nervous system. Now the fluid body comes way before the nervous system. So, you know, in a lot of rehab, they’re talking about just primitive reflexes.

They just stay in the nervous system. So in my practitioner training as an example, we go all the way back to the fluid body, the cerebral spinal fluid, the fascia, the connective tissue, the lymph because if we can go all the way back, then we can reprogram the fluid body and then we can do the primitive reflexes on the nervous system. And there you go. You’re covering all the bases. This also can be with adults. This is what I saw in the hospitals.

Sam Berne (28:36.804)

This is a way that you can start healing the PTSD and the trauma. Some other things that happen in trauma around vision is we tend to tunnel our peripheral vision. We have trouble with eye contact. We have trouble with convergence. That’s where our eyes aiming in towards each other and focusing issues. And also the last thing is we’re sensitive to light and there’s a problem with our balance our orientation. We might have vertigo. That’s that vestibular visual mismatch.

What about vision and inflammation? I’ll tell you a lot of the eye diseases. I see are really related to inflammation gone amok. And if you look at conditions like dry eye uveitis macular degeneration, just to name a few, there’s a connection between those and cytokine cascades. Also oxidative stress and pairing.

the lens health. So that’s why we develop cataracts or retinal problems, either macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy or other very weird retinopathy conditions. There is a very strong gut-eye axis. I know that can be hard for some of my colleagues to understand, but the gut and the eye are very, very related and connected.

Sam Berne (30:38.604)

Just to teach you a little bit about function as opposed to just structure. There’s also in my experience a neuro emotional and a somatic approach when we start adding those things to our vision. It allows us to open the door to create to create and treat the root causes not the symptoms and I would say most I care is really interested in symptom suppression. They’re not really

Looking at the root causes. So I think of it as education prevention and restoration empowering people to take agency in their healing and this is what our practitioners training is about. Okay, so I’m going to bring you in to structural anatomy versus functional anatomy and structural anatomy focuses on form and shape. This is the lens. This is the eyelids. This is the optic nerve.

Okay, so there’s an identification of here’s the anatomical parts and maybe this is where the disease is. This is where the disease begins. It could be in the optic nerve. It’s glaucoma. It could be in the macular. It’s macular degeneration. In functional anatomy, what we’re interested in is how the anatomy moves, how it works. It’s more of a dynamic situation. In this particular saying that I use function

affects structure. So how we use something is going to eventually affect the anatomy. As an example, a lot of people out there go into what we call invisible bifocals or progressive lenses. And when you wear a progressive lens, what happens is basically the edges of the lens are not usable and the only part of the lens that you can see through is the middle part and it’s

Sam Berne (33:06.12)

but they were prescribed for them and what the progressive progressive lenses are doing functionally is they’re making the person focus and use primarily their macula exclusively. So they’re making them use the weak part of their retina, but they’re not even thinking that the practitioners that are prescribing these aren’t even thinking of the functional ramifications.

They’re thinking of it as this is cosmetically great. Nobody’s going to see the line, you know, it’s everything’s in one lens and you know, so they’re they’re not really looking at the root cause they’re just trying to treat, you know, the the symptom again. So we take them out of the progressive lenses. We might give them a single vision lens for driving and a single vision lens for the computer and maybe we give them a reading lens as well. Okay, they can still use their

progressive lenses if they’re really shifting back and forth. But the key thing on function affecting structure, the bigger the window you look through the more of the eye you’re using the smaller the window you’re using the less of the eye you’re using and you’re putting stress maximum stress on the stress point. It’s the weakest part of the person’s retina, which is the macula macular degeneration. So you have to look at what are you giving the patient?

as it relates to their functional vision experience. Okay, so here’s the anatomy of the eye and if we go over here, see my arrow. This is the front part of the eye. We have the the front part, which is the eyelids which protect the eyes and they house the glands. So people that have things like blepharitis or you know, my bone me and gland dysfunction.

Sam Berne (35:30.708)

Restasis, which is very expensive. It suppresses your immune system. It gives you some temporary relief, but it’s certainly not dealing with the the cause of why the person is getting dry eye just as an example. And then we go behind that and we see the iris, which is the colored part of the eye. And then here’s a healthy lens. So I read a statistic recently that by the age of 70.

95 % of people are going to get cataracts. Okay. Why is that? Why do we get cataracts? Well, partly it’s because the lens of the eye has no blood vessels that run through it. You don’t see any blood vessels here. It’s what we call an avascular structure and it’s very susceptible to oxidative stress accumulation protein accumulation.

something called the glycation process where glucose molecules attach to the protein molecules and this creates the cloudiness in the lens. So what can you do to reverse cataracts or slow down cataracts? Well, two of the main ingredients are glutathione and vitamin C just to start with we’ll get into some other things. But basically if you’re developing cataracts, you’re low in glutathione, you’re low in vitamin C.

And the third thing is you need to really monitor your pancreas health and your glucose levels because if your glucose levels are moderate to high, if you eat a lot of carbs and a lot of you know, white foods or sugars or you know, bad fats, you’re going to start getting oxidative stress in the lens of the eye. So there are things that you can do nutritionally to start to reverse that and we’ll talk a little more about that.

Sam Berne (37:54.346)

poor dentistry head trauma just to name a few and so there’s some things that you can do to mitigate some of the floaters. I think improving the lymphatic system is another way getting better circulation in the eye. Sometimes is a way to get rid of the floaters and then finally we’re back at the retina and the retina is made up of photoreceptors. We have the macula we have the

which is right here the fovea and then we have the the retina itself and then we have the optic nerve here and this is the connector back to the brain. So the eye in general needs a lot of nutrients and after about age 35 or 40 of we get less and less of those nutrients into that eye area unless we have really good digestion and

coupled with stress poor lifestyle lots of digital use not getting enough morning sunlight. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons why our eyes let us down and there is a genetic component to it as well. So we’ll kind of go into that maybe in about five minutes. We’ll go into that. All right, so common eye conditions. I had progressive myopia and I was able to reverse it. Certainly myopia is running an epidemic.

portions because of all the screen time we’re doing. I call it visual confinement time.

Hi Friends,

Individual Lecture (live online presentation) – Sam Berne O.D. – The Eyes Never Lie: What Your Vision Reveals About Your Health

Panel 63 – Natural Vision: Unveiling Holistic Strategies for Lifelong Eye Health – Saturday, Apr 12, 2025, 8:15 PM – 9:30 PM EDT

Sam Berne O.D. – Vital Vision: Clear Vision Naturally

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Strategies For Chronic Eye Symptoms: Demodex

Step 1: Rule Out and Reassess

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Step 2: Consider Root Causes

2. Demodex Mite Overgrowth (esp. if itching or worse in the morning)

🌬️ 3. Allergy or Environmental Irritant

4. Autoimmune or Inflammatory Response

5. Topical Support

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Functional Vision Add-ons (Your Toolbox)

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Chronic Inflammatory Blepharoconjunctivitis, likely from:

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## 🌿 Refined 7-Day Protocol to Calm, Clear, and Reset

Step 1: Cleanse the Lids + Calm the Microbiome

Step 2: Reduce Local Inflammation

Step 3: Internal Anti-inflammatory + Eye-Lipid Support

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Bonus: Functional Eye Reset

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Optional Soothing Eye Rinse (Daily or PRN)

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Re-Evaluate After 7 Days:

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Show Notes

Keywords: Iridology, eye health, iris analysis, health insights, holistic health, dietary recommendations, preventive health, Sam Berne

Summary: In this conversation, Sam Berne discusses the practice of iridology, explaining how the iris serves as a map to the body’s health. He elaborates on the significance of eye color and pigments in diagnosing potential health issues, emphasizing the importance of dietary and lifestyle changes for prevention and overall well-being. Berne highlights the educational aspect of iridology, advocating for a proactive approach to health rather than merely treating symptoms.

Sam Berne (00:00.414)

at the pupil which is inside the iris and through lots of clinical research over the years. There have been certain say patterns that show up based on the color of your eyes. So just generally speaking, if you’re blue-eyed like I am, there’s a tendency toward lymphatic weakness, sinus congestion.

lung congestion and arthritic symptoms, arthritic symptoms. If you’re dark brown, that’s a person that tends to be more towards having blood issues and glandular disturbances. And then the third type is the kind of the mixed where that’s a person that’s inherited both the brown and the blue eyes.

And they tend to suffer liver and digestive issues. So when we look at the colored part of the eye and we’re looking at the color the pigmentation and the structure. This is going to reflect several things our organ health our glandular health. It’s also going to show us genetic tendencies that perhaps our parents or grandparents were dealing with, you know, where could be things like

blood sugar issues or heart issues thyroid issues just as some examples, but iridology can be used as a tool. It’s the way I use it to measure different strengths and deficiencies that are located within the body and especially when you use it with kids like I do at kid power where I’m working with a lot of special needs kids. I mean just the other day I was

Sam Berne (02:28.673)

pigments and patterns and colors that can be proactive and preventative, you know, like for example, sometimes I’ll pick up say a cardiac issue in the iris. I’ll see say a certain way the the heart. You know the heart pattern is and so that can tell us that herbally we might be able to do some things like Hawthorne.

as a way to support the heart better. Or if we have lymphatic congestion, it might be advised to avoid foods with gluten and dairy because those are definitely going to set off the respiratory issues and it’s also going to affect the lymphatic health which is going to cause inflammation.

So I want to give a shout out before I go any further to the father of iridology in the US, Dr. Bernard Jensen and Dr. Jensen. I actually studied with his daughter-in-law Ellen, Dr. Ellen Jensen. She was my teacher and that’s how I became certified in iridology. But Bernard Jensen was such a pioneer in the field of iridology. mean, he, I think he taught.

iridology in like 55 different countries amazing and he had the wherewithal to develop the maps and you know collaborated with a lot of different doctors around the world to create a mapping system today that is really great in terms of pinpointing different patterns in the iris and you know we talk about

Sam Berne (04:48.013)

really really a great tool to help kids get what they need because if they have the proper energy on a cellular level, they’re going to learn faster and develop quicker, especially through the functional vision therapy programs that we’re talking about. All right. So I started off by talking about the three different colors of the eye.

blue eyes mixed and brown. I want to go into a little more detail on each one and it’s very simple. If you’ve got blue eyes, they can be light blue, gray, green, blue. There tends to be a sluggishness in the lymphatic system, mucus and sinus congestion. Inflammation is a big issue for the blue-eyed person, especially in the upper respiratory tract.

where you get, you know, conditions like croup and bronchitis and you know, colds and things like that that create a lot of mucus. So it really comes down to number one eliminating gluten, dairy and sugar and this includes, you know, wheat and making sure you’re getting enough of an anti-inflammatory diet things like celery. That’s probably my number one celery cucumber.

sprouts and lemon water. Okay, you can also do apple cider vinegar sipping it is a is a way in a glass of water. Again, you want to get the raw you can put apple cider vinegar is vinegar on your salad dressing berries apples. Pears are great for the blue-eyed people herbal teas like nettle dandelion clover. One of my favorites is oat straw tea.

Sam Berne (07:10.001)

These are like a pure green light brown. There’s a blend of blue and brown. I mean you can ask the person or ask the mom, you know, do you think your child has blue eyes or hazel eyes, you know, get their feedback. So with this particular set of colors, the mixed colors, there tends to be a problem with the liver and digestive health. There’s more inflammation in the digestive tract. They might not be digesting their food well.

This could be leading to things like candida or irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease. And of course, liver is very important for our eyes, but it’s important as a detoxification organ. Another thing the the mixed Constitution will show is blood sugar fluctuation. So we might see markings on the pancreas as an example, bile insufficiency, sluggish gallbladder.

Remember that it’s very important for us to absorb our eye nutrients vitamin A, is fat soluble lutein and zeaxanthin. So if we have a problem with our gallbladder or we don’t have a gallbladder or we’re dealing with a lot of toxins in our body, then we’re not absorbing those fat soluble foods that are really feeding the eyes. That’s why we get night vision issues, dry eye retina issues, cataracts.

You know macular degeneration all of these things show up later. what is the recommended food for the mixed color? I would say number one liver supporting foods. This would be carrots beets artichokes turmeric and lemon high fiber vegetables really good the cruciferous vegetables would be like broccoli or cauliflower kale radishes and then the low glycemic

Sam Berne (09:35.157)

vegetables for your salads go a long way for cleansing the liver. Obviously foods you want to avoid fried greasy fast foods, alcohol, processed sugars and food additives and dyes. I mean that goes across the board. And then the third type I call the hematogenic type or the brown eyes. These are the dark brown black brown may look velvety.

or uniform. So these people tend to have a really strong constitution, but they struggle struggle sometimes with blood toxicity things like anemia or you know blood imbalances. They also can lean more towards sluggish elimination. So you have a tendency toward liver and bowel sluggishness and there’s a risk of

Mineral imbalances like not absorbing the minerals. These are really people that are on the go a lot. So they need B vitamins and minerals that they’re absorbing and the B vitamins help them. They’re going to do mineral rich foods and this would support the thyroid really well seaweed dolls. And then of course the dark greens lentils work really well quinoa.

clean proteins. So if they’re going to do, you know, more animal products, I would say cage free eggs, wild caught salmon, grass-fed beef, organic chicken, and then chlorophyll rich foods like chlorella, spirulina, wheatgrass works well. They tend to do better if the foods are cooked. So things like Kitchery, that’s an Ayurvedic formula.

Sam Berne (11:58.955)

Sam Berne (12:12.403)

The next thing I want to do is I want to go into the pigments of the eyes before I go into the pigments. I want to reveal I want to share what are the inherent strengths of what iridology can do and what it can’t do. So first of all, iridology can improve the organs the glands and the tissues. It tells us what

is weak what we need to nurture on what nutrients they need to utilize what what are the the problems with toxicity? they discharge the toxins? Sometimes the pigments and the markings can tell us what special nurturing is needed in terms of toxicity. Iridology can also show inflammation signs.

in an organ or a gland and that tells us how we might react to illness autoimmune disease. It’s also going to show us genetic patterns. So even though we may not be dealing with it, there might be tendencies based on our mother and father and by the way, the right eye is the father and the left eye is the mother in terms of our, you know, genetic connections. Another thing that we can look at in iridology is the

The shape of the pupil that regulates how much light gets in and it tells us the pupil shape tells us about the health of the spine. It can also tell us about what part of the spine is traumatized or is injured based on the shape. And so chiropractors use this quite a bit as a diagnostic tool. I certainly use it in my practice in craniosacral therapy.

Sam Berne (14:32.347)

Tendency towards tend we might have a tendency towards hernias hemorrhoids, varicose veins and even scoliosis. Iridology can show us glandular deficiencies, high cholesterol levels and lymphatic congestion. But now here are some things that iridology can’t do. We can’t diagnose disease and treat based on that. It doesn’t diagnose things like parasites.

our Candida. cannot confirm bacteria viral or fungal infections. We can’t tell whether a woman is pregnant. We can’t diagnose tumors cancer or whether a person has kidney issues in iridology. We talked about the three different constitutional types. And now what I want to do is I want to move towards the pigments. So

What are the pigments mean in iridology pigments are the colored spots. There are the the flex there the specs that we see in the iris and they can be there. Usually we see them really quite prominently where they’re kind of deposits of byproducts of inefficiencies in our metabolism.

Sometimes they’re inherited. Sometimes they show up later. So they offer insights into different glandular and organs of the body. So for example, one of the most common pigments that we see is orange and this is often related to pancreatic stress or blood sugar metabolism issues and it can be a predisposition to things like hypoglycemia.

Sam Berne (16:56.679)

that there’s stress in the liver in the gallbladder in the digestive tract and there might be a history of poor detoxification or exposure to environmental toxins. The third pigment that I see is yellow and this is related to lymphatic congestion. It also can be related to kidney stress. Usually you’ll see a diffused ring maybe around the

the edge of the the iris and this also can affect the skin health. This can tell us about skin. Another pigment will see is dark blue or black and this often relates to stagnation or degeneration in a certain organ zone. So this can relate to long-standing toxicities or poor circulation that area. One of the things I look at is dental health and

If you’ve had mercury amalgams or mercury removed, have you done enough toxicity release of the mercury or is it still, you know, part of your systemic and metabolic health? And then there’s the white pigment around the edge of the iris and this can relate to cholesterol imbalances, fatty deposits, circulatory congestions, drusen in the retina.

and inflammation and acute stages. Whenever I see cholesterol rings, one of the things I’m really looking at is liver health because if we can prove improve liver health that can really affect a lot of different aspects of the health and the body. So I think it comes down to a couple things. First of all, I think we need to take a look at our genetic tendencies. Number two, I think we need to take a look at

Sam Berne (19:21.695)

You know relationships, I think the lifestyle is also part of this whole situation. So in summary, what I would say is that iridology is an educational and preventative tool where we can work on proactively our health and restore balance and vitality from the inside out. So we’re not treating symptoms. We’re not treating disease, but we’re trying to restore balance and harmony.

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Keywords

nutrition, brain health, children, vision therapy, developmental delays, biochemical imbalances, essential nutrients, meal planning, healthy eating, cognitive function

This presentation by Sam Berne explores the critical role of nutrition in enhancing brain health and functional vision therapy for children aged 3 to 16. It emphasizes the importance of addressing biochemical imbalances, essential nutrients, and effective meal planning to support cognitive function and overall development.

Sound Bites

Chapters

Sam Berne (00:00)

It’s great to be here. I enjoyed your Q &A at the beginning. So I want to jump in and talk about the nourishing vision and this has to do with what are the best foods in nutritional practices to enhance functional vision therapy in children. So I’ll start off by telling a story.

I was practicing in the East Coast at the time and I was giving a presentation down in Florida and it was a very well received professional lecture on vision therapy, nutrition, naturopathic medicine. And at the end of the lecture, there was this man that was sitting in the front row.

and everybody had left and he said I want to introduce myself. My name is Dr. Sutton. I’m a professor at Berry College here in Fort Lauderdale. I’m also a developmental optometrist. I’ve been in practice over 45 years and I really enjoyed your lecture, but there were some holes in it and I was kind of taken aback by it because

You know, I was a hot shot. had already published a couple of books. I was very well known. I was lecturing all over the place. And here was this gentleman saying, you know, dude, you got some holes in your thinking. So it caught my attention and we went out to dinner and he told me a little bit about his background and all the things he had done working with special needs kids.

And so we struck up a friendship and I actually became a student of his. And over a course of many years, he and I did a lot of collaborations together. And he was in practice in Miami Beach, Florida. And he was a professor at Berry College where he taught special ed teachers and teachers who worked with learning disabilities.

So I definitely had a lot to learn and got some humility over it. And there are many things I learned from Dr. Sutton, but one of the main things that I did learn and this had to do with nutrition is that when we would consult on a lot of different cases and these were complicated cases where there were multiple developmental delays sensory motor integration issues birth trauma.

Obviously there was biochemistry issues. One of the things that he taught me was that the nutrition is an essential piece the building block sometimes the secret in the puzzle and really stimulating a child’s learning and development because what he said was that when a child has got

developmental delays, possibly traumas, other issues that usually there’s a biochemical imbalance going on on a cellular level, meaning that there is an interference in the child’s ability to absorb nutrients. Now, of course, there can be things like inflammation, oxidative stress, poor digestion.

And you know, many other things that are obstacles which inhibit the ability of us to absorb our foods. mean, plenty of us as adults have had these kinds of dysbiosis imbalances in the digestive system. And we know the digestive system has been called the second brain and it mirrors a lot of the things that go on in our upstairs brain in our head.

And because our eyes originate from the brain, we have to include the eyes in the brain discussion. And so the eyes are distant relative to our gut health and especially working with kids where we’re trying to have them make big changes in their development and getting them to learn. They have to have the energy to do that. And if they have

biochemical imbalances on a cellular level. They probably don’t have the energy to do the learning and the changing and the transformation that we as therapists are asking them to do. So in the sequence of when we might introduce the conversation of biochemical imbalances, especially with parents. It’s important to have that discussion early on. Now, one of the ways that I open the door with that is

That in my history, and it’s a very extensive history over 12 pages, lifestyle, birth, motor skills, auditory skills, many other things that we have the parent write out. What does a child eat? What do they eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks? What are their drinks? Because a lot of times if there is a biochemical imbalance, we start to see where kids

gravitate certain to certain types of foods and one of my favorite games. I like to play with the kids is I’ll say, okay, Johnny, we’re going to leave your mom and dad out of this discussion. You and I we’re going to go down to the local grocery store. Just you and I and I want you to take me to your favorite aisle. What would you go for? What would you eat? What are you thinking about and 99 % of the time it’s either cookies candy.

carbohydrates, sodas, you know, all the things that are going to interfere with having that long-range energy that we need to have proper brain chemistry, mood and also the ability to learn because we need the energy to do that. So once we have the diet, once we know, you know, what we’re dealing with another thing that we have to

Take into account in the equation is that if a child is going for sugary things, carbohydrate things that this has almost become an addiction and it’s very difficult to just go cold turkey on any kind of addiction, especially sugar. So one of the things we have to look at and there are many tests that we can use. I have a book that I wrote about 10 years ago called taking it in and in that book I talk about

different biochemistry tests that I do that give us a baseline on what’s going on. Now we can obviously do a 24-hour blood test. could certainly order, you know, other things like what are your D3 levels? What’s your, know,

protein inflammation, homocysteine levels will tell us about inflammation. A lot of things that we can we can ask for but usually in a blood test things are missed because unless there’s a gross imbalance, everything’s going to look pretty normal. So then we start looking at more subtle tests like a 24-hour urinalysis test urine test, which can give us information on heavy metal toxicity.

or saliva test, which gives us information on endocrine health or hair mineral analysis, which tells us about what are the minerals that work. We’re excreting into the hair and these minerals are the spark plugs which make ourselves work and based on mineral ratios. We can see if we’re either sensitive to carbohydrates, not absorbing carbohydrates, whether we have inflammation, adrenal thyroid imbalances.

heavy metals, other toxicities. So there’s a lot of things that you can get from all of these kinds of tests. Not one test gives you everything. I also like stool tests. If we’re thinking about parasites and you can even do bio resonant testing, which is more of an energetic way of measuring the body’s compatibility, especially with foods and supplements and so on. Another way we can test it is by going through certain

guidelines, which I’m going to talk about and you can do something called kinesiology muscle testing and for those of you that aren’t doctors certainly doing kinesiology, which is where you read the body based on the body strength while they’re holding the supplement or the food or the or the whatever and if it’s strong, then the body could use it. There’s a good chance. There’s a compatibility going on.

So the role of nutrition is so important in our functional vision therapy program because if we can improve dietary absorption and get the right foods in the body, it is going to have a very high impact on things like visual processing, visual coordination, visual tracking and cognitive function as we call it our prefrontal cortex. So

The the issue around not having the proper nutrients in the body affects us from everything when we start the primitive reflex therapy vestibular stimulation gross and fine motor skill sets that we’re working on and common nutritional deficiencies that we can say pretty much are in most of these kids would be number one Omega-3 fatty acids.

Number two would be the trace mineral zinc. Number three would be the fat soluble vitamin A or beta carotene and then B vitamins magnesium and perhaps other minerals trace minerals depending on the stress level. Most kids are under stress. So they’re going to need B complex and minerals. A lot of times they’re not holding their minerals. We can look at iridology.

And we can tell say on a blue-eyed person their constitution is saying they need to have a strong lymph system and the very sensitive to gluten-dairy and sugar. We can look at the mixed hazel color, which has to do with the possibility of maybe liver gallbladder issues. And then we can look at the brown colored eyes, which can reflect certain things blood disorders and certain issues with

Most of the glands and organs could be pancreas liver gallbladder and so on. So we can use a variety of different ways to figure out what are the possible nutritional deficiencies. So going through this in more detail number one, I think omega-3 is so essential not only for our eye health retinal health, but also our brain health and some of the sources that we can get omega-3 would be wild-caught salmon.

grass-fed eggs. Obviously everything we do is related to organic non-gmo very important. So omega-3 wild-caught salmon sardines walnuts flax seeds chia seeds. These are all possibilities vitamin A, is related to retinol or beta-carotene. This affects our night vision. It affects our focusing muscles.

It affects our retina health. So these would be foods that contain eggs, carrots, sweet potatoes and dark leafy vegetables. Then there’s the fat soluble plant carotenoids called lutein and zeaxanthin which protect us against blue light and they also can help with visual acuity. Lutein and zeaxanthin can be found in spinach, kale and eggs and bell peppers.

I find that zinc and copper are notoriously low in kids and zinc is very important for retinal health and it’s also a neurotransmitter. So it’s copper. And so where can you get these pumpkin seeds chickpeas cashews and shellfish and then we look at the B vitamins and I would recommend getting folate not folic acid. Make sure you’re getting an end niacin B3

It’s really good for circulation, but you want to get a full spectrum B complex. This is so good for nerve function and stress. So where do we get B vitamins grass-fed meats eggs legumes dark leafy greens and then finally magnesium magnesium is such an essential trace mineral and most of us are really deficient in it.

Magnesium helps in so many different chemical reactions on a cellular level. It’s really great for the muscles, especially the eye muscles and visual stress. We can find magnesium things like avocados, nutseed and cacao dark chocolate. Obviously the foods you want to avoid would be processed foods, sugar, artificial dyes and preservatives, omega-6 overloads. So too much

Omega-6 creates more inflammation and then of course gluten-dairy considerations. I find with most of these kids if we take them off gluten-dairy and sugar immediately their behavior gets better and their cognitive health improves. Something that’s not talked about is hydration. Make sure you’re getting six to eight to ten glasses of healthy water daily.

We’re now recommending hydrogen water or and or structured water. Those can be very helpful in terms of giving the cell more energy and being able to absorb the water better because when we’re dehydrated this affects our brain health and our digestive health and it creates more inflammation. So you have to be really really careful. All right. So in terms of meal planning some things we talk about would be

getting those Omega-3 rich smoothies in the morning. If you can get a smoothie in there that works really well. Again, we use things like celery and beets and kale. Maybe a little ginger turmeric. You could add a date if you wanted to. Cabbage also. Again, it’s kind of you have to see what kids with their texture.

their ability to handle different textures. I should say especially orally some kids just can’t do smoothies try to get more protein in the morning whether you do almond butter eggs avocados and try to do more whole grains as opposed to white food again when we when we get into the white food. This is really going to be low calories.

lots of carbs, a boosting or a spike of the blood sugar levels, which are going to throw us off in our behavior and our focus. So lunch and dinner could be things like wild caught salmon, grass-fed meats, root vegetables. If you’re going to do snacks again, organic nuts, cacaua, fruit with almond butter, hummus.

with carrots and easy food swaps. So healthier, healthier alternatives for busy parents. How do you figure this out? Because you can’t keep going to McDonald’s or Wendy’s and you know, expect to get the proper nutrients that you need. So food is the fuel for vision. That’s what I’m going to leave you with and you want to

have this discussion about nutrition. Either in the first or second sessions are very early on in your physical vision therapy program. And the reason is is the earlier you can Institute the food conversation the supplement conversation the better chance you have of getting success in the physical therapy. Remember if you’ve got the energy you’re going to absorb what you’re trying to learn better.

than if your energy is inconsistent because of poor diet. So this is round one of nourishing your body and nourishing your vision. And these are some of the best practices and foods that enhance function in children.

Keep Up with Dr. Sam

To make a one on one time with Dr. Berne for an Iridology session and/comprehensive functional vision assessment, contact him: [email protected]

To learn more about his practitioner’s program go to: https://www.drsamberne.com/practitioners-training/

Keywords

color therapy, light therapy, vision improvement, holistic healing, emotional health, energy fields, chakras, adaptogenic therapy, natural light, functional vision therapy

Summary

In this podcast episode, Sam Berne discusses the principles and applications of color and light therapy, emphasizing its benefits for vision improvement and overall health. He shares personal experiences and case studies, explaining how light therapy can enhance emotional well-being, energy fields, and even physical health. The conversation covers the historical context of color therapy, practical techniques for implementation, and the adaptogenic nature of light therapy, encouraging listeners to explore the natural light around them.

Light therapy can improve vision and emotional health.

Sound Bites

“Light therapy can do a lot of great things.”

00:00 Introduction to Color and Light Therapy