In this episode I recount my personal struggle with vision issues and how I found solace in the holistic method. Vision encompasses more than just the eyes; it encompasses the brain, emotions, posture, and balance. I lay out crucial strategies for bolstering vision, especially for those aged 70 and above grappling with conditions like cataracts or macular degeneration. Enjoy the show!
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Hello, everyone. It’s Dr. Sam. I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. This is a show that offers cutting edge information on how to improve your vision and overall wellness through holistic methods. I so appreciate you spending part of your day with me. If you have questions, you can send them to [email protected].
Now to the latest EyeClarity episode.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to my podcast. So today I’m going to take on a subject about your eye health, eye disease. And this is targeted for 70 years old and up. We’ve been diagnosed with a certain condition like cataracts or macular degeneration. So how do we dissolve the barriers to follow my protocols and program?
Well, I’ll start off with a personal story many years ago. In fact, if I think about it, it was over 40 years ago. I was very, very near sighted, and I also had a struggle with reading. I was in my late twenties. I had graduated optometry school. I was involved in a postdoctoral fellowship at the Gazelle Institute. And I was just starting my first private practice in Philadelphia.
And I met a developmental optometrist who practiced in Connecticut. His name was Dr. Al Shankman, and he wrote a book that you could look up called Vision Enhancement Therapy or Vision Enhancement Training. And he invited me to a year-long seminar that he was putting on for a group of young optometrists who were interested in his philosophy.
So he was holistic. He was mind, body. He was a yoga teacher. He also taught meditation. And he was in his mid-70s, so he’d given up his regular private practice, and he was doing this out of his home. So when I met him, I drove up from Philadelphia. I was really taken to him immediately. And we had a very strong connection, developed a deep bond over many years of my working with him and being a mentor, mentoring.
So he was mentoring me. And then we became friends, and he watched my career take off. But the very early part of it, I signed up to be a patient of his and I began doing his vision therapy. Now, it was a form of physical therapy that was very different than what I had learned both in school and in some of my externships. Because he was of the perspective that vision was not just in the eyeball, but it was a whole body pattern that influenced our posture, our movement, our emotions, our balance and many other things.
And so I started in on his program, but this is where it comes in about dissolving the barriers, because what I ended up doing was spending anywhere between 30 and 45 minutes a day, seven days a week, doing his physical therapy practices and having that level of commitment. I began to see some changes that went on that eventually allowed me to completely let go of my strong near sighted prescription. And it also healed my learning and reading problem that I had had since I was eight years old. So it was a 20-year odyssey.
And when those two things happen, I recognized that one of my own blocks was my inability to commit and be consistent in a daily practice. Now, the other point of it that he emphasized was whatever activities he gave me. And he didn’t like to use the word exercise because when we think of exercise, we think of I’m strengthening muscles, I’m stretching it’s more on a physical level. But vision is very much an internal process in the sense that when I would do the practice, I used the practice that he gave me as a mirror, be like looking into a mirror and seeing and watching and observing my patterns of awareness.
It could be things like my right eye was more emotional than my left eye, my left eye had a better balance than my right eye, meaning body balance. And my posture was different when I used each eye separately, stuff like that. So the activity allowed me to understand my awareness. And this led to my insight into habits and conditioning that caused the vision problem to begin with.
Because again. In the space, it’s all genetics or because my parents had a certain condition that I’m going to get it. And in the epigenetic research, there’s more to it than just your genes. But it’s really how the environment, how you interact with yourself and the world that turns the genes on and off. And this epigenetic dia is not new. It’s been around for a long time. I mean, if you wanted to look up, probably one of the founders, at least on a public level, is Bruce Lipton, who first introduced this to the mainstream and it really took off.
But in these practices around your vision, because vision equals brain, I began to understand that the brain, the mind, our thoughts, our belief systems had such a huge influence on the physical eyesight. Remember, eyesight is glasses and it’s the eye chart. But vision is the brain and how we process information, how our two eyes work together.
And so in my protocols, one of the things I emphasize is, number one, you’ve got to commit to do a daily practice of at least 30 minutes a day. Now you can split that up into different time periods, doing a little bit in the morning, afternoon, evening. And especially I’m targeting this towards 70 year olds because usually you’ve got a little more time, but your vision is deteriorating.
You are investing in being able to reverse any visual deterioration. The second thing that’s important is to keep a journal, keep a diary of your awarenesses. What you’re experiencing, feeling, seeing, noticing your thoughts. Just write them down. Awareness is the key, I think, in healing your vision. The more you become aware of the habits and conditioning, you’re now dissolving the obstacles that have been created that actually changes the physical structure.
So those two aspects are really, really important in being able to make the changes. Now, case in point, I’ll talk about two people who I saw recently who are in their seventies, and they were able to improve their vision. I had a patient who came in and she just wanted an exam. She was having difficulty reading contracts, skipping words, losing her place. And so during the evaluation I recognized that she was way over corrected in her glasses prescription.
But she wasn’t ready to. Take the less prescription. The other thing that was going on is her right eye was shutting off when she was using both eyes together. So we had to do a vision test to uncover that problem. So I began giving her a couple of vision practices to do. And I got an email about two weeks later, literally two weeks later. And she wrote and she said, you know, I can’t wear my glasses anymore.
My balance is off, and I see better without my glasses. So some switch got turned on and she came in and I was able to reduce her prescription by 50% 50%. That’s unheard of. And on top of that, she was actually able to do some reading without her glasses. So she’s farsighted. She needed some magnification, but I think the doctor just over magnified her.
And that was also creating some of the suppression in the right eye because she was saying, you know, I’m not having that problem right now reading contracts. And so that
was just two weeks doing daily practices that I gave her. The other person I’ll mention again is 70 plus. She came in with a cataract diagnosis in both eyes.
Now, in her case, I had her supplement with glutathione sublingual and vitamin C. Also had her take some additional eye supplementation that included lutein and Zeaxanthin to wear blue blockers to do some vision practices that I gave her. And within six months, her cataracts completely dissolved 100%. Now, she was 75 years old, but she made the shift as well.
Now, in both cases, these people committed to the practices, deeply committed, because if you’re dabbling in it or you just want the end result, it’s probably not going to work for you. It didn’t work for me. And this is one of the messages that I convey to people that they have to commit, they have to sharpen their self awareness, and they have to understand that this is a process of relearning how the eyes and the brain work together.
Now, some obvious other things that you can do would be get 30 minutes of morning natural sunlight every day. Get out in nature, 15 to 30 minutes a day. Improve your lymph system, if you can, by walking. Eat a diet that is cleaner. So you’re eating more fruits and a few vegetables. What I’m saying is a few fruits, like especially the berry family and the colorful vegetables, especially the red or orange yellow pigmented vegetables. These have the lutein. zeaxanthin in it. You can even add the astaxanthin by eating marine carotenoids. Just make sure it’s wild caught if you’re doing salmon, because the sources, again, can be a problem.
Include your omega three s, your fish oil, if you can remember. Fats and oils are really important in the equation. And I also include my red light exposure. Know, so many people have benefited from my red exercise glasses. And I think red light because it stimulates the mitochondria function in the retina. It does help reduce the reactive oxygen species that’s the free radicals that form in the retina. And it kind of turns the corner where you’re reducing oxidative stress and improving your visual functioning by absorbing your nutrients better.
The mitochondria are working better. So that’s kind of a no brainer. So that’s my message for today. I want to thank everybody for their contribution, their participation, and keep watching. I got more to say.
Take care, everybody. Thank you for listening. I hope you learned something from the EyeClarity podcast show today. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to subscribe on iTunes or Spotify and leave a review. See you here next time.
