Episode Details

Here’s another look back at when I was interviewed by Gael Rosewood, Certified Advanced Rolfer™, Rolf Movement® Practitioner and Sam Berne, O.D.

Gael Rosewood, Rolfer, Rolf Movement Practitioner, and Continuum Movement teacher interviews Dr. Sam Berne, optometrist and so much more, on the relationship of eyes to structure, perception, and movement and his innovations in holistic eye care. Enjoy the show!

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

eyes, people, vision, affects, cataracts, problem, prescription, macular degeneration, macula, body, doctor, astigmatism, studied, reduce, reverse, osteopath, lens, sam, condition, workshops

Hello, everyone, it’s Dr. Sam, I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. This is a show that offers cutting edge information on how to improve your vision and overall wellness through holistic methods. I so appreciate you spending part of your day with me. If you have questions, you can send them to hello@drsamberne.com.

Gael Rosewood: I’m excited to be introducing Sam Berne O.D. to the Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI) community. Sam has been a colleague of mine through the Continuum Movement community. We met at various of Emily Conrad’s workshops and retreats, and over the years I came to be intrigued with his particular specialty as an eye doctor. I took a workshop with him some years ago and have had an interesting journey into exploring his various healing protocols. It shows me that how I see the world is, as Rolfers know, a perceptual habit. I have options, maybe options that I never saw before. First, Sam, would you like to introduce yourself in any way?

Sam Berne: Yes. I am an optometrist, but also much more than that. I’ve been in practice over thirty-five years, and I’ve studied many different disciplines and consider myself a holistic practitioner. It’s been an exciting journey, I’ve met amazing people along the way, and I’m happy to share what I know with your community.

GR: How were you drawn into optometry?

SB: Well, it actually started when I was a child. At about eight years old and I was diagnosed with a learning problem and my mom took me everywhere because I couldn’t read. At an eye doctor’s office I got a pair of nearsighted glasses. That didn’t address my learning problem but I became a memorizer, that’s how I got through school. My eyes kept getting progressively worse. After I graduated optometry school, I met a holistic eye doctor, Albert A. Shankman, O.D., and went through his physical eye therapy program. He said two things to me: “Number one, the reason why you have a learning problem is you have a left eye that drifts out and you’re not using your two eyes together.” And second, “You can definitely reverse your prescription.” So I went through a sixth-month program and I did both of those things. I dissolved my prescription 100% and I learned to use my two eyes together. I stopped seeing double, and I became a voracious reader. It inspired me to move into a track of helping people improve their vision instead of just looking for disease and using pharmaceutical drugs and surgery – that’s the way most eye doctors are trained.

That started me on a very dynamic process where, although I’ve been out way ahead of the curve, luckily I’ve met other visionaries along the path. Along the way I studied various things. One was light and color therapy for the eyes, which can actually heal certain eye problems. And I developed programs in hospitals working with traumatic brain injury. When people have had some kind of a whiplash or head injury, they can have tremendous vision problems that either go undiagnosed or that are hard for eye doctors to treat, so I developed ways