Great conversation with Dr. Jay Montgomery. He’s an ophthalmologist in South Carolina.
Well-worth watching.
Unknown Speaker 0:02
Hello everyone, Dr. Stone here with Dr. J. Montgomery. He is the only ophthalmologist I know of who's hip to all the different problems that I see in the world that are derailing people's health. And the reason that I wanted to sit down with him and chat is that next to your mind, the thing that people fear losing the most, I think it's fair to say would be their eyesight, which, of course, is a neighboring territory to the brain. And I wanted to give people who subscribe to me, and who follow me on social media, basically, the cutting edge science behind how we keep our eyesight for as long as possible. So Dr. Montgomery, thanks for being here.
Unknown Speaker 0:39
Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Unknown Speaker 0:41
Yeah. So let's talk about why people lose their vision in 2023.
Unknown Speaker 0:46
That's a great question. And there are many causes, I think, you know, most of the modern eye diseases that we face, glaucoma, macular degeneration, cataract, they're really one of the things that I see most now is just some of the early signs. That dry eye is becoming a really big problem, particularly in the younger population, autoimmune diseases, inflammatory problems, and every one of those, I think there's definitely a role, particularly early on in using the light that our eyes are exposed to, in a very intentional way to slow those processes. We can't always prevent them. But we can slow them and particularly the aging process within the eye. So always happy to help at least put some of those principles out there for you.
Unknown Speaker 1:32
I'm curious, are you seeing more retinal detachments in your practice to
Unknown Speaker 1:36
you know, I'm not a retina specialist. But we do see those fairly commonly, we see them a lot in a lot younger patients. And a lot of that has to do with the increasing myopia in the population, which is directly linked to artificial light, there's destruction of dopamine in the retina. So even, you know, adult patients are progressing in myopia. I put out a post recently and shared with some of my colleagues, probably 50% of the cases I did in one day, were high myopes. And 20 years ago, that was a that was an uncommon, I really was uncommon. Yeah, absolutely. Just 20 years all it took to change. That's all that's all it took. You know, I think it's it's interesting, because what happens is mainstream ophthalmologist doesn't see that particularly and okay, what's causing this, they, they look at it on the back end, like most of our, you know, our mainstream physicians, like, okay, how can I treat this? What am I going to do to treat this? I like to look at it from an etiologic standpoint. And I don't think there's any question that the modern technology most of the pediatric ophthalmologist and optometrist, they know that the best way to slow myopia in the young population is simply to get them outdoors. They don't really discuss the the actual mechanism, which is sunlight promotes dopamine production in the retina, dopamine controls the elongation of the eye. So and blue light there, I've got numerous studies that show that blue light distorts dopamine in the eyes. So therefore, the eye continues the elongate, elongation of the eye increases myopia further weakens the retina that increases the risk of retinal detachment. So it's a direct correlation. So I think we're going to have an epidemic of retinal detachments in the coming years, even in the younger population. So it's a real problem. And most of my colleagues that do LASIK, they're happy because they got a lot more surgery to do. But that's a really very wrong perspective, when I look at it from the complications standpoint.
Unknown Speaker 3:30
Yeah, I mean, the sad thing is, there's a really perverse incentive when you're getting paid to manage damage to end organs. You know, and we have the same thing, and you know, my specialty Internal Medicine where, you know, nobody really gets paid, unless something is failing and going wrong. And it's why in the practice, you know, in order to survive, what I've done is create a model where, you know, people do like an intensive program with me if they're very sick. We teach them everything they need to know, which is a lot of material, you know, hours of time and group coaching calls, online courses that are automated, and then one on one consultations, not to mention the lab work. And then after that, they're healthy enough that I've had, I've had one or two patients at once in the program as well. And Dr. Stillman, why would I Why would I? Why would I pay you a monthly fee to keep you as my doctor? And the simple answer is number one, I'm going to stop taking patients eventually. Number two, I want to keep you well. So why don't we do some intermittent laboratory tests to make sure that everything is looking good, because it's amazing to me, you know, people don't realize they don't have any kind of concept of how what they're doing is affecting their physical body. And so we'll see this all the time is something as simple as a magnesium level, I'll have these, like, I just looked at these labs the other day, it was for wonderful, you know, retired lady, she's in her mid 60s, and we boosted her magnesium levels by like 20 He percent in like four months, easily. But just some oral supplementation, we didn't even push it to the maximum dose. Contrast that with a CEO who's inside staring at the screen working hard, extreme stress flying all over the country, I will struggle to get his magnesium levels up with oral supplementation at max dose. And this guy in particular I'm thinking of was the first guy who really took the pedal to the metal as a lot of my executive people do. And he started doing twice a week IV magnesium infusions. And we still struggled to get his magnesium level up. And this goes back to your point about the dopamine, the AI, people have no idea that the blue light that they're being inundated by by their work screen, their laptop, their tablets, iPhones, whatever is destroying the thing that's controlling the ultimate structure and function of their eye, which obviously has all these pathways back into the brain. And dopamine, of course, is so critical for prefrontal cortex, parts of the hindbrain and midbrain limbic system. And it's just amazing people don't people need to hear think me more than anything. I tell them that they don't have a barometer, an internal barometer for how this is affecting their physiology, and they can be creating a retinal detachment 1020 3040 years down the line by their tech use today.
Unknown Speaker 6:24
There's no question I think what you do is very important, because you know, in modern medicine, we have algorithms that that don't really they don't consider the actual individual context of the patient, particularly as far as the environment is concerned, I would say most physicians don't consider that at all. So they have Okay, have low magnesium, we're going to do this. But without considering all the other things, you're just spinning your wheels. And I see that, you know, just in the in the optimistic world as well. It's a tough uphill battle. And most people just want a very simple thing to do. They don't want to change their lifestyle, but that's 90% up.
Unknown Speaker 6:58
What kind of things have you seen in your practice, when you did have the time to chat with patients or in patients not just, you know, tuned into what you were saying in the exam room, or, you know, post op or operating room, whatever. But when they went to social media, your blog, and they started to see the things you were putting out? What kind of things have you seen as far as changing the course of a disease that otherwise is considered to be chronic and transgender and hopeless?
Unknown Speaker 7:20
Yeah, I think, you know, it really depends on the stage of the disease that they present with. You know, I mean, the earlier we can intervene, obviously, you want to prevent it. Yeah. Earlier we can intervene, the better off they are. And so there's definitely some, particularly people who have some of the early stages of dry, I have 1000s of patients, because I get referred some of the really bad dry patients, and by them, we're just doing paleo to treatment. But if I can catch them early enough and educate them early enough, they can make huge difference. I do think artificial light, I believe that drop is probably the carrying coal mine for blue light toxicity. We most of my colleagues believe is just exposure, you know, without blinking enough, and there's no question, you know, the blink rate decreases, as but as a part of that is because the corneal nerves become desensitized by blue light, so you don't have the stimulus as much. So I do see some very, very clear and definitive measurement, objective measurement changes and people who would pay attention to that, who are willing to get exposed to natural sunlight, particularly morning and evening. The infrared light, as we know, there are lots of studies in in Europe, looking at the use of infrared light for the treatment of early macular degeneration. Unfortunately, in the US, we don't have availability of those FDA approved, but I do have patients that, you know, I have consistently get them into the morning and evening sunlight with macular degeneration glaucoma. And although it's hard to measure those because they're both slowly progressive diseases. You know, I have anecdotal reports from patients, but also measurements where things actually slow down or improve where to otherwise seem to be progressing fairly rapidly. I mean, I don't think there's any question from the myopia standpoint, that there are objective measures where people were progressing and over a diopter year, you start getting into proper light stimulus, that we can slow that down for sure. And that that's really evident even in the mainstream literature right now. So yeah, that's a great thing because we are going to have an explosive prevalence of macular degeneration, glaucoma, retinal detachments, due to the artificial light exposure, that has changed dramatically, even in my adult life.
Unknown Speaker 9:39
It really has changed changed dramatically. I mean, I'm 34 and you're few years older than me. And yeah, and you know, I remember we, I remember my first smartphone, my first cell phone, I thought, This is ridiculous. People are gonna be able to, you know, wake me up in the middle of the night they're gonna be able to bother me while I'm out. This is annoying. I was not excited about A little did I know how much it would change my life and all society.
Unknown Speaker 10:05
It's interesting I, I have really thought a lot about why I got sick. And to be honest with you a lot of my problems started about the time we transition to electronic health record, started carrying a smartphone all the time. And I really, really got some pretty bad neurological conditions. And it really all started about, you know, a year or two or three after that. And so I can, in my personal life, I can see the deleterious effects from it. And when I educate the patients, it's usually the older patients that grasp it much quicker. They remember a time when your life without it, the natural sunlight, candles, incandescent lights, which were my lighting sources were and they understand it, they see it, and the younger patients, they don't want to hear it, because it's just part of their life. Just think, you know, a cell phones and computers like oxygen.
Unknown Speaker 10:56
Oh, I know. Yeah. And I have to say, part of what got me onto the whole quantum biology kick, which, you know, for me was just two years at the beginning of just very, very intensive reading, because I felt like I was drinking from the firehose all over again. And there was so much literature and so much knowledge and so much that it challenged me and what I thought I knew. And what really convinced me that the quantum paradigm had a lot to offer people was the fact that I'd been working at a very, very upscale destination Wellness Center. And we had basically two categories of patients, we have people who were a little bit older, you know, Medicare or like menopause, 50s, and up, sort of sort of age. And then we had a lot of younger patients. And there was this very troubling, you know, tendency of the younger patients to never get better. And they would bounce from one high priced clinic, high ticket clinic to another, sometimes across the country across the world. I mean, there were people who've been seen in multiple countries, multiple very prestigious clinics. And a lot of these people I think, are getting written off as we are crazy, or they're being labeled, as you know, you have chronic Lyme, and it's something that you're going to live with for the rest of your life. But when I started to look at the norm in functional and Integrative Medicine at the time, and this is getting better gradually, thanks largely to just people like you and I finally talking about a little long guys like Jack Cruz, who were way earlier to the party than we were. What the tendency or the thread running through those cases was that they were young, they were tech addicted, and no one put together the fact that they were constantly on their devices, they were constantly exposed to EMF, they were constantly exposed to blue light. And to this day, you know, some of those people I know from those circles, and they'll text me or they'll call me and they'll say, you know, I'm really tired and wiped out I got this or that or the other flu or cold again, I don't know what happened. And I I'll tell them, you know, look, if you just normalize your circadian environment, if you stop baking yourself with microwaves and radio waves constantly, a lot of these problems are just going to go away, and you're not going to need to take any more of these supplements. And you're not gonna have to go in for IVs. And this now, the other thing, let alone colonics coffee enemas, you know, in crazy amounts of sauna, not that sauna is bad. But I mean, these people just don't realize what an effect technology has on their biology.
Unknown Speaker 13:15
Yeah, we spent a lot of time, you know, talking to patients that, unfortunately, in my field, and where I practice, I don't have the compliance rate that you do, I think people probably seek you out for a reason. They do remote. They're very motivated. I would say the average American, at least in South Carolina, why practice? They're not always interested in doing the hard things. And sometimes, you know, what we talk about doing is harder than taking a pill. But I think, you know, it's either gonna be hard now, easy later, or easy now, and very hard later, and I teach my kids that too. And in life. Yeah. I think unfortunately, the the younger generation because of the mitochondrial dysfunction that they inherit, they're, they're going to be sicker far sooner than the generations ahead of them. And that reality is coming to fruition. I you know, I have two kids in college. And they'll tell me, you know, Dad, what's going on, most of my friends are sick, or the neuropsychiatric disorders are just off the chart. I mean, most of their friends are already on sleep meds, you know, they're taking ADHD medicine, they're all on anxiety. Medicine is phenomenal to me. I can, I don't remember there being a kid in my class. I'm 52 that had autism. Growing up, don't remember it. Okay. Type two diabetes was unheard of, in the younger population. It's, it's just amazing to me, and just, you know, even less than a generation where we gone and nobody's really paying attention. And I think it's going to take some radical, you know, just realization of our society of what the real source of this problem is. You and I are talking about it, but the mainstream positions just really aren't paying attention.
Unknown Speaker 14:57
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that you know, we We what ends up happening is people paper over these problems, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, whatever with a variety of neuro psych meds, they get the job done. But what they don't realize is the collateral damage from this, aside from all the, you know, psychosocial misery that that causes is, we're incubating an epidemic, as you've said, of retinal detachments of glaucoma of vision loss from totally preventable causes. And, you know, one of the problems with this is that it's like really bad debt that you don't see accumulating, as if you just cut off the statements, and then all of a sudden, you know, 10,000 is $100,000, it's going to overwhelm the system. I mean, you guys, ophthalmologists are already booking out I mean, what's your waiting time right now for no appointment?
Unknown Speaker 15:43
Right, it's much. And you know, the problem, too, is that, as you know, most of the positions are getting burned out. I know, the good ones are wanting to escape. People, especially for patients are so far advanced complex. And you know, it's really hard, when to try to basically mitigate those problems once they get to a certain point. So I think that problems only going to get worse. And so we need people like you on the front end dealing with folks before they get to that stage, like I said earlier is, you know, by the time they get to me, they need a surgical intervention. And you'd like to prevent that. I mean, and I look at as you know, every surgery that's prevented is a patient's eye that's probably saved from a problem even worse. So I'm happy to slow those processes to make myself less busy, and work myself out of a job as possible.
Unknown Speaker 16:44
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I don't think that's going to happen. But we can try, right? Um, yeah. And when you keep saying about the fact that it's, it's important when you intervene, it is very true and everything I see, and I explained to patients a lot like a boulder rolling down a hill, you know, you need to stop it at the top, because once it gains all that momentum, you have to do more and more and more and more and more in order to try and just stop it, let alone push it back up that hill. And at a certain point, people's vitality seems to have waned to a point where if they were younger, right, they could they could heal from that. We know a lot about that from Robert Becker's work in regeneration, orthopedics, just you don't have the same voltage and the ability to heal as you get older. And that's very important in the eye, because it's such a sensitive structure. And it's so it's so upsetting to think that people are really, they're gambling with their eyes in a way that they may not understand. And thinking everything's fine, but 1020 30 years, they may survive their eyeballs by 10 or 20 years, they may spend a substantial proportion of their lifetime blind, simply because
Unknown Speaker 17:56
the top and now, you know, a large part of my practice, our rural, elderly patients, and one of the things that that always talk about is, you know, you ask these older patients that actually have good vision, their brains, or their cognitive function, still very strong. Yeah, they're, they're very consistent. When you ask them why they think they're doing so well. And most of the things they've done have been a lot of things we talked about, just because it's kind of it was natural, they didn't really have these technology, options. And I'm seeing patients in their 60s, and their eyes look like they're 80 and 90 now. And that's really changed in my career. And so I think we're gonna see a lot of people who were able to, quote, keep alive with modern health care, but their vision is gonna fail them and, you know, being blind is a disability that most people aren't going to be able to afford to, to deal with.
Unknown Speaker 18:51
Yeah, and I'm wary of, you know, because I attract a lot of high achievers, people who are at the desk, front of the computer 10 1216 hours a day. And one of the things I'm wary of is if I don't get them to fix their technology habits and go outside enough, am I going to be in a you know, backed into a corner at some point and having no option but to refer them to you? Even though a lot of other things in their case look good, like their magnesium level, their hormones, their their energy, whatever? And I can't answer that. It's something we're going to find out, frankly, the hard way. And it's why I'm so one of the things I stress most with people is it's really hard to get well when you're working 40 No, sorry, 6080 100 120 hours a week. You need to make that time. I love it when patients scale back. I love hearing that they're gonna hire any kind of help nanny, you know made meal prep service, preferably a professional chef
Unknown Speaker 20:01
Sure, well, yeah, people are gonna have to make those choices. And, you know, a lot of people can't always afford to do that. But they can't afford a they cut their spending, they can afford to do it in a way because there's nothing, there's no more. There's not a better investment than your hell. I mean, particularly when you look at it from a healthspan standpoint, and you try to get people to understand that, but in the business of life, it's hard for them to fathom being able to scale back but making the time for these things and a lot of what we talk about, it's not like it takes hours a day. I mean, does have you it consistent? And that's really important that people understand.
Unknown Speaker 20:40
Are you using any red infrared light therapy in your practice or recommending it to patients as a prevent?
Unknown Speaker 20:45
I do recommend it. It's hard because most of the red lights now the power is a little bit too intense for direct ocular exposure. Yeah, are some devices that I'm watching that hopefully will have a little bit lower energy level. But I do I mean, again, we talked about, you know, morning and evening sunlight, I definitely recommend that for everybody, particularly when they have you know, macular degeneration, glaucoma, things like that. But But I did have some potential uses, you know, not staring directly in the red light, but the indirect exposure for five minutes. There's some studies looking at the reduction of myopia and kids using infrared lights, those devices aren't available yet as well. But I do think that that's coming. The problem right now is most of this cursorily available red lights, the power density is just a little too much for for the eye. I don't have we don't have studies, looking at the actual dose per se, yeah, infrared light. But there's no question that not only from the mitochondrial function in the retina, but also just from reading photoreceptor regeneration, that red light is going to be a big factor for us going forward.
Unknown Speaker 21:54
Yeah, and what I tell people to do, if there's a really intense life that they have, like, you know, that's the EMR tech, Inferno, Bihar fires, remember? Yeah, what I'll tell them to do is just look more in front of it, close your eyes, it's gonna get through your eyelids, and it's gonna, some of it's gonna get to retina, which is better than nothing.
Unknown Speaker 22:14
That's usually what I asked him to do the patients who have them, if you're going to use it, just you know, instead of wearing the glasses that block all of it, just close your eyes. And because it penetrates through, it's much more tolerable and maybe not sit as close to your face. But I think there's definitely some benefit to that, I think I'd like to see a little bit more objective studies, with the different power levels, as you probably I have to buy photobiomodulation textbook, there's a lot in there about potential treatments and research, particularly on macular degeneration, but most of that's at the research level at this point. So I'm looking forward to applying a lot of that.
Unknown Speaker 22:54
Yeah, it'll be great. But man, did the academics take their sweet time. Patients need help. Now. The other device I think that's going to be useful for people is the sauna space. And you know, the sauna space is one option, but you and the reason I like it is that it has that red spectrum of light, as well as the infrared. And you know, you can go in there with your eyes open, because it's not too intense, and you can go with the eyes closed, it's gonna give you the added benefit of sauna. If you had a sauna already, you could add a light like that or a panel like the inferno or juice or one of the other companies that's making them because that'll give you that red infrared combination. I think people are missing so badly. And that's one of things that I'm I'm most enthusiastic about for people because it gives them such you know, long term return on investment in the device.
Unknown Speaker 23:49
Not only from an eye health but also you know, brain, just overall general body health, which I've had for probably eight years now. I added I just basically add an inferno to mine for the pay for my patients who have the wealth to buy one of those I disarmed space definitely is a great one as well. But I think adding supplemental red light to it is a great option.
Unknown Speaker 24:12
Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious, you know, in the quantum space, there's lots of different people and of course, the integrative world in general. There's so many different people saying this and that and the other thing about diet and I'm really curious, you know, with your perspective, what do you see as most important foods people eat for their eyes?
Unknown Speaker 24:31
Are there no question that Seaford we talked, you know, there's been a lot of studies looking at DHA. Yeah, right now. And as we know, particularly, we haven't talked about the retinal hypothalamic track but it's a it's an often overlooked part of the of the atomic system pathway anyway, because it's not visually oriented. It's really about the circadian clock, right. You probably know that for your listeners. The retinal hypothalamic track runs for on the retina to the hypothalamus controls a super cosmetic nucleus, it has more concentration of DHA than than any neuro circuit in our in our system. And so it's critically important that we have a proper amount of DHA in our diet. And so I think, a seafood rich diet, of course, you have a lot of patients who just don't like fish or don't like seafood. So, you know, there are other sources of that. But I think that's critically important. You know, a lot of the carotenoids, very important for retinal health. I think those are those are important in colored vegetables. I am a seasonal nutritional guy. You know, there's some, I think there's some evidence for that, but I typically do keto, keto, whatever. And I start adding fruit and vegetables in the spring, summer and early fall. But you know, try to encourage people to do that, for me, particularly for the eyes, if they have macular degeneration, there's no question. The lutein Xanthine. 's and crop noids are extremely important. Keeping the vitamin A levels up, all the options in the in the retina are bound to vitamin A. So it's critical that we keep those levels high as well. grass fed beef is pretty popular in the area. And we have a lot of cattle folks. So pretty readily available for grass fed beef around here. So it's, that's a good option for folks as well.
Unknown Speaker 26:20
Great. Are you using a lot of organ meats in your practice? Or recommendation as
Unknown Speaker 26:23
well? You know, I do, it's hard to get people to, quote stomach. We talked about the importance of it. But you know, I think that's obviously a very nutrient dense source for those vitamins as well.
Unknown Speaker 26:38
Yeah, I've seen a few people overload on the copper from them. But, you know, by and large, people are not getting enough of those trace elements. And it's one of the things that makes seafood like we've talked like you mentioned, such a powerhouse. And people just don't realize how many nutrients there are in, you know, I mean, you know, fish, but particularly shellfish and shellfish have so much nutrition in them, we're including trace elements and vitamins. And it's an amazing, amazing thing. The other thing I'll tell patients that a lot of people don't think about is seaweed, for not only the crowd noise, but the iodine. And iodine is really interesting, you know, when it comes to brain health and neuronal health, because it plays a lot of critical roles in those cells. But people don't think about it I've ever looked looked at any iodine literature and things like ophthalmology or the
Unknown Speaker 27:27
I honestly, I have not, but I know it's important for neural health. So obviously, there would be some crossover there particularly for the optic nerve pathway. Visual pathway, for sure.
Unknown Speaker 27:37
Yeah. And in in med school, we learned that it's because of its effect on thyroid hormone. And I was reading David Brownstein spoke on this. And he makes it very clear that it's not just its effect on thyroid hormone, it's actually having complex interactions within the cell, as in the iodine is complex thing with different things inside the cell and the cell membranes, too. And what's interesting to me about iodine, you know, in the quantum sense, is that it's got this really distinctive color. So it's complex thing with things in the cell and must be changing their color too. And that's got to change the way that things like the eye perceive the world. Yeah, yeah. It's really fascinating. Another thing that's really important for us to talk about is the simple fact that the you mentioned the Oculus, was it? Retina flammig or Oculus?
Unknown Speaker 28:22
retina? Yes. Yeah. And what's so important
Unknown Speaker 28:25
about that, that's really obvious from the early research in ophthalmology on this and pointed for tall, which is book up on my shelf, you got a physical copy of that, right?
Unknown Speaker 28:33
I do. Yes. It's such a good book. Oh, my favorite isn't fascinating. It's probably one of the books that actually convinced me early on that as an ophthalmologist, and I've said this before that it convinced me that the eye is probably the most important. Neuro hormonal neuropsychiatric metabolic organ we have. But absolutely, yeah, because it literally controls the circadian mechanism for every cell in the body. And without proper time, energy and information through the retinal hypothalamic track, the metabolic processes in your body are totally disrupted. I know, work is really what got me most interested in this. And and he was doing it at a time when they weren't using intraocular lenses. So yeah, it was a unique opportunity to research that.
Unknown Speaker 29:24
I know. Yeah. And what I explained to patients because the number one complaint that we get is, is fatigue. And number two or three hard to pick would be brain fog, and I just look at brain fog as being fatigue of the brain. And when I look at fatigue, all the things that I you know, that cause it effectively, are low levels of nutrients, right, which I can, you know, fix with the diet and with some lab testing, things like that. That's worsened by stresses in the environment, which you know, we have to address but the number one thing that controls how those nutrients get turned into the things that make us feel the way we feel hormones and neurotransmitters that run the neural circuitry. The number one thing that controls that is light. And the last light that hits that retina and makes it to are and then generates a signal in the brain, the lower those levels are going to be. And, you know, I wish there was more data out there on this, at least the way that Fritz Harwich did it where it was very simple, very clean for obvious, but it seems to me like we're tanking hormone and neurotransmitter levels with modern life and that's one reason why with with Jim and I sometimes all will tell somebody to do and this happened in the fall we had a young lady, young lady, she's, you know, menopausal but she's still young, particularly at heart, she comes into practice. Pretty much the only things we told her to do were either more nutrient dense diet, take these supplements based on lab work, and go walk outside three times a day and get more natural light and stop wearing sunglasses and poof next thing you know, she's lost 16 pounds. And most of the women come into my practice who are perimenopause or postmenopausal one of their number one complaints aside from fatigue level and brain fog is I can't lose weight. I don't know why. And they don't they it does not get through in the conventional narrative, that something as simple as a pair of sunglasses, or tinted windows in your car could be having a meaningful effect on your metabolism because your metabolism is run by signals from the eye being mediated through the hypothalamus than going down into in controlling the pituitary gland that then runs your hormones, let alone your neurotransmitters. But it's very clear when you when you go into clinical practice. And you actually get people to make these changes, that it's absolutely happening. It's not theoretical at all.
Unknown Speaker 31:45
It really is. And, you know, the interesting thing about my field is, you know, I can talk with you about this make sense, I can talk to 99.9% of all the other ophthalmologists. And I'll ask them, tell me what the retinal hypothalamic tracts function is. They have no idea. I mean, it's probably I mean, vision is important. Let's mean you can't survive without vision. Sure. But in my opinion, that is the most important function of the eye, because it relates to every other systemic process in our body. And you have to know how to use the eyes. If you want to stay well. If you don't know how to use your eyes, and you don't use them properly, not only are you going to lose vision, but you're going to lose your systemic health as well. And most of that is through the retinal hypothalamic track, which starts with only 5% of the retinal ganglion cells in the retina are intrinsically photosensitive, meaning that they absorb light, particularly melanopsin, which is the blue light detector in your eye and people say all the time, optometrists ophthalmologists, but we have to have blue light to survive. Why are you telling people to block it? Well, because we are designed to receive the blue light from the sun, which varies throughout the day. And it's always a company with infrared light, whereas the devices have only blue light. And so we're just literally destroying the retinal ganglion cells function with far too much toxic blue light. And so you just completely disrupt the circadian rhythm in a way that creates chaos at the sale.
Unknown Speaker 33:19
Yeah. And have you do you have a spectrophotometer? At all?
Unknown Speaker 33:25
I do not. I've used one, I borrowed one from the lab here. One of the universities.
Unknown Speaker 33:30
Yeah, yeah. And I went ahead and bought my own because I was curious enough about it. And, you know, it's just amazing. The LED lights don't put out any infrared, they put out very little red. And they put out tons and tons of blue and green and the eye doesn't perceive this difference. And I have to explain this to patients too, when it comes to the intensity of light. Like right now, in Florida, early March 80. Something degrees outside the UV index today at noon was eight something so pretty high. I mean, that's as high as it gets in like the northern latitudes of North America in the summer. So it's pretty hot here. It's pretty intense sunlight. If I was to go outside right now with a lux meter and say how many Lux which is a measurement of visible light. For those who haven't heard of it? It would be over 100,000 In all likelihood, yet, if you're in an office with a small window, let's say or even if you're in an office, that's brightly lit, but you have the blinds drawn, or this got tinting on the windows, you might or you're just in the shade, right? You might be in a 52 as low as I've seen single digit or 10 locks environment. Most people in office spaces don't realize that they're trying to save as much money as possible. So many of these offices seem brightly lit because the lighting is well distributed. So there's no big shadows. But in reality, there's you get as much light from a candle as you do in a lot of these offices. And the result is that people are getting, you know, 510 15 locks of light on it at any given time in their working environment, when in nature, they would be getting hundreds of 1000s of locks all the time. And that magnitude of difference in terms of the signal the is getting is really important. And they don't realize it because their eyes dilate and contract in order to control the amount of light they're getting in their eye. So they the most they might clue into this is that if they walk outside, and particularly sunny day from a dark environment, it takes them a minute to adjust. And likewise, if they walk into a dark building on a sunny day, they might take a little while to adjust. But there's real physical consequences to that. And that's why getting people outside gives them so much more energy, and as we talked about can really preserve their eye health.
Unknown Speaker 35:47
Yeah, and that's a really good point. And an interesting corollary to that one of the most common complaints we get now, and I don't remember hearing this, in earlier days, my practice is photophobia. I mean, that is one of the most common and sometimes extreme complaints that we get from patients. And there's multiple mechanisms for that. It just means pain with light. People can't even walk outside without dark sunglasses on without, you know, severe pain and a lot of cases, a lot of it has to do with just what you described, we're living in a much, dimly lit environment, even though you know, it's, it's light enough that we can function is certainly not the amount of looks that we were designed to, to certain. So what happens then is even normal levels of light, because of the pupillary mechanism gets completely disturbed. Not only can I not have handle natural sunlight, but they didn't they can't handle you know, car lights, even the natural candle LED lights in the room, and then they become so light sensitive that they want to wear their sunglasses indoors. And it's it's it's really just a progressive problem. And again, it it when I look at people, people their responses, I can literally tell a lot of times just how blue light toxic they are, because they're pupillary responses change over time due to that. And
Unknown Speaker 37:08
well you can really tell that on your ocular exam.
Unknown Speaker 37:11
I can the ciliary ganglion, which is a parasympathetic ganglion gets desensitized. And so they literally can't respond to light normally, and it contributes to photophobia. But it's it's becoming really common, even more particularly in the younger population, because of the amount of time they spend indoors. And the blue light toxicity has an effect on it as well.
Unknown Speaker 37:36
Wow. Yeah, I haven't done I mean, I'm virtual now. So I don't do ocular exams. But it would be really nice to be able to do that, and have a metric for that. But you have to do a lot of exams before you.
Unknown Speaker 37:51
There's a way to measure that we do that in certain neurologic diseases, looking for afferent pupil defects, which you have to have a special instrument to do that it's really more of a kind of a clinical kind of exam, pearl that you look for. Yeah, wow. You know, typically what I don't see those patients, usually until they they typically are pretty severe. So by the time they that I see them, I'm evaluating them. There's not in unless they're willing to change their environment, there's really not a lot that I can offer to them to actually change it because you can't just continue to increase the the darkness of their glasses, then they're wearing completely blacked out sunglasses indoors. It's crazy. Yeah, you have to, to natural light again, or you're just starting the morning and evening and work your way through the day.
Unknown Speaker 38:39
Yeah, I think people have really lost sight of what stress really is, you know, stress in Latin means to pull apart. And you know, as you stress and distress, people don't think about you stress and distress, they just think about stress, they don't think about them as being good and bad. They think about stress is just being bad. It isn't fair at all. Because the reality is the when you when you there's we're designed for the stresses of nature. And I talked about this in my book, and I have a whole chapter on it, because you need the stress of nature in order to be optimally healthy. And the more you remove yourself from that stress, or the more you over stress yourself in nature, the more your body falls apart, which is why that word stress goes back to that Latin idea of pulling apart, you know, when you try to pull something apart, something as simple as like when you know the the action of a bicep or any muscle right? Technically, that weight could pull the muscle apart. But the stress that you induce when it's you stress and you're using a weight that you can handle induces a strengthening of the muscle in all of its aspects, you know, ligaments, tendons, muscle, belly, etc, not to mention like mitochondrial proliferation and increasing number of cells and nutrient levels and blah, blah, blah, right? But when you hit that distress level, that's where you start to destroy it. So people are creating tons of distress with their blue light and they're grading it with, you know, their temperature controlled environments where they're not exposed to heat and are not exposed to cold and they're, you know, they're are doing crazy things with their diets and, and they're not getting any healthy stress, and then they're falling apart. And then they're blaming what little natural stress they have left in their life, you know, the sun makes my eyes hurt. And not really, you know, the sun is trying to fix your problems in a way. And you're just living in an environment that makes you totally unprepared for that stress, because you've denuded yourself of the required nutrients, or you've inundated yourself with toxic blue light, let alone EMF, which we could talk about for a long time that's destroyed, destroying these things. And on that topic, I'm really curious. Have you seen Have you seen a role? I mean, blue lights very easy for us to talk for patients about because they can see it, and I can tell us how much tech they're using. But do you see a difference in your practice? And the patients who have a lot of EMF exposure versus those who don't terms of their ocular health?
Unknown Speaker 40:51
Oh, for sure. I mean, particularly in the modern day where people are, through the pandemic, most people were actually working from home. Yeah, and, you know, a lot of times, you know, I've seen patients, there's a lot of problems, particularly neurologists. And I'm convinced that, you know, trigeminal neuralgia, I see a lot of those patients now, where, you know, before, you might see one every one or two a year now, I see one a week, where these, these are younger patients, typically, that have nerve pain, you know, of course, their imaging is completely normal. Yeah, sometimes it can be pretty severe. And I don't think there's any question that those pages and I think there's a correlation with people who use Bluetooth, quite a bit, people who have, you know, work around routers quite a bit, I typically get into that with a lot of patients. And it's really very common for when they really go and look at their environment. They look at the practices using EMF devices, whether it's YouTube, or Bluetooth, or these routers, in close proximity to their head. They have a lot of neuralgia type pains. And if we can get rid of those, sometimes you can improve it. It does take time and willingness to the patient to change their environment.
Unknown Speaker 42:06
Yeah, I generally expect complaints to improve by about 50%. If we go from a totally non EMF mitigated environment to a 100%, EMF mitigated environment, and that's based on not a lot of patients who've done it, but the results for the ones who have had been, you know, worthwhile, that I still bother talking about it, because once you've done it, it's very easy. And then you want to do it again.
Unknown Speaker 42:30
Particularly what you know, obviously, when I can examine the I can see if there's structural problems, if we do near neuro imaging, we can see structural problems. But if they've got complaints that I can't explain, based on kind of traditional pathophysiology, that's when I start thinking in these terms, and I start asking questions about environment, you know, lifestyle practices, and typically we'll find some things that are just completely out of the norm, you know, practices. And if you help mitigate some of those, you can, like you said, you can approve it. A lot of times, it depends on how far down the road of pathology they've gone. As to whether you can reverse it or not.
Unknown Speaker 43:06
Yeah. So I'm curious, from your perspective, you know, with eye diseases on the rise, there's nothing in conventional guidelines about health screening for the eyes, you know, there's women get pap smears, you know, men, we get prostate exams, that's pretty outdated. Now, there's a lot of different things we do in preventative medicine. But there's nothing Optima logical, it's sort of if your vision deteriorates, and you can't see things you used to be able to see go see the optometrist, and maybe ophthalmologist, if you could rewrite those guidelines and get every American, some kind of preventative, you know, ocular exam to detect these problems, you know, 1020 years before they really become less significant level of surgical, what would you what would it be and why?
Unknown Speaker 43:48
Well, I think the technology to screen for these is improving. I mean, we've got, you know, imaging technology that can be done in primary care offices now that I think those are actually going to get better. To be honest with you, at this stage, nothing beats a good eye exam, we can usually, at least we can find early structural changes. You know, I do a lot of Octa images of the optic nerve and retina, typically when I can't explain certain things. That's hard to kind of say, I'm going to make a guideline on this because sometimes that just depends on the exam. Yeah, I would say, yeah, the usual exam threshold, you're having your your typical vision screens at your when you're young child PDF, PDF, yeah, do that. But I would say you need to have eye exams every couple of years if you have completely healthy eyes with it with a well trained optometrist or ophthalmologist. And then hopefully, those optometrists, ophthalmologists are going to recognize that hey, this, this is not there may be a normal peering exam, but there's some things that we can do earlier to pick up on some of these I was using a lot of ERGs at one point because I felt like particularly in the patients who had headaches with, with no visual problems, but headaches, and they get sent to me and I was finding some very interesting thing in the ERG and V PCs. Unfortunately, most patients want to do things that are covered by the insurance in my course. And so those are no longer covered. So sometimes I'll use the patient's want to pay for it. But I was finding that was a really good way to screen. And then I would actually move a little further and down the paradigm, looking at imaging and things and we were able to pick up some very early pathologic problems with that, but
Unknown Speaker 45:35
and those are like retina grams, and then visual let you
Unknown Speaker 45:37
read the grand potential. Yeah, I had a, I was seen a lot of concussion patients TB eyes. Because I had a pretty decent protocol for it outside of what the typical protocol was the current practice I'm in, they've got me kind of more in the the lane of surgery. So I don't I don't see a lot of those anymore.
Unknown Speaker 45:59
Got it. Okay. And then once people have got surgical ocular problems, what are the main surgeries? And do you think there's anything? You know, beyond everything we've talked about, obviously, that people need to know about them before they go in? And is there anything you would add to things timing, for example of things like cataract surgeries for those who are interested in all this?
Unknown Speaker 46:21
Well, I think I think for your patients and people who follow you, obviously, the big question is, what is the effect it for cataract surgery, which is probably the most common surgery on the I O? What are the effects of intraocular lenses, because we talked about how which, and the benefits that he he showed, but he was taken mostly, you know, completely blind patients functionally, and restoring them to a cataract and so they were getting natural light in. So then the question is, so I mean, obviously, people in modern days are having cataracts much sooner than that. But what's the best way to time it? And what I would counsel people is the intraocular lenses that we have available, all block ultraviolet light, okay, there's a couple on the market that don't block 100% of the companies that manufacture them don't market that because they think that's a bad thing.
Unknown Speaker 47:12
It's not a feature. It's a bug. But for us, it's a feature, not a bug.
Unknown Speaker 47:17
But I've actually met with all the modern IOL manufacturers that that sell products, and they have no desire or interest in quantum circadian paradigm. They're all about vision and optics. And so. So for the patient who is quantum minded or circadian minded, I would just say, if you do have to have cataract surgery from a vision problem, I would delay it into it's just necessary to perform your daily activities. Don't, don't opt for it too soon, don't opt for it just to get out of glasses. Do it when you have to, from a vision lifestyle standpoint. But if they do have cataract surgery with a modern intraocular lens, you're going to have to be more mindful of the light environment, you have to get outside more, you can absorb some UV through sclera. Fortunately, our circadian processes are redundant, we've got you know, photoreceptors, you know, on the surface of the eye, in the retina, you can, the red light penetrates the sclera up a little bit through the square your skin has more photoreceptors than you'd imagine. So you can use those to offset the loss of UV through the pupil. But you got to be more intentional about it. And that's a lot of times when I talk to patients, that's what I tell them, particularly if they're if they understand this or at least want to or interested in
Unknown Speaker 48:40
backing up for a minute, though, let's activate your question, which is why is it important for UV light to hit the retina?
Unknown Speaker 48:46
Right? Great. Well, so you have a UV light is extremely important. People always, you know, in my training, we were taught movies bad for the AI bad for the retina. Well, the question is, if it's bad for the eye, bad for the retina, why do we have UV receptors in the retina? I don't believe nature or God makes mistake. So we yeah, we obviously well, however you want to believe it occurred evolved with a system that in my mind, God designed for a purpose. And so the UV receptors in our retina, particularly the retinal pigment epithelium, you know, of course UVA is the stimulus for the production of dopamine, serotonin and melatonin in the eye, and that's where it's the first stimulus for those neurotransmitters neurohormones are received in the retina, and that the information from the retina to produce those very important neurotransmitters is this transmitted into the brain through the hypothalamus. So it's critically important that the retina receives most about life. Small stimulus, you know what 3% of UVA passes through the cornea and the lens 1% of UVA UVB didn't take much. Nobody's saying you need to go stare at the sun all day. But small stimulus massive return. Yeah. That's why it's important.
Unknown Speaker 50:08
Wow, I didn't know that. I'm fascinated to learn that. Got it.
Unknown Speaker 50:14
Yeah, it's in. This is why my whole world my whole paradigm changed. And most of my colleagues, my partner 15 years, he's kind of on board. He gets it. He didn't want to really dig into it the way I did it. Like you said, earlier, I became like a first year medical student when I first got into this, mainly because I was motivated because I was sick. Yeah, nothing like being personally sick to motivate you. Right? Okay. But I studied I had textbooks. My wife was I had stacks of literature, when you're studying for your boards, or you don't have boards for five years.
Unknown Speaker 50:50
And same thing, I just had stacks and stacks and stacks and stacks of paper trying to figure out what I was going to do all this information. Yeah, yeah. But
Unknown Speaker 50:59
you know, I think the the paradigm shift for me. I never remember talking about UV light, its importance for the retina. I never remember talking about retina, hypothalamic track, I probably remember it from neuroanatomy. And med school was just one of those things you've memorized, check that box, right. But it wasn't the relevance to systemic health wasn't emphasized, it wasn't even discussed. And it is critically important. And that's why I think my field has, can have or could have a very pivotal role in the revolution of health in our, in our society, particularly as it relates to the use of technology. If we could get that message out, I will say this. For five or six years, I was the only ophthalmologist that I knew that was talking about this. In fact, I'd go to meetings and talk to people and they literally would laugh at me. Now there's a few I have people that reach out to me by email they see on Twitter, I have people that asked for, you know, my slides, because they're going to present something to their societies. So I think we're starting to kind of break into the mainstream a little bit. The problem and just you know how mainstream medicine works? Yes, No, there's not a lot of money that you can make on recommending natural treatments. And yes, you know, I've never been motivated by money. Most of my a lot of my colleagues, let me say that mean, I say most a lot of our colleagues are motivated by financial gain. The pharmaceutical and surgical device world has a death grip on our education. And they, they lead us with the carrot of, hey, if you use this technology, you use this device, you're gonna make more money. And everybody just follows along gets in line, well, telling people to get outside in the sun worn by a pair of $50, blue blockers just really didn't gotta pay the bills, right. But in the end, it's what's best for patients and ultimately, what's best for our society.
Unknown Speaker 52:57
Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's one reason why you know, and when patients are asking me, you know, why aren't there more doctors like you? The answer is, listen, it's really tough to get out of the hospital out of the operating room, because there's a real pesky simple fact of human nature is that people want to drive the car until it breaks. Which is sort of ironic, because everyone recognizes that they have to take their car in for regular scheduled maintenance. And when I'm, you know, when I'm talking to somebody about, you know, why they need to be involved with the team, my team of clinicians in some way, you know, they may say things will look is it's not covered by this, it's not covered by that, but I'm like, Yeah, listen to your oil change is not covered by your car insurance isn't they say? Absolutely not. I said, Would you ever dream of not taking your car in to have the oil change? And they say, Well, no, of course not. I say, do you think you're worth more than every six month 5000 mile oil change? And they're like, Well, of course, I say, you know, think about it, the minimum I offer people is look, we're gonna get you the best price possible. We're going to spend as little time on your cases as possible, not because we want to spend very little time with people but because sometimes it's just a real issue. Like it's tough for people to carve out even a couple hours a year to spend on Zoom calls with us and I get that because life's busy, you got kids, you got bills to pay all that right. But you've got to do it. Because that's how you get the information early that keeps you from that, you know, having to meet your $10,000 deductible so you can get your whatever fancy ocular surgery that and you know, sadly, I think a lot of people don't realize that as promising as surgery is. It is not a cure. And sometimes the recovery from these surgeries is miserable. I mean, I don't know which one it is or I don't remember which one it is, but there's one where you got to lie flat and not move your head otherwise the air bubble goes somewhere and the Renick antagonists and retinal detachment
Unknown Speaker 54:49
yeah the the gas bubble they put in also some of the corneal transplants now they'll do that. But yeah, it's actually top those macular hole surgeries can some people just can't do it. And then the outcome, the surgery is just not affected. So it's nice that that's a big commitment. It's also very expensive. And the complications from those surgeries can be vision threatening. I think what what physicians like you are doing are critically important. I hope we get more more people to buy in, again, preventive health, particularly through a lot of things that you're that you're recommending are absolutely just priceless. People, you can't really put a price on health, I mean, your life is going to be more fulfilling, you're going to be more joyful, gonna get to do things you want to do longer. My goal is to be at Fox in being able to go down to ski slopes, with my great grandkids. You know, he's healthspan. That's, that's the critical thing now.
Unknown Speaker 55:45
That's a matter of absolutely, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And that's why this Saturday, I'm doing a it's going to be Marchman 23. Whenever you're watching this, the webinars how to get your healthcare in 2023. And I'm doing it because I want to share with people why the clinic we have is structured the way it is, because we have to break the model of the conventional medical system. And that means rearranging your mindset a little bit so that you understand why the new model is set up the way that it is. And I tell people, when I'm explaining this to them, you know, Henry Ford said that if he asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster car. And when I ask patients what they want, they say, look, I want integrative and natural medicine that's covered by my insurance. And I say look, you know, just like Sorry, Henry Ford said, if I'd asked people what they wanted to buy, they would have said a faster horse, not a faster car. Right? So people are asking me, I want you to make us better. You know, they want us they want me to make a faster horse. And I'm like, No, we're gonna make a car, it's going to be a totally different thing. It's going to work way better. And you're going to be happier with the result. So anyway, any last?
Unknown Speaker 56:51
Yeah, my my opinion on that is if the last three years of healthcare and recommendations in this in this world and country particularly hasn't opened people's mind to a new way. I don't think anything will. It's been a very disturbing time, just mostly for me as an ophthalmologist, being an observer. I've had some opinions I've put out there and I know you have as well. Yeah. If this is if this has woken people up to the fallacy of modern healthcare and the paradigm that we've been pushed, you know, for the last 3040 years Big Pharma. I don't think I don't think people are going to wake up.
Unknown Speaker 57:32
Yeah, but people watching this are probably already awake. So absolutely. Thanks for joining me. It's great to see you. questions, post them in the comments and I will answer them at some point.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Quantum Ophthalmology