➡ The text discusses the importance of understanding the root causes of eye problems like macular degeneration, glaucoma, and cataracts, rather than just treating the symptoms. It suggests that factors like stress, lifestyle, and even past trauma can impact our eye health. The text also emphasizes the potential of natural remedies and lifestyle changes, such as meditation and nutrition, to improve eye health. Lastly, it highlights the importance of a team approach in healthcare, where the patient is an active participant in their own treatment.

➡ The text discusses the importance of understanding the causes behind changes in eye health, which can be linked to various factors such as excessive screen time or gut health. It also introduces the Bates Method, a technique for improving vision, and emphasizes that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for eye health. The speaker, an expert in the Bates Method, highlights the need for personalized approaches and continuous learning in the field of eye health.

All right, thanks, everybody, and welcome to another edition of conversations with Dr. Cowan and friends. And today is a really important one, I think, because. And I’m going to explain a little bit. This is Mark Grossman, who’s an optometrist, who is the most recent addition to the new biology clinic staff. So, Mark, I just wanted to say a few words, like, why did we do a new biology clinic? And obviously, there’s a lot of reasons, but one of them is people like us. And I would say, even me, we’re actually being shut out of the medical system, right? So if you wanted to go to a doctor, you couldn’t go unless you had, you know, a Covid shot and wore a mask and submitted to colonoscopies and all kinds of things.

And so basically, we. Me and my friends, we didn’t go. And so, okay, that’s medical doctors. Then the same thing with Dennis. You couldn’t go unless she had a Covid shot. And so you don’t go to the dentist. And then you think, you know, it’s like living in a third world country or even worse. And so we started looking at, you know, well, what are we going to do here to help people? And one of the things that came up. And it came up with me, I couldn’t go even get my. A new pair of glasses, which I probably shouldn’t wear, but anyways, I do.

Unless I wore a mask to go to the optometrist. And I thought, this is crazy. Like, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to put them. Next thing you know, I heard about somebody. You had to have a Covid shot to go to the eye doctor to get a new pair of glasses. And you think, I don’t have any place to even have somebody, like, tell me whether my eyes are okay or whatever. You know, it’s just weird. So we thought, okay, well, we have to. We can’t do everything, right, because it’s online, but we can bring people on who can address these issues, right? And at least help people decide what.

What their options are, whether they need to go and what they need to do when they, you know, what tasks. And so that’s why we’re thrilled to have. We now have a dentist and we have an. And so we’re bringing you on as somebody who can help people with their eye issues, because people have eye issues, and they want to know what they can do and if they can’t go and get a question answered unless they have a Covid shot, which my guess would make their eye issues worse. And it’s weird, you know, it’s just frigging weird.

Anyways, with that intro, Mark, welcome. If you could just introduce yourself to the people and just talk a little about your background and how you see eye problems and then you know, who might benefit from talking to you and what, you know, like what you might suggest or what. Just what it would look like. And again, thanks for joining us and welcome, and we’re thrilled to have you, Mark. Thank you so much, Tom. Yeah, I mean, I love joining the outliers. I always felt like I was one of those outliers when I was in graduate schools, etc.

But I like to start off with a premise. The premise is that embryologically, neurologically, embryologically, the eye is brain tissue. If science has shown that we know that there’s neuroplasticity of the brain, then we know this neuroplasticity of the eye. So I tell people what neuroplasticity means. Things can change. Yeah, things can change. That it’s not stuck. Right. And I will go through my own case. So. And that’s by the way, not to interrupt, but that’s what we hear. Oh, you got this. That’s it. Nothing can change. Finished. No good. And even, even, even worse. And also in multiple personality disorders, all the different personalities had different prescriptions.

Okay. And. And in Chinese medicine, you know, as Shakespeare said, the eyes are the windows to the soul. In Chinese medicine, we look at the eyes as the shen, the pilot light, the spirit. Yeah. So we’re starting off with a premise. Now I’ll go into what I do and why I do it. Okay, so let’s. Let’s go back a little bit. So as an eye doctor, optometrist, what do we do? We look inside the eye. We go, oh, you’ve got the beginnings of a cataract. What is a cataract? The cataract is a cloudiness of the lens in the eye.

And then you say to the doctor, excuse me, is there anything I can do about this beginning of a cataract? And they say, no. They say, no, we’re just going to watch it. And when it gets worse, we can do surgery right away. You’re unempowered. You say, okay, a part of my body is degenerating. I just have to wait until it gets worse. And then they’re going to take it out and put an artificial plastic lens in. Now, am I against cataract surgery? No. I worked in a multidisciplinary Clinic with ophthalmologists and optometrists, and when necessary, we refer for cataract surgery.

But what’s really important, which I’ll get into, is what can you do if you did need the cataract surgery, which is maybe number three or four on my list. But what can you do if you need cataract surgery to make sure that it goes as well as possible? What homeopathically, what in case. Because one of the symptoms of cataract surgery is dry eye. What can you do to get your tear film and in as good a shape so that you don’t develop dry eye problems after cataract surgery? And then the other thing is, these days, when I got out of school 45 years ago, there was no implants.

You had these big, thick cataract glasses. Okay, so what do you do now? It’s like, okay, do you want a multifocal implant? Do you want a one eye for near, one eye for far? What do you want in the implant? So what I work with people is I’m their advocate. I hold their hand, I speak to the doctor, I tell them what questions to ask. Remember, it’s not about the answers, it’s about the questions. Yeah. So we need to know what as a. As you know, what I love about your new paradigm of the new biology clinic is you’re empowering people to be educated consumers and to ask the right questions.

Yeah. Okay, so here we go with the cataracts. And then what can you do after the cataract surgery to make sure that it heals? Well, think about it. The lens is cloudy, and then all of a sudden we put in a clear lens, and my God, people see better. It’s fantastic. You know, there’s a high success rate, but then their retina is more prone to macular degeneration because all of a sudden there’s a lot more light energy coming in. We have to do nutritional things, herbal things, special sunglasses. Depending on the color of their eyes, if they have less melanin than others, we’re looking at not treating the eye, treating the person behind the eye.

Then the question is, why did that person develop a cataract at 62 and that person at 88? And then the question is, why did they develop it in their right eye, but their left eye hardly has any. Oh, but why? I was the kid in the back of the room, and I know you are because you always ask the right questions in everything. I’ve read and listened to you. Well, why, why, why? And they go, why? Do you want to know why? I go because I want to know why this is the only thing that matters.

Right. And they say we’re going to treat it the same way. We’re just going to give surgery and medication. So I said, all right, I’m going up to the library. I’m going to go study Chinese medicine, I’m going to study nutrition. And like I said, this is my 800 page book with 2000 peer review references on natural ways to heal eyes. Yes, the information’s out there, but eye doctors don’t have the time and the education to do that. And that’s one of the things that is part of what I’m going to hopefully do in the next couple years is with another ophthalmologist and some other people develop a program for eye doctors to treat eye problems naturally.

So that’s just a little bit about cataracts. You know, Mark, I don’t know what you think of this, but I have long wondered whether you form a cataract to actually protect your retina. Yes, yes. Remember, everything serves you and everything hinders you. Yes. Many times we develop. Body is not stupid. It knew that that was. There’s something toxic in the light or that you don’t want to see or, I don’t know, something. So it creates like a film. It’s protective. Yeah, it creates like an internal sunglass. All of a sudden you’re blocking it. But, you know, it’s all of a sudden things are glary and all of a sudden they’re blurry.

But yes, remember, it’s the unconscious that we have to make conscious. It’s the underlying issue of like, why did that person develop macular degeneration? Oh, look at that. That’s an Earth element issue. Oh, that person was taking care of their father who was dying. They weren’t nurturing themselves and therefore all their energy was going out. Why did that person develop macular degeneration at 52 years old? So. And then let’s go to glaucoma for a second and then we’ll do another one. So glaucoma, what happens? We measure the eye. We do eye pressure, we look at the optic nerve, we do visual fields, and you have a little bit of a high eye pressure.

And you know what the doctor says to you? You are a glaucoma suspect. Oh, my God, I’m a suspect. And what are we going to do? We’re going to watch. That’s in jail. We’re going to watch that too. And when it gets worse, we’re going to do surgery or medication. So the question is, as the empowered patient, what can you do while you’re watching it? Then you go to the cardiologist, oh, you got a little bit of a heart problem. Oh, we’re going to watch that too, until you need a stent or a bypass. But Dean Ornish published a definitive study showing that meditation, nutrition, does so much as, you know, things you can do for heart that you don’t have to just keep watching these things until they get worse.

Now, I just finished giving a weekend workshop, and it was really interesting because somebody in the class shifted the consciousness because many times in medicine we say, well, we’ll wait and see what’s going on. Now, when you wait and see, you’re not paying attention to the present, and that means you’re not seeing. She said, we need to see and then wait. So we need to see why this is happening and what’s going on. And that’s in terms of myopia. I was legally blind without glasses from third grade on. I couldn’t see the biggie on the eye chart.

And what happens when you get your first pair of glasses? Oh, a year or two later, you need a stronger pair and a stronger pair. Oh, man. My dad was an accountant. He said, this is the greatest profession ever. Every time you give them something, it gets worse and they. They still come back and thank you and pay you. Yeah. I go. He goes, you can’t lose. But I improved my own eyesight. I’ll be 70 years old. I passed a driving test. I could read without glasses. Vision can change. It’s the why. How do we use and abuse our eyes? You go to the dentist and they talk about dental hygiene.

What about visual hygiene? Which I’ll be talking about in the classes I give for your group. Visual hygiene. We’re on computers and digital devices 8 to 10, 11 hours a day on average. We’re NDD. We’re nature deficit Disorder. We, you know, we. We need to be in the world and we need to protect our precious gift of sight. Now I can go. I could roll for another hour. Yeah. Any questions? Yeah, so what. What might it look like for a person comes in, let’s say they’ve been told they have early cataracts. We’re going to watch and see what happens next when they come to you, because obviously it’s online, so you can’t.

Do you. Yeah. Tell them what. What might you suggest they do as far as tests or whatever it would be. Yeah, Right now I’m doing. I’m only seeing patients in person once a month and I’m doing lots of telemedicine. So basically if anybody who wants to consult with me, I have to see a copy of their records. I have to look at their eye records before I would even have the consultation. Because there’s six different types of cataracts. Is it related to blood sugar? Is it a diabetic cataract? Is it secondary to being on steroids? Because one of the side effects of steroids is cataracts.

Is it, do they live even inhaled steroids by the way? Correct. I just did a consult yesterday and she actually said, oh, I have an inhalent of a steroid. Any problems? I said, well, it could affect the beginnings of a cataract, you know, so then once we see the type of cataract, what layer it’s in, then I’ll make recommendations on different types of natural eye drops to what we call in medicine anti glycation agents because the proteins stick together. So there’s certain eye drops that have N acetylcarnosine, there’s some homeopathic remedies, and then there’s even some dog drops that you can see that they’ve reduced cataracts in animals.

So it’s not just limited to humans. If somebody says, oh, my dog has a cataract, oh, there’s things they can do. And I believe that in the, and there’s many research going on in many countries around the world for eye drops to help, you know, reduce cataracts. Now, but I am not against cataract surgery. Okay? But I’m saying if somebody has cataracts and we, if you’re going to get changes, we’re going to get changes usually in the first three to four months. And then if we say, well, you know, I think you’re probably better off doing the cataract operation, then we have to go through how to do it.

Do you do it through laser? Do you do it through fake or emulsification? Help them with their choices. What I love about the new biology clinic, this is what excited me, is that you’ve put together a team. And I tell every single patient, I am just part of your team. It’s a team approach because even if you get the cataract done, we’re not taking care of the underlying issue. It could be a blood sugar issue. Right. And so in, in inherent in that the first step sounds like you have to know not only the exams of the patient, of the person, but the story, like what happened to you.

And, you know, what is it? Somebody who was taking care of their family and resented it? Or, you know, is there somebody who. I don’t know if this. It figures into how you think, but I can imagine somebody who saw something really traumatic. They might have some sort of reaction that would inhibit their vision. I don’t know if it works like that, but I wonder about that myself. Well, Tom, we know that you’re psychic because about 20 years ago, no, maybe 30 years ago, I had a theory that is shown to be true. And it’s called that eyeballs get stuck in time.

And what happens is the eyes are the video cameras to the world. And this is what happened. I was working with a patient. I was just doing eye tracking. Follow my finger. Follow my finger. All of a sudden, she started getting flashbacks about being beaten by her father. I said, oh, my God, they didn’t teach me this in optometry school. So I put my finger down, and they didn’t teach us any of the good stuff. So I put my finger down. And this is before emdr, a psychotherapy that deals with eyes and trauma, was existing. And I put it down, and I said, okay.

And then about five, six years later, I read an article by Dr. Francine Shapiro, who discovered EMDR, which is an eye movement therapy to help unleash emotional trauma. Yeah. So what happens is when we see and experience trauma, remember I said, it’s the spirit, it’s the shen. When we see things, it gets into our cellular memory, and it gets into our cellular memory in a particular angle of gaze. Hmm. Was it. Oh, that’s interesting. I would even say maybe it gets into your water. Yes, yes. Totally into the water. I mean, through you. I started drinking structured water a few years ago.

Yes, the water. Yes, because. Collects the memories and it changes its configuration slightly, right? Yes. And that’s why a lot of times I will do sounding or I’ll do tuning forks, because the eye is 98% water. It’s fluid. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And so then you’re sort of, you know. So again, it comes from the. The foundational principle of the clinic is your body does these things for a reason. Now, you know, just like the blood pressure, in order to create flow, you squeeze down the vessels. Now you keep squeezing and squeezing and squeezing until you don’t get any more flow.

So that’s it. The therapy can be a problem. Right. You put a film over your eyes so you’d block the light and eventually can’t see. But I always used to say well, what else can you do? The only thing you can do is stop the exposure to the light. Then your body doesn’t have to do that sort of, you know, heroic therapy to make it better. Right. And then the other thing is, on one level is giving yourself permission to see. Yeah. You know, remember why? Again, the why. And in Chinese, I mean, the lens of the eye and the adrenals are related.

The highest concentration of vitamin C in the body is in the adrenals. The next highest is in the lens of the eye. But let’s think about the adrenals for a second. That’s fight or flight. That’s the stress hormone. So again, we’re saying what started to happen three to six months to two years before you developed a change in your eye tissue. Again, I need the records, but in the conversation of the consultation is the discussion of the why. Yeah. What happened to you? Yeah. And then what you can do on a physical, emotional and psycho spiritual level.

Now, sometimes it’s just as simple as I’m sitting in front of the computer eight hours a day, so I need some blue light glasses. And you know, sometimes it’s, you know, we, we have to look at on different levels. And then I said, well, I think, I mean, need to refer you to an integrative medical doctor or somebody to work on the gut, because remember that one, we all know about the microbiome and the brain. The gut brain connection. Yeah. What was the initial premise? The. The eye is the brain. Yeah. So then we have a gut eye connection.

Right. So. Yep. So maybe the last thing. So I, I know I always say this sheepishly because I didn’t. I’ve never done it myself because I’ve known about the Bates method for 40 years. I don’t know. So in my understanding, Marcus, you, you not only know the Bates Method, you teach the Bates Method, you’re like one of the world’s experts on the Bates Method. In other words, that’s vision restoration. Right. How do you know a person can’t see properly? Like, I couldn’t and you couldn’t. You did something about it. I didn’t really. But you could. That is another thing.

If somebody just, you know, young people or whatever people say, I want to help with my vision, to restore my vision. That’s in your wheelhouse, I take it? Oh, yeah, yeah. We just gave a three day workshop at Omega Institute. It’s specifically on that. Yeah. I mean there’s different. But remember, there is no cookie cutter cookbook. But there’s. It. There are infrastructure Bates Premises and Practices that I will be teaching to your classes. And we also have. I’m going to be giving out free videos of these kind of things because the Bates Method is. Is good.

But we want to go beyond Bates. Yeah, right. It’s old, so we’ve. We’ve gone beyond that. You know, I don’t know if it’s. I think it’s you who told me this, but I remember this, too. You go to the high school, like, AP classes, and everybody has glasses. And you go to the gangs, you know, and they don’t. None of them. So the people who I think you say look at things too much, can’t see. Yeah. Well, the thing was, I grew up in New York City. I went to a high school called Stuyvesant High School, which was a math and Science High School.

90% of us were nearsighted. Less than 5 to 10% of juvenile delinquents are nearsighted. Yeah, right. 90% of accountants are nearsighted. Right. Less than 5% of farmers are nearsighted. Yeah. Right. So function affects structure. If you carry 50 pounds of rice on your back, this will be straight, you know. Yeah. That’s interesting. Yeah. Great. All right. I think we got it. I think that gives people a really good idea. And again, Mark, I’m thrilled to have you with us. And. Yeah. I’m just glad we’re doing this and you’re joined us and I think it’ll be fun.

I am so excited because as you are a seeker and an out, you know, part of our little outlier medicine, I have a thing that every day I have to learn something new. Yeah. And. And being part of this team. And hopefully I am, like, so excited to learn more and to be part of a collaboration. This is what I want to do in my, you know, after 45 years of practice, this is what I want to do. No, it’s an amazing group, and we have some really fascinating conversation. I’m sure. Yeah, it’s amazing. All right, Mark, I can’t thank you enough.

And we will be in touch a whole lot of times in the future. Okay. With deep gratitude for what you’ve put together. And thank you for having me as part of your team. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.
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