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eye surgerythe major tools of that industryenter the lives of virtually all the citizens of the Western world. Aldous Huxley wrote in The Art of Seeing that "if everyone who had deficient vision had broken legs, the streets would be full of cripples."

Patients come in year after year, their eyesight getting worse. Conventional eye care professionals just give them stronger and stronger glasses. Something is wrong with this picture. Cataracts are present to some degree in nearly all adults over the age of 60. These patients are usually told, "Let's wait until the cataract 'ripens' (gets worse), and then we'll remove it surgically." Something is wrong with this picture. Patients with macular degeneration and glaucoma are told, "We'll watch it and try to keep it under control." Where is the much-needed prevention, education and rehabilitation? Something is wrong with this picture as well.

Natural Eye Care will educate readers about their vision difficulties, explain how to prevent vision disorders, and explore how they heal those that do occur. It will enable the individual to be a more informed consumer when it comes to vision care.

Medication and surgery may sometimes be necessary or even the appropriate way to maintain the precious gift of sight. This book and the approach it presents are intended to be used as an adjunct to these traditional treatments of vision problems.

Doctors in China have reached out to the West to borrow the best modern medicine can offer; we in the West can, in turn, take from the ancient wisdom of the East. By combining the medical approaches of East and West, we may be able to achieve better health with less cost.

Natural Eye Care will provide both the lay person and the eye care professional with a complementary, balanced approach. In the past, people's choices have been limited to either/or: either traditional medicine with its emphasis on health as a static state of well-being and disease as a breakdown or malfunction of the body machine, or alternative methods placing total emphasis on emotional, psychological or spiritual healing.

Natural Eye Care is dedicated to the belief that a common ground can be created in which the strengths of modernday Western medicine can be united with the preventive approach of other healing modalities.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my teachers, colleagues, patients, friends and family for their love and support. Special thanks to:

My optometric family Drs. Sam Berne, Ray Gottlieb, Robert Michael Kaplan, Jacob Liberman, my co-author Glen Swartwout and others too numerous to mention with special indebtedness to my two primary mentors, Drs. Albert Shankman and Elliot Forrest.

My office colleagues who make working with patients such an enjoyable experience: Dr. Bob Lesnow, Katy Bray, Vinton McCabe, Denise Catuguno, Annette Nacinovich, Kim Pitcher, Dr. Mark Fillipi, Dr. Ron Wish and Dr. Catherine Sweet. Special thanks to my friend, mentor and partner at Integral Health Associates, Jason Elias, for his inspiration and help.

My community of friends whose nourishment I feel everyday: Michael Edson, Ellen Marshall, Amy Fradon, Loren Quimby, Bea Ehrsam, Pasquale Strocchia, Paul Barone, Hindy Preskin and David Lester.

Carol Lorente for her wonderful gift for turning our ideas into the written word.

Ramona Fradon for illustrations, Katy Taylor for endless patience as copywriter and Phyllis Herman, our editor, for her belief in the concept of natural eye care.

My wonderful parents, sisters and their families, Dorothy and Irwin Grossman; Karen, Ronald, Cory and Jenna Speicher; Lisa, Scott, Steven and Jessica Ente.

Finally, my departed grandmother, Esther Teichman, whose failing eyesight inspired me to help others with their vision.

MARC GROSSMAN

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Introduction To See

When he broke that commitment to art, to making beauty, to recording, to bearing witness, to saying yessiree to the life spirit, whose only request sometimes is just that you acknowledge you truly see it, he broke something in Hal. Hal could not defend himself, for instance; he didn't consider himself worthy of defense. He never learned to fight. And listen, the most amazing thing, his eyes became weak! But I always took up for him, I knew he had to be reminded that it was all right to see.

Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

The body does not work as a series of parts in isolation, but as a whole, dynamically integrated living system. Every cell in the body has receptors for neuro-transmitters, so in a real sense, every cell is a nerve cell. We do not see with our eyes or think with our brains, but rather we live in a "minding body." This biological awareness of every cell is really the foundation of vision, the ability to derive meaning and direct action based on patterns of electromagnetic stimuli which we call light.

The skin of the entire body is covered with tiny electric eyes known in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as acupuncture points. Each is a window of heightened sensitivity of the organism to its energetic environment. What is unique about the acupuncture points compared to the rest of the human skin,

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our largest organ, is that at these points there is a gathering of blood vessels and nerve cells called a neurovascular bundle.

The most profound window on the world of energy that surrounds us is our eyes themselves. These remarkable sense organs specialize in the transduction of quantum photon energies into electrical nerve signals that account for two thirds of all the nerve current entering the human brain. To accomplish this demands the most concentrated and specialized neurovascular structure in the body. So much is vision dependent on circulation, that the entire blood volume of the body passes through the eyes every 40 minutes or so. Behind the retina lies a tremendous network of blood vessels positioned perfectly to bask in the warmth of natural light.

According to Nobel Laureate, Albert Szent Gyorgi, natural light can stimulate a 400 to 500 percent increase in the performance of not only enzymes and hormones in our blood, but even the basic building blocks like vitamins and minerals. So, not only is vision and eye health dependent on good nutrition, but even our ability to get the most out of our body chemistry depends on the energizing effect of the light entering our eyes. And besides direct energetic effects on the compounds in our blood, there are intricate pathways in the brain that link vision to the regulation of nerve, endocrine and immune function. This may be one reason why allergies improve in children who develop enhanced visual abilities through vision therapy.

Eye tissue places tremendous demands on all body systems to maintain optimum health and performance, because the process of vision is so exacting. In no other part of the body must the major branches of the nervous system coordinate so closelya source of tremendous strain under various conditions of stress, whether visual, cognitive, emotional, physical or metabolic. The voluntary nervous system must command the two eyes to position accurately within a tiny fraction of a degree. At the same time this function must maintain precise coordination with focusing which is regulated by the parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system. Under mild stress, focusing near gets harder, while converging the two eyes to triangulate the same near target also gets harder. Under moderate stress, focusing gets harder still, and overconvergence produces strain as well on the alignment system. Under severe prolonged stress, the system eventually fatigues, resulting in a general difficulty in both focusing and converging for near visual tasks.

The eyes are unique in many ways, making them a particularly sensitive in-