Glaucoma

April 3, 2004

Just had an entertaining chat about glaucoma, marmalade and her dog with Wendy.

It's lemon and lime tonight.

The marmalade not the dog.

Glaucoma - is it yourself that's been diagnosed, Susan, or someone else?

Wendy's first thought was that it may be just hypertension, which the doctors sometimes call glaucoma.

She mantioned that the official line is that it's caused by increased pressure in the anterior chamber (between the cornea and the lens), and she can't see how that can cause the reputed damage to the optic nerve.

But we needn't agonise about that, what can we do to help?

First, all the usual suggestions - relax more (I know that's a big subject, and sometimes easier said than done), the colour days idea from www.seeing.org, sunning and palming, but with a big proviso on the palming.

(Can I assume you've looked at www.seeing.org so you might have an idea what sunning and palming means?)

The proviso is that palming might have the inadvertent effect of increasing the pressure so should not be prolonged more than about 7 minutes. However, any amount of closed-eye sunning tends to reduce the pressure, so is a GOOD THING.

Diet is of course important, but you probably knew that anyway.

So are things like Bilberry (highly recommended by all of us), Vitamin C, lutein, zeaxanthin etc. Boots in the UK do a supplement called Visionace which is highly recommended. By not only me, but some of my clients and also Dollond and Aitchison.

Chocolate and cheese are NOT GOOD.

Pity about that, two of my favourites.

If you smile at him nicely your optician will do pressure readings at various times of the day, it tends to be high in the morning, goes down by lunchtime then up again. But do you really want to bother with that, it might make you more stressed and nervous, and those are two states we want to avoid as much as possible.

Learn to juggle, and practice a lot.

For people on both sites, that is a serious suggestion, and all teachers do it and suggest it. And teach it if they're good enough. Or even if they're not, you ought to see one of Wendy's juggling lessons. Or mine.

And don't stand on your head first thing in the morning.

Hope that helps for a start,

Stewart

P.s. a good book is "The Handbook of Self-Healing" by Meir Schneider.