Natural Eye Care with Dr. Marc Grossman, Holistic Optometrist
Natural Eye Care with Dr. Marc Grossman, Holistic Optometrist
Cataracts and Cataract Surgery: Holistic Approaches
Cloudy vision and glare don’t have to dictate your life—Dr. Marc Grossman, integrative optometrist and acupuncturist, reveals practical ways to understand and manage cataracts, from early symptoms to smart surgery decisions. Discover how targeted nutrition, gentle natural supports, and a clear explanation of lens options can help you protect your sight and feel confident about your choices. Get the checklist, know what to ask your doctor, and take control of your vision journey. If this helped you see things more clearly, follow the show, share with a friend, and leave a review!
I'm Dr. Mark Rossman, integrative medical optometrist, acupuncturist, in practice for over 45 years, and author of five books on natural eye care. And today we're gonna start our series on cataracts. Why cataracts? Because cataracts are the major cause of vision loss in the United States. Symptoms can include blurry hazy vision that worsens over time, glare sensitivity, and research has shown that treatment in the form of specific lifestyle, diet, and supplement choices can actually stabilize cataracts or sometimes reverse it. Though I recommend people get cataract surgery all the time. So again, I'm an integrative medical optometrist, so I'm not saying not to do cataract surgery, but we really want to see what we could do before and after and possibly instead of if necessary. What a cataract is, it appears as an opaque spot on the lens of the eye that obstructs vision. It may seem that you're looking through a hazy cloud. The density of the cataract typically increases over time, so the effect on your vision will vary depending on the cataract density and especially the location of the cataract on the lens. Many people first experience a general blurriness of vision, requiring more light to read by and difficulty seeing street signs. Depth perception can often be affected, which can result in added risk of falling for older people. And again, sometimes it gets worse in one eye way before the other eye, so it affects your depth perception. The lens can change as we age and be damaged in several ways. The most common is that as we age, we become less your lens becomes less flexible and less able to adjust between near and far distances. The lens then can become clouded and obscure vision. Damage to the eye's lens impairs vision for driving, close work, affects your color, vision, and depth perception. Patients with impaired lenses may experience blurry or cloudy vision, poor night vision, and many other symptoms. Again, it's the cloudiness, the depth perception, the light sensitivity. These are the things that most people complain about. Cataracts tend to worsen over time. About 40 million people in the U.S. alone suffer from cataracts. Only 10% are affected by cataracts by age 55, but it jumps to over 50% by 75 years old and over 70% by 80 years old. Cataract removal, highly successful, is the most common surgical procedure covered by Medicare, with almost 3 million surgeries performed per year. Let's say you do need to get a cataract operation. What are the things that you need to think about beforehand? One is have the doctor check you for dry eye. Have them do a test called tear breakup time to see if your tears evaporate too quickly. Also, check for what we call mybobian gland dysfunction. Check the glands in your eyelids to make sure that your eyes are producing a good tear film because many times after cataract surgery, we get dry eye. So we want to do omega-3 fatty acids. I have our own tear film support nutrient, but omega-3s, flaxseed meal, hemp seed, uh chia seeds, walnuts, salmon, anything you can do to help with the omega-3s. Then we want to see if your retina can handle it. So one of the tests I always recommend is that they do an OCT test of the macula. Is your macula vulnerable to all this new light energy that's going to be coming in? Because remember, this cataract works as a sunglass, blocking the light from your retina. So all of a sudden you get all this light coming in, and you want to make sure that your retina can handle it. So we want to do an OCT test of the macula to see what your vulnerability is. But whether you have vulnerability or not, I always recommend that you do the following, whether through supplements that have lutein and zeaxanthin, such as, and food such as goji berries, kale, green leafy vegetables, blueberries, all the good nutrients for your eyes to build carotenoids of lutein and zeaxanthin. And yes, you can do it through supplements too, if need be. But we need to build those carotenoids so that your eyes can handle all this new light energy that comes in so that the cataract could be successful, but then your macula is protected also. So other things that I recommend before you go in for cataract surgery rescue remedy, a homeopathic remedy to take to calm your nervous system down. A visualization from Peggy Huddlstein, preparing for surgery to get your system ready to be healed during the eye surgery. Arnica 30C, three, four times a day, starting the day before and for three or four days after to make the healing go better. So again, we want to get the eyes nice and healthy and good tear film. And it also depends if you're very highly near-sighted and getting the cataract operation, because then your eyeball is more stretched. So we also want to make sure that we don't get a lot of floaters and retinal detachments. So we want to build that up. You're going to get many choices when you go for the cataract surgery. Should you do a multi-blended lens, like a multifocal? Should you do a toric lens to correct for astigmatism? Should you do one eye for near, one eye for far? Do you want to have them both implants set for close or for distance? There is no answer to that question. It's an individual decision based on how you use your eyes. For that, you'd have to discuss that with your eye doctor, or you can do an individual consultation with myself. So again, we want to make the eye as healthy as possible. We want to especially get the tear film as good as possible. So the tests we want to do before, once again, are tear breakup time, mybobian gland dysfunction testing during dry eye testing, and an OCT test of the retina. If you're going to get cataract surgery, it's amazing. It works really well. And there are also different things that we can discuss in a different podcast on possibilities to not need cataract surgery and what are the alternatives if you don't need it at this moment. And we'll discuss that in a different podcast. So thank you for your attention and help keep your precious gift of sight.