Episode 19: Vision Problems as a Warning Light for Stress and Health Issues

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Dr. Rob Whitfield, the board certified plastic surgeon specializing in explant surgery. Breast implant illness is a topic that is not often talked enough about, especially in medical community, but is something that affects many women. In this podcast I'll be discussing the latest research, treatment options and personal stories of women who have undergone explant surgery in an effort to heal breast implant illness. In this podcast, we'll explore the symptoms.

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Welcome everyone. Today my guest is Claudia Mullenwig. She is the founder the Naturally Clear Vision Institute whose mission is to empower 10 million people worldwide to see clearly without glasses or surgery by 2030. She thinks our vision is to expand freedom and confidence to live life's true purpose. Poor eyesight and compromised vision affect every aspect of one's life. For almost all people, age and genetics have a far lower impact on the quality of their vision than lifestyle factors like stress management, healthy diet, gut health, sleep movement, mindset and others. We strive to help people make better choices for their eyesight by understanding how their day choices and actions support or deteriorate their eye health. Well, I have a special guest today. I have Claudia Mullenweg, who I've known for a period of years now, but have not been able to get her on my show until now. So Claudia has a very exceptional program. Her Naturally Clear Vision Institute's mission is to empower 10 million people worldwide to see clearly without glasses or surgery by 2030. So I want everybody to welcome Claudia to our show today.

Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Rob.

Well, I'm glad we could finally make this work. We have very busy schedules and we only see people like us at meetings unless we're online. So this has worked out wonderfully. So I look forward to hearing how things that align for us in terms of gut health, food quality, air quality, fluid quality, stress management, great sleep, all improve our vision.

Yeah, so you basically touched on this. I actually say the root cause of poor vision is stress. And stress is obviously kind of a big catch word, but really think about it. Physical stress, like not sleeping enough, not getting the nutrients you need, right? Straining, like having emotional challenges, those are all a form of stress or mental challenges, right? So at the end I always say vision is like the engine light. If something Isn't right. Your gut health, right. If there's something wrong, your vision will be blurry. And so instead of slapping glasses on, see that as the engine light. Like, what is going on with me? And I don't know about you, but I've noticed when I had really stressful periods in my life, and still to this point, if I had a really stressful experience, my vision will not be as clear as it is now. Because when we are in a stress response in the sympathetic nervous system state, right, the pupils dilate, the peripheral vision shuts down, all these things happen, and our vision will not be as good. And if that becomes chronic, guess what? Your vision will be blurry for, like, will not go away. Yeah.

It's interesting because, you know, my children, neither of them has the genetic issue that my wife's side of the family had, which was an inherited farsightedness. They're more or less maybe a little nearsighted. So nothing that's an exceptional problem. And to your point, I never had glasses until I got into medical school and was supremely focused on reading copious amounts of literature and textbooks and staying up all night studying. And, you know, I always joke with my, my children, like, you know, every Friday and Monday I had an exam, just so you understand, like, there was no, like, time period where we weren't working to a point. That creates a lot of stress. And when we're younger, even now that we're older, we don't necessarily manage our stress exceptionally well. And I certainly wasn't focused on my quality of food intake. I was just happy to have some food and, you know, probably drank a fair amount of caffeinated soda back then, which I obviously don't do anymore. I, so I, I, I tell our patients, and for everybody listening, you know, what Lottie and I probably will agree on is you have to prioritize your sleep if, if you don't sleep enough. So quantity. And if you don't sleep to the depth you need, we'll just say quality. Then you don't have a chance in hell of recovering after a stressful day or a stressful event or a week or anything. And you will wake up feeling pretty poorly, almost like you never went to sleep. And certainly she's going to talk to you about how that affects your vision. And we talk about it as it relates to recovery for patients.

100%. You touched a little bit on the genetics, and there's always right. We do have genetics, and they do influence to a certain degree. I've heard different things from 10% to 20%. And if our genetics are not great, we have to be even more, you know, be really more aware of this and be even better in our behavior than if we had really good genetics, right? So, yes, I was born farsighted with a squint in my right eye, and I had astigmatism and depth perception problems. So I had my first pair of glass at the age of three. And I don't remember other than being teased and bullied once I got to school at age 6, so I don't even remember. I think I was like, as a kid, right? I just didn't put them on. I was like, really good at taking them off my face. But I. Years later, as being in my teenage years, I started playing handball. And that was something I was not good at. I was clumsy. But my team and my little town in Germany didn't have enough guards so that everybody, they tried to get everybody. And I said yes, because I finally had some friends. And after three years of doing that, my eye doctor said, your vision is normal. And I was like, wait, what? So I was like 15, and all of a sudden, like, boys would believe you have pretty eyes. And before I was the four, I was teased and. And then a few years later, at my high school exam, my vision I got. You know, I was not a good. Like you in college, right? Not asked that much to us. But I had to study. I had to. I wanted to really get a. Get a good exam, get finish high school, get to go to college. So my vision got really blurry again and I had like, just tasted like two years of freedom of not needing glasses. And I was so. And that's when I really got into vision improvement for the first time. Because there must be a way to get it back. There must be a way. This doesn't make sense. And that's when I really started. I found that first book and I really got into that. And I was able to stay out of glasses all the way into my mid-30s when I was in the stressful marriage and divorced, being a single mom. La di ladi, like crazy, no sleep, right? Working to like, long story short. And I was back in glasses. And I remember in my early 40s after a few years of wearing them again, noticing how quickly my vision declined. I was like, wait a moment, you've done this before. I know Everybody says you're 40, there's nothing you can do. But I was so frustrated with that vision decline that I went back to this book. And then eventually of course, took courses, got a certification and so on. Because I realized this is not normal. It's not normal that we lose our vision randomly. But I could connect it to stress both times. Like intense on a different level, but intense stress in my life.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's a, it's probably, it's cliche, you know, for us to say you need to lower your stress. In fact, I was at a function last night and someone was recounting an interaction with their GP and they said, you know, the GP said, are you happy? Are you stressed out? They were trying to ask them the correct questions. But we're so programmed to not, maybe, I don't know if it's not honestly answer that, but acknowledge that there's a lot of stress going on or appreciate that we're more programmed to be like, okay, just push through all that. And self care has not really been part of our programs. Like that's just, you know, you were raised by who? You were raised by? My parents. They didn't do any self care. I mean, my parents were like, you know, raised during the American Depression. They were older, they had me when they were older. So they always, probably from a peer standpoint, looked like grandparents rather than parents. And people raised during the depression had a far different outlook on the world. And what was, you know, considered stressful to them was just like, oh, this seems pretty easy. Probably like my dad was in World War II. Probably a different kind of, you know, experience in terms of, of stress. Now, now we don't have, you know, I, I haven't experienced that kind of stress. And I will say, as we've talked in group before and offline before, that taking care of yourself is paramount. So I just prioritize my sleep over everything else and, and the quality of food I've become very focused on in terms of wild caught fish or pasture raised grass fed meat or poultry that hasn't been exposed to H. And I try to get as much quality fruit and vegetable was probably the hardest thing for us in Texas to get is hard. It's hard for us to get quality fruits and vegetables. So we go to these farmer's markets and try to source things that way. Maybe speak to our audience about how nutrition then will translate into things that can help them from a vision standpoint.

Yeah, so obviously you talked about, you know, you were in college and you spend a lot of time at nearpoint. And I want to come back to that for sure because also the lack of sunlight and all those things. But yes, Nutrition. So we have, you know, we have cells in our retina, the mitochondria in our retinal cells use more energy than any other cell in the body. So having, you know, giving them the pure energy that they need and giving them nutrients, lutein, zeaxanthin, astaxanthin, all those nutrients that are in eye vitamins come from fruits and vegetables, like from dark leafy greens, from the orange vegetables. Right. So when we don't get that into our diet when we are younger, that doesn't really, like in our 20s or 30s, that usually doesn't. You know, it's not like immediate. Like immediately there's things happening, but then you get a little older. And the ability to absorb blue light and the, you know, because our eyes are amazing, amazing structures and actually an extension of the brain. And our eyes are able to tolerate light, UV light and blue light. First of all, we don't have blue light all day long. But when we get that pure nutrition, that's when age related macular degeneration happens or when other eye diseases happen. Because now these cells can't absorb the blue light, right? Because they don't have those, they don't get those nutrients. So that's an example. Another example is sugar, right? I mean, I'm sure you talk about this too. Diabetes gives you a 60% higher chance of cataracts, 40% higher chance of glaucoma. And I give you a little story. So I had a person call me like many years ago, she was 40 and said, I have a cataract. And like, so I asked her like, is this genetic? Do you have that in your family? You know, because you can have it as a baby, right? Cataracts can also be genetic. And she said, no. I'm like, what about your blood sugar? Yeah, my doctor said, I'm pre diabetic, but I have nothing to worry about. And this is the kind of stuff where I go like, yes, you have a lot to worry about. So you don't have to have diabetes. It could be insulin resistance, it could be metabolic syndrome. And those eye diseases take decades in the making. And all of a sudden you're 16. They're like, you have a cataract. Oh, well, that's just normal. Everybody gets those. You're 70 or 80. It's like that's what the eye doctors tell their clients and their patients. And so nutrition, you know, smoking, alcohol, you know, like, you know, we all, like, I don't know about you, but when I worked in advertising in my early years, of my career. And you know, growing up in the 60s, I mean everybody had a glass of wine at the end of day. You know, you smoked a cigarette like it was just part of life to chill out at the end of the day. You know, in Germany, the end of the day fire abend actually means celebrate, evening celebration. It's like so it's like I grew up with this like sweets, right? We sugar galore. And so all of a sudden you're like, oh, you have a cataract. No, this has been 40, 50, 60 years in the making of having poor nutrition and other bad habits that contribute to all these challenges. So you know, what I'm trying to say is like I don't think it's age related. It's just years, it's age, years of abuse, you know, of your, of your system, of your, of your body is what happens.

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I always say to, I have people in my courses from 30 to 90 and I always say you can always improve. However, not Everybody, if you're 80 years old, you know, and you have one wearing glasses and you have a minus 10 level of MYOP. No, but we had somebody with a minus 12 go down to a minus 8, which is the lower your diopter in terms of strength of glasses. Also the lower the risk of some of these eye diseases because there's actually such a thing as myopic macular degeneration, right? So vitreous detachment. Many of these things are related to high levels of refractive errors, which is nearsighted fasciitis, astigmatism. So we get everybody into weaker glasses. Many people are able to completely ditch their glasses. So it's not just sleep and diet. It's also what you talked about in the beginning, the happiness, your outlook on life. What do you even want to see in your life? What is the vision for your future self? Emotions. There's a high connection to emotion related to vision. So many factors, relationships that we need to look at. So it's a physical, mental, emotional, and sometimes spiritual level that is kind of out of whack. And so. And the habits, right? Simple habits, like blinking. People with vision problems, usually they stare in the space. They might be daydreaming. They, they. They use their eyes in a way that they're not designed to be used, right? We have the macula, the phobia with a tiny spot of perfect clarity. So unless you shift your eyes a lot, which people with perfect vision do automatically, they don't practice this. It's just they do that automatically. People that had strong glasses, we need to kind of teach them some of those what I call naturally clear vision habits. We need to teach them those habits again. Initially, it's like, for me, I used to be good at staring. I could stare into space. Now I can't even do it anymore. It hurts my eyes. So some of those things, obviously, and getting into weaker glasses, weaning yourself slowly off the strong prescription glasses. We get everybody out of progressive glasses, which is those kind of modern bifocals, because they lead to partial problems. You see people on computer screens tilting their chin up. You know, they wear progressive glasses because those glasses assume that we look straight. You look in the distance, you look down, you're reading close up. But now you sit in front of a computer, which is pretty close up. But now you need that lower part. So what are they doing? They're tilting their head up. And there's a connection to astigmatism, creation, neck tension, you know, so. So it's like we're looking at the whole. The whole thing. Basically. When I work with clients.

That's a good point because I just had a conversation about head position and how we've. I think we're going to see generation after generation now with degenerative neck conditions from tilting and looking at phones and probably more eye issues for certain and certainly more metabolic disease starting at an earlier age based on the quality of the food sources or what people consider food. So just for everybody listening, if it has a label on the back, it's actually not food. Food doesn't have a label. That's things that are grown in the ground or picked off a tree or for a protein source. It's will not delve into that. But those things are, you know, particularly. I'm sort of toxic to what you're describing in terms of vision. I wanted to go back a little bit and so do you work hard to help your clients get into more of a parasympathetic state? Do you take and provide maybe pointers or some pointers you can share with the audience about getting into a parasympathetic state? Because I assume that's part of your program.

And we do that on like a top down approach, which would be, you know, I do certain. So it's kind of two things. We do something called palming, which is like resting your eyes. So some people call it cupping. You basically use your cup tans to close your eyes and you relax your eyes, you relax your shoulders. So it's kind of a way to kind of get the whole system to calm down. But the most important part is the mind. Like what are you doing in your head, right? Are you like, oh God, I got to go to the Trader Joe's later and I have to, you know, that's not helpful. So we get them into like connect with a happy place or happy memory. And there's different ways. So it's kind of a top down relaxation. The other thing I do is myofascial release. I use little therapy balls to get people to kind of like, oh, I had no. I knew my neck was stiff or my shoulders were stiff. So that people really get to relax their tense muscles. So we work on the whole body. So it's like the top bottom up with, you know, a self massage and then the top down approach. And then some things are like what more in the middle, right? We use lights. We do a lot with light, with natural light. Because eyes are light receivers. I mean people say they're photosensitive or light sensitive, which I used to be, which you usually find with refractive errors. Meaning again if somebody's nearsight or farsight or have astigmatism, they also are more light sensitive, many cases, or they have migraines. So we work with, like, weaning yourself of sunglasses, except for extreme conditions. Or if anybody comes to me has a problem with their pupillary reactions, for some reason, their pupils don't constrict, you know, in bright light, obviously. Right. But assuming all that is working fine, they're not in extreme conditions, then I get everybody out of sunglasses because you can't be light sensitive and have perfect vision. It's impossible. So we need to, you know, use that. And so we call it sunning and palming. And that is really helping people relax. And the third aspect is movement. So movement, it's. It's both a body movement initially, but then we get into smaller, smaller increments of eye movements. And initially it's like, you have to learn those habits again that people with good vision naturally do. But we teach them techniques to improve their saccadic eye movements, those little vibrations, so that they have more sharper vision. And we also work on the peripheral vision, which is peripheral vision is when you are relaxed, you have a wide visual field. When you're stressed, you have that tunnel vision. So we do that by, let's say, blocking the central vision and really exploring the peripheral vision. And those are the same cells, the rod cells in your retina that provide you with night vision. So any vision work on the peripheral will also help people with better night vision, for instance. So. Yeah, but the parasympathetic nervous system, it's, you know, we work with, like, mindset. Like, people say, I'm blind without my glasses, right? That's the first thing I hear. I'm like, oh, really? And we're shifting that into, like, a more positive thing. Like, I teach something called color of the day. You take your glasses off, pick a color, what do you see? And they're like, I see red there and there. And I didn't know all these. So becoming more present in the present moment and noticing things versus always being here in the head. Right. In the future, the past.

Do you feel like. Because they're dealing with patients with a lot, maybe chronic inflammation, trying to. To help them appreciate and understand that, to. To make adjustments. Because we have a lot of patients with chronic inflammation. You know, my breast implant group has a lot of inflammation, but there's just a lot of chronic inflammation in general. People don't detox well, people are getting constant exposures. People's gut microbiome is poor people's, you know, food choices. They have sensitivities. They may have problems with mast cell activation, histamine release, hormone imbalance, whatever. I mean, there's a whole host of things that are going, you know, off the rails with inflammation these days. Are you seeing more of that in your patient population like I'm seeing?

Not so much, because also, I'm not really. Like, if I were to teach all those things, my program wouldn't be 12 weeks, but it will be a year. So what I find that people that think about vision improvement. Let me backtrack a little bit. At a conference that we probably both attended or that we're both part of. Right. The mindshare. I did a talk, the biggest blind spot in holistic health. Because for some reason, people think everything can be reversed. Inflammation, but we don't look at the eyes. And so people that come to me are very aware. They're usually working with a functional medicine doctor. So they're already, you know what I mean? Like, they're already aware of these things. So I'm just adding the piece that's missing about brain health, eye health, how we use our eyes, nervous system regulation, how we see with, you know, based on eye anatomy. So I'm adding all those pieces in, but I'm not starting. So I don't really know because I. That's not part of what I teach. Really?

Sure, yeah. I was just curious. I get this group of patients who are super frustrated with conventional medical practice. They may have sought alternative practices. You're kind of seeing those. Those folks further down the road. They've already been engaged in and working on probably their inflammation and taking steps to lower that. So then it's a little bit. That's more your client to work with then. Because they've already been doing some of those.

Yeah. Or they. When they come with macular degeneration or they come with cataracts, we talk. I educate them on these things, but I then usually refer them to somebody else. So I have a big network of people like you and others that I work with where sometimes I'm like, people end up doing a program with metabolic syndrome. So sometimes people end up having guests on my show continuing the health journey. But I would say they don't come as this is the first step of holistic vision. Like, things usually they don't come with that. They've already been kind of in that health optimization kind of, you know, space for a while. Most of my clients, I would say.

Yeah, I find more and more clients are really due to just a. A quest really to understand exactly what's going on, how they can help themselves. They're just not satisfied with the. Your labs are normal, you know, kind of go on about your day. So I, I feel like the consumers, the clients I see, I'm sure the clients you're seeing are working harder and harder to become better informed. And I think that's. I mean, our hope for all of our clients, just like for yours, is that they get themselves into these better rituals or habits, and then it makes everything that we're trying to do more successful to help them. Well, I think in terms programming, where would our audience go to best learn more about this and engage in your program if they feel like it's a good fit?

Yeah. So my website is naturally clearvision.com There is a download called 10 Habits for Healthy and Happy Eyes. And that gives you. It's a PDF. It's very detailed. It gives you 10 things you can implement really easily. For instance, one thing is wear your glasses less. Wear your glasses only when you need them. Depending on your vision scenario, right, you might not need your glasses all the time. Maybe you just need them for reading, but you can go like on a hike without glasses. So that's one thing I recommend. So that's a great guide. Great way to get started. I also have an Instagram and a YouTube channel at Holistic Vision Coach, where there's lots of great content about how to get started. Obviously, it's not as organized, right. It's like, you know, when you jump into those things. But I feel people that are interested in these things, like you said, they're already educating themselves. They're frustrated with the medical system. And when I talk about, in my masterclass about vision and the eye doctor experience, it's just like slapping another band aid on, right? Getting another stronger prescription, paying another 600, 700, $800 for like a prescription. And we look at prescriptions in my. In my courses, right? I'm like, oh, it's a quad adapter. More. You literally probably don't even notice the difference. But now you paid another $800. And they're just frustrated with this, like, symptomatic treatment that actually makes that condition worse. And so. Yeah, but naturally vision.com is my website. That's where you can. That's all these things are linked on there.

Well, thank you so much for coming on. I've always been intrigued by both your presentation and your outcomes and your passion about the project. So thank you so much for coming on my show.

Well, thank you so much for having me. Rob.

Thanks for joining me today. I hope you found the information and stories shared on this podcast helpful and informative. Remember, taking control of your health and wellness is key to recovery from breast implant illness. If you're looking for additional resources and support, be sure to visit our online store, Dr. Rob's Solutions. At Dr. Rob Solutions, you'll find a wide range of wellness products and supplements to support your journey to recovery. From specially formulated detox supplements to personalized skincare products, we have everything you need to aid your recovery. Visit Dr. Rob's Solutions today at drrobssolutions.myshopify.com thank you for listening and we'll be back with another episode soon. Remember, you're not alone in this journey, and together we can overcome breast implant illness. Take care.