Improve ADHD and Dyslexia through Vision Training, with Dr. Bryce Appelbaum

Motion sickness, poor eye contact, trouble catching balls, or being the last one picked on sports teams. Reluctant readers preferring audio books rather than reading on their own. Scattered clutter around the desk and not being able to find things in your environment. Dizziness, nausea, vertigo. I mean, there's so much out here that has a portion that's related to our dominant sensory system, the one that's supposed to be guiding and leading rather than interfering.

If you want to live like you matter, ditch the pills, look great, and feel freaky freaking amazing. You're in the right place. I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo.

And I'm Dr. Ed Levitan. Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast.

Where we empower you to live a vibrant and healthy life by optimizing your structural, chemical, emotional, social, and spiritual lives.

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Hello, and welcome back to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast.

We.

We have an amazing guest today. I know I say that every day, but we do. We have Dr. Bryce Applebaum.

Well, guest and friend and a friend.

And part of our mastermind, and we're just delighted to talk to him. So he is Dr. Bryce Applebaum. He is a pioneer in neuro optometry. He's passionate about unlocking your potential through vision. He's on a mission to change the way the world views vision because there's more to vision than just 2020 eyesight. And he's developed really cool programs that retrain the brain to revise the ey and it impacts everything from ADHD to dyslexia to just your daily experience of life. So, Bryce, welcome. We're so excited you're here.

Such an honor to be here. Excited to hang out with you guys and talk about vision and empower and educate your audience.

Well, the first thing is I'm actually excited about this because I want to know how dyslexia, how. What's going on? Like, how does it affect it?

This is going to be. This is going to ruffle some feathers, and I want to double down on it. Dyslexia, by definition, means difficulty reading words. I have yet to find a patient out of tens of thousands of patients where we couldn't improve their reading ability. So what that means is dyslexia is an incomplete diagnosis until hidden functional vision problems that cause the exact same symptoms and challenges are ruled out first or treated first. So it's not like somebody's born with a portion of their brain missing that allows them to read. Right? I mean, as silly as that sounds, I think that's what many people really stand on a Mountaintop. Believing and reading is something again. We're not born with it. It comes through learning from our life experiences. It comes from the development of our tracking system, our conversion system, our focusing system, our visual processing systems, the development of depth perception, the ability to use the eyes as a harmonious team, and the ability for the eye brain connection to be efficient and fluid. When the language centers and the visual processing centers and the auditory processing centers are not communicating effectively, or we haven't allowed the airplanes to take off and land in the right places through the developmental milestones and the sequencing that's needed, then reading can become the most daunting task. I had two people in town last week for intensives. We do these intensive boot camps for people from out of state and out of country. It's a lot of work, but it's ridiculous results. The father runs a non profit for dyslexia. His daughter has dyslexia. He has dyslexia. They've moved around the country and are now in Florida because of this school that's specific for dyslexic learners that she's now a student at. In a week's time, they're both reading by the end of the week. And they weren't reading before. The daughter was skipping words, losing her place. Words are moving and going double. She had a hard time even comprehending what she was reading. I would argue that wasn't dyslexia. It was just a label slapped on symptoms, behaviors from our medical system.

I mean, you know, here's the problem, Bryce, or challenge that dyslexia, as we know, you know, this is near and dear to our heart because one of our kids has essentially the worst form of dyslexia. You could basically have had and has processing speed issues, has issues with retention, storage and retrieval, and it's called dyslexia. But it's really this sort of sin. It's more. It's not just one thing. Sure, she sometimes reversed her letters, but it was a bigger issue. And she's out of school for kids with dyslexia.

But can I ask you a question?

Of course. And she had glasses, by the way. She had those prism glasses to help her see, which helped.

So without even saying anything else, there is a visual component to your daughter's reading challenges that is treatable.

Absolutely, absolutely.

So you both are brilliant doctors. You know more than 99.9% of the population. All of those areas of opportunity that you shared with processing speed and retention. We can arrange the conditions to establish that to Teach that with the right type of visual brain training. Yet the medical model would say, no, these are just temporary endpoints or these are labels. And so we got to figure out special ways for her to take in information, whether it's auditory processing or certain reading programs like Orton Gillingham, which bypass some of the visual stuff. I mean, prism glasses is moving. Those are moving the world to where her eyes are, because her eyes, there's likely some sort of spatial mismatch. And like you said, this is not eyesight. This is vision. This isn't the ability to see. This is the brain's ability to process the information. The eyes are sending it, filter it, organize it, and then know what to do with it. And any brain at any age can be improved and enhanced in terms of that ability.

So we actually went to a provider that's similar that looked obviously not as good as you. No, obviously not good.

We didn't know you then.

I want to be in Boston for many reasons. But one of the reasons is there are three providers that I know of that are doing much better care than everybody else in the Boston area. And yet still, in my opinion, there's so much left to be desired based off of their treatment models.

Right. We actually went to New Jersey.

Even better.

But that being said, just so I understand, out of 100 kids with dyslexia, they all come to you are 100% cured, or are they? All of them are improved. I hear that. How many of them are cured and how long is it diagnosed also?

Yeah. So I would say it depends what cure looks like. I would say 100 out of 100 are improved. And in terms of doing enough work and the right work with the right motivation and the right compliance, reading cannot be a weakness, in my opinion, for 100 out of 100.

Okay.

Which, again, is a bold statement, and it goes against the entire medical model. But when we see it over and over and over again, and we have programs in place that can be rinsed and repeated for every different profile, to customize training to. For a child, teach the vision development that didn't take place on its own or remove the roadblocks or maladaptations that have emerged, or for somebody who has an acute event where they've acquired some sort of brain injury, and then they're having to tap back in and re. Establish order, it really stems from not using the brain the way in which it's wired. And I believe there is neuroplasticity for vision at every age, for every brain, if we know what to do. And what to do is something that. There's a big disconnect in my space on what that looks like.

So how does. But there's obviously a genetic component to this because it does get passed down.

But think about it. We say your genetics are 10% of your life, and the other 90% is what you do about it.

So.

Right. But there is.

So genetics plays a role in a few areas, but not in a reading ability area. In my opinion, genetics is strabismus or amblyopia, which is. Strabismus is the medical term for an eye turn. Amblyopia is a medical term for a lazy eye. There absolutely is a genetic component to those. But something like nearsightedness or myopia. It's genetics and it's environment. We can't control who the parents are. But environment plays massively more of a role with vision, especially with kids today because kids are being exposed to screens at earlier and earlier ages. They're being asked to read earlier than ever before. And when the system is presented with stress and it doesn't have the foundation in place to meet those demands, we adapt or we avoid. So avoidance of reading, we know what that looks like. And then maladaptations or bad habits, those then become more and more embedded with time because the demands visually in school and in life increase every single year. But if the root challenge is still there, it just becomes more your normal.

But dyslexia definitely runs in families.

Well, but Bryce is saying not necessarily.

Up until five, I've been in practice for 16 years. The first decade of my career, I was so careful with what I said about dyslexia and visual processing and a very clear like, we don't cure dyslexia. We cure the vision problems that make it hard to read. And I would say now that's still accurate. But so much of dyslexia is not dyslexia. Just like so much of ADD or ADHD or autism are not these labels. But they're becoming more and more prevalent because we're more aware of them. But also we have more of the triggers and challenges that are causing these changes and bad habits.

So this is a dumb question. I apologize ahead of time because in our field it's also similar. But if this is so profound and it's been around for a hundred years.

Why is nobody absolutely so. And I think I'm assuming you're talking about like the treatment to close the gap. Right? Yeah, there's. This isn't like physical therapy for sprained mcl, where if it's grade one, you get a dozen sessions, if it's grade two, you get two dozen. And depending on where you go, it's kind of the same work everywhere. There is not consistency on what vision training looks like. You don't even have to be board certified to offer it. And nowadays you don't even have to be a doctor for what people are calling vision training. There's OTs, PT, speech therapists, teachers, coaches, trainers, health vision coaches doing vision work because the need is so great. In the vast majority of these cases, it's ocular motor work, which is tracking and kind of X axis work, which is important to do. And it's impacted for many people's lives. But life takes place on the Z axis, which is the focusing system, the eye coordination system, the depth perception. And you need to have the ability to utilize lenses and prism and high tech and filters and things that are really only unique to our profession to be able to implement those and establish programs and protocols to fix these problems. But then even on top of that, our model, let's say, is very holistic. We are integrating cognition and movement and balance and vestibular input into all of the work from day one. Because vision doesn't operate in isolation of these systems. A lot of what we do is be is based off of what was done for me to fix my problems. My father was a developmental optometrist, my mother was an occupational therapist. They had no idea what to do with me and literally created a practice around what they did for me. And we've just doubled down on that and evolved it over time. And now it's, you know, what was done for me in years, we can accomplish in months for kids and adults with a much higher ceiling. So to answer your question, Ed, there's not consistency in what this looks like. So that's why we see so many people from out of state and out of country. Not because there's not eye doctors around, but what we do we call visual performance training because it's very different than the old school vision training, vision therapy, orthoptics, visually enhanced occupational therapy, sensor integration based training. I mean, there's lots of different labels around different treatments, but one of the many things on my list is I want to be training doctors in our protocols so that more of this can be commonplace depending on where you live.

How does all this relate to brain function? Because we've talked about dyslexia, you've alluded to adhd, you've alluded to cognitive decline how does it all relate?

Vision problems are brain problems. Our eyes emerge from our brain in utero. The retina is part of the brain. How our brain functions is a direct reflection of how our vision is functioning. And if we can't focus our eyes, we can't focus our mind at the same way we would otherwise. Our ability to keep our mind focused is deeply embedded in our ability to keep our eyes focused. We've talked about ADHD a couple times. I mean, it's not like there's a blood test that says, yes, you have adhd. It's based off of symptoms and behaviors. And more than 2/3 of the symptoms in the classification for ADHD are the same symptoms for hidden functional vision problems. So we see three different groups of people. We see people who have been told they've ADD or adhd. They come and work with us. Visual attention drastically improves. They stop taking their meds, and then all of a sudden they're functioning better than they ever have without any support. I would argue that group did not have ADD or adhd, but, you know, they were given a stimulant or they were labeled based off of whatever criteria, and it wasn't accurate because we didn't rule out vision first. We see another chunk of patients where there's an identified functional vision problem. We treat the vision problem. Their sustained visual attention for near tasks or any task improves, yet they still have ADD or ADHD because of whatever reasons that caused that. But their visual tension was improved.

They got a functional medicine workup too, right?

No, he's not doing that. They would come to us for that. Are you doing it or no?

I would say my biggest referral sources now are functional integrated medicine docs. So most people are coming in already having that done. That is a huge piece to the puzzle. And everybody should have a functional medicine evaluation. And knowing that you guys see such a large percentage virtually, I think that's fantastic. Which means anyone listening who's not one of your patients needs to be one of your patients. And then that third group is people who come in and they say, I want to see if vision is contributing to this. We had a story that came out in NBC and then another one next couple weeks in cbs. That is a simple title of is it ADHD or is it your eyes not working well together as a team. As you know, there are certain people who just. Their brains work differently than others. And I would argue there's just a lot that can be done with nutrition and supplementation and lifestyle modification and. And look at the Gut health and, and all the stuff that are your bread and butter. But, you know, we need to be putting our vision first and looking at vision as a contributing factor, especially knowing that there's so many reasons why functional vision problems are more prevalent now than they've ever been.

This is really cool because I'm thinking of at least like 10 people maybe sending your way.

And it's, it's such low hanging fruit when you know what to look for and then the stuff's no longer hidden and then it's like, oh, my neighbor, my child, myself, like, whoever. There's so many aspects of life that we all struggle through that have an underlying visual component that's treatable. Motion sickness, poor eye contact, trouble catching balls, or being the last one picked on sports teams, Reluctant readers preferring audiobooks rather than reading on their own. Scattered clutter around the desk, and not being able to find things in your environment. Dizziness, nausea, vertigo. I mean, there's so much out here that has a portion that's related to our dominant sensory system, the one that's supposed to be guiding and leading rather than interfering.

So I have a patient question. I have a patient who had a brain surgery for, I believe it was a benign tumor and then had multiple concussions. And I would say she's better than she's been, but she's gone to a lot of people and she now has intervention fatigue. She's like, oh, I've tried everything. So I'm assuming you get this a lot. Like, I've tried everything. But as we're talking, I'm thinking, okay, I really should send her to you because she can't. She generally doesn't have a life where she's on a screen because it's too uncomfortable. But I will say over the last five years that we've been together, she's been able. She couldn't use the portal at the beginning, it was too visually awful for her. But now she's able, able to send me a message and send an email, but she doesn't do it a lot. So is that the kind of person when they've tried everything and they've had multiple interventions, do you often see success in the gap where they're living without.

You even sharing anything else about your patient? I can confidently say that this work or me, I can change her life. I can get her back to where at least a better place and functioning is less so chaotic. Vision's represented in every lobe of our brain. There's more areas of our brain dedicated to processing vision, not eyesight than all of the other senses combined. And two thirds of the neurons coming from our eyes are coming to our brain originate from our eyes. You can't have a brain tumor or one concussion or multiple concussions or all of these like your patient has had and not have vision be involved. It's just a matter of at what level when that happens exactly like you're describing, Screens become terrible. The glare, the brightness, the sensory overload becomes too much. Malls and grocery stores. She goes in and is just like, oh, my God, get me out of here. The junk lighting in all of life becomes unbearable. And when our visual system is under stress, our pupils widen and we get this tunnel vision effect, which means she's always under visual stress. She's locked in like she's looking through paper towel holders all of life. And how great is that that you're seeing this needle be moved with the work that you're doing in terms of being able to message you now and being able to probably maintain better eye contact and have some sort of thoughts that are starting to have some coherence to them. But vision should tie together all the pieces of the dysfunction here. Our average patient has seen four and a half specialists looking for a solution before they come to us. That is a problem. That's a problem with the medical system where I would say we know so much more about head injury now than we ever have, and we have so much more to learn. I mean, if you've seen one head injury patient, you've seen one head injury patient. Everybody's different and everybody sees differently, so everyone should be treated differently. And from that standpoint, I'm sure she's seen an eye doctor. The eye doctor is probably finding glasses that are going to make her see the tiniest letters far away or up close, but not even looking at how the eyes are working. As a team, and especially for a patient like that, we want to shoot for 20 happy, not 2020. Seeing HD clear is very likely going to be way too strong for her. And getting to a place where she has comfort along with clarity, that is enough, is going to at least make things comfortable. But ultimately, she needs to learn how to use her eyes to rewire the software of her brain to get back to previous level of function. I'm a firm believer, especially with head injuries or concussions, with the right work, right motivation, and right compliance, you can get back to previous level of function, in many cases a better place. But you got to know what work to do.

Do you have a list of things that you Recommend for people who have, I'll call it two categories. Either they've had a concussion and you wanna put them on a supplement regimen that helps them recover, or in general, for people's vision. Is there a set group of supplements? I'm basically asking two questions in one.

So 100. First of all, anything that's good for the brain is good for the eyes because our eyes are part of our brain. For concussion, we have a, what we call a brain boosting bundle. So a top six supplements we recommend. But out of those six, I would say there's a top two, in my opinion, which are game changers. And everyone needs to be on if they've had a head injury or even if they haven't. Number one, Omega 3s. I mean, we need to load up our brain with what it's actually made from. And really high quality matters more than anything else. There's a neurologist here in Maryland who's done a ton of research on, on omega and brain injury, probably more than anybody in the world, and he recommends a ridiculously high loading dose of 9 grams for anybody who's had a head injury, whether it was last week or 10 years ago. Nine grams for two weeks and then going down to six grams for the weeks after. I personally think that's probably way too much for most people, but ultimately enough that it like you're giving your brain high doses of what it needs to heal. So Omega 3s are huge. And I have found, honestly, in the last year, glutathione has been incredible. But specifically gluterol, which is a transdermal spray. So a version that you spray in your skin.

You mean this?

Thank you.

We're interviewing him next. We're literally interviewing him. Yeah.

Tell him I said hi. He is.

I will.

And literally, like that's. Neither one of us have been told or being paid for this. Every single one of my patients who's had a head injury, I'm like, I don't like to judge people. I'm judging them. If they won't take my recommendations and, and take literal, it's unbelievable. Antioxidant and like the amount of brain fog that's cleaned up immediately for head injury is fantastic. And then we have a whole list of others. But you know, nutrition wise, anything that's bad for us is bad for our eyes. So the seed oils, the gluten, the dairy that, you know, whatever is going to be causing this inflammatory reaction, it's going to show up in the eyes as well.

Well said. And where can People find you.

They can find me on the Internet and also in Maryland. We're in Bethesda and Annapolis, Maryland, on the Internet. My practice is myvisionfirst.com and like I shared a few times, we see so many people who come from out of state or out of country for intensive boot camps because just this type of work doesn't exist anywhere else. Screenfit you can find on screenfit.com and then Instagram is Dr. Brice Applebaum. But my ancestors tried to make life really hard. My last name is Appel, not Le. So that sometimes makes it a little bit challenging. But we'll put it all in the.

Show notes so people can.

Amazing.

Okay, I think I have two more hours of questions.

I know. I was like, we just scratched the surface here. There's a little bit more going on, but we have to complete one, for attention span and two, because we have another commitment. But we can have him back.

You promise? You promise?

Yeah.

Can I, Can I ask a request?

Yeah.

Next time we hang out or this weekend, whenever. Can we talk about your child with dyslexia?

Totally, totally.

We can, but she's probably going to be coming to you for a week, so probably with. With me with it.

And maybe me because I've been nearsighted for. Since I was 12.

I mean, I can, I'm 42. I can confidently say I'm not going to wear reading glasses.

Ooh, throwing down the gauntlet. Okay, we'll have you back. We'll talk about it.

We can do enough work to get there. So appreciate this opportunity. You guys are amazing and this dynamic is fantastic. Thank you.

It's fun.

It's fun. We wouldn't do it if it weren't. All right, Bryce, thank you for being with us. Thank you, the listeners, for joining us for another episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. And Bryce, we'll have you back. We'll dive in more and we'll, we'll get. We'll get even more. Throwing down the gauntlets for. For vision.

We like it would love to. And such an honor and a privilege to be with you guys. Thank you for having me.

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