LET THERE BE LIGHT! (Macular Degeneration Vitamins)

The prospect of gradually losing one’s eyesight and being totally in the dark is terrifying, but that’s what happens to people afflicted with macular degeneration. As with most illnesses known to man, traditional medicine is useless. This type of vision loss cannot be reversed via doctors and drugs. According to the American Macular Degeneration Foundation (AMFD), “macular degeneration is an incurable eye disease… the leading cause of age-related vision loss, affecting more than 10 million Americans.” Not a pleasant picture for an aging population’s future.

Fifteen years ago, a friend suddenly lost 90% vision in her left eye and saw nothing but a gray cloud through that eye. After reporting to a local hospital’s emergency room, she was diagnosed with a vascular occlusion – a sudden arterial blockage which deprived the retina of blood supply. The retina is light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye that’s critical to clear vision, and it requires a constant supply of blood to provide nutrients and oxygen to tissue cells. If deprived of blood, cells die, causing the retina to malfunction. Doctors were unable to help my friend, and she never regained vision in the eye.

The same concept applies in vision loss due to macular degeneration, except that loss of sight occurs gradually in both eyes, instead of instantaneously. But the cause is the same – lack of blood supply to the retina. In macular degeneration, as the retina is gradually starved of nutrients due to hardening or clogging of tiny vessels supplying it with blood, it performs less and less efficiently, until it fails altogether.

The AMFD declared macular degeneration incurable. I’m here to tell you that it’s quite curable, if you don’t wait until you’re nearly blind to begin treating yourself naturopathically. The remedy is identical to treatment for any other type of circulation problem – unclog veins and get blood flowing again.

Macular Degeneration Vitamins

Within the past few years, my personal naturopathic doctor (Dr. E) reversed macular degeneration in two people my family referred for treatment. My sister’s friend, Carol, was very nearly in the dark after years of gradually eroding vision, despite using prescription drugs meant to slow the progression. Yet, within weeks of beginning to use Circu-Care, a circulation enhancing tincture made by Nutritional Frontiers which Dr. E prescribed, Carol’s eyesight miraculously began to improve. The retina was receiving sufficient blood flow again, which supplied nutrients it desperately needed to repair itself. Within months, Carol was seeing well enough to drive her car again.

In the second case, our beloved aunt noticed worsening vision loss and consulted Dr. E, after her ophthalmologist (eye specialist doctor) couldn’t help. Dr. E again prescribed circulation enhancing nutrition supplements, and eighteen months later, my aunt’s vision is normal. She’s no longer in danger of going blind.

Poor diet that leads to clogged arteries, which eventually cause heart attacks and strokes, is the same culprit that eventually leads to macular degeneration. People who consume mostly raw fruits and veggies, nuts and legumes, sparse meat, and healthy-fat foods (like olive oil) are far less likely to develop circulation problems than those who dine routinely on fried foods and dairy and trans fat laden diets. Each of us controls our own destiny in regard to circulatory illnesses.

While discussing vision health, I’ll address another issue that isn’t as critical as macular degeneration but which can cause impaired vision as we age. Many people live with “floaters”, those annoying dark spots that resemble moving shadows in your peripheral vision. Some people swat the air because the dark spots can resemble a housefly near your face.

Floaters don’t actually float. They’re excess protein deposits in the vitreous fluid of the eyeball, and whenever you move your eye, the dark spots move with it and appear to float. Floaters occur when an aging body stops assimilating proteins efficiently. Sometimes just wearing sunglasses temporarily alleviates the problem, because floaters are less visible on a dark background.

Floaters become problematic when they occur directly in the line of vision, rather than in the periphery. This happened to me, when I awoke one bright August morning half a dozen years ago and noticed a new dark spot, front dead center in my right eye. I was surprised and somewhat intrigued because the floater resembled the shape of an eagle. A large eagle partially blocked the vision in my right eye. Since I never leave the house without sunglasses, the eagle really wasn’t bothersome, until I decided to undergo Lasik vision correction five years ago.

I opted for mono-vision Lasik, wherein the dominant eye is corrected for perfect distance vision, and the weaker eye is corrected for perfect close-up vision. With mono-vision I wouldn’t ever have to wear eyeglasses, and after 40 years of sporting glasses or contact lenses, I wanted freedom from all of the above, especially after having recently lost two pairs of expensive progressive-lens glasses over the railing of a water taxi while vacationing in Venice.

After my Lasik procedure, the eagle floater was suddenly a big problem because my right eye was the only eye that focused on distance vision. Now, every time I tried to read a street sign while driving, the middle of the sign was blocked by the eagle, and I saw blackness where part of a word should have been visible.

I consulted the ophthalmologist who performed all my pre-Lasik vision testing, and was informed that nothing could be done for floaters. He advised me that a very expensive and somewhat dangerous surgical procedure recently introduced was proving minimally successful in breaking up floaters, but there was no guarantee it would work, and it could end up causing damage. I know of one doctor in the US performing a surgical procedure to break up floaters – Dr. James Johnson in Irvine, California. He calls himself the floater doctor and charges $2000 per eye to dissolve floaters with a laser. I chose another route.

After researching natural remedies for floaters, I learned that an amino acid called Methionine is a requisite for proper utilization of proteins. And since my body obviously wasn’t assimilating protein properly anymore, I began supplementing daily with Methionine at twice the recommended dose. After all, I didn’t want to just utilize new protein consumed – I needed to dissolve an eagle!

Three weeks into my supplementation regimen, my right eyeball was suddenly awash in bubbles. The eagle appeared to have exploded into thousands of bubble-shaped fragments, which seemed to be floating everywhere I glanced. I was astounded at the result and continued using Methionine for several weeks more, while my body absorbed the bubble fragments – the remnants of excess protein deposits in my eye.

I stopped taking the amino acid when I awoke aching from head to toe. My body was assimilating too much protein, and I felt like muscle tissue was weakening. Myofibrils (the functional tissue of human muscles) consist of protein fibers, and my body was absorbing that protein too.

Though I still had some floater debris in my peripheral vision, the treatment had accomplished the goal, and the eagle no longer blocked my right eye. I use a normal dose of Methionine intermittently throughout the year to ensure I don’t develop new floaters.

Once again I experienced first hand that traditional doctors have no clue. When a health issue manifests, the best course of action is doing your own research and then opting for natural remedies. I sometimes utilize my own body as a guinea pig of sorts, but nature’s remedies have yet to kill anyone, so I continue to learn how to maintain good health naturally, by trial and error when necessary.

We welcome questions and/or comments about macular degeneration and floaters.