Opt Vision Therapy Manual – Procedures and Forms for In-Office & Out-of-Office Training Programs

I remember going to the printer with my father when he was publishing the first edition of his manual. He was looking to create a loose-leaf 8 and 1/2 by 11 inch book of the vision therapy forms he used in his office that could be easily be reproduced by other ODs with their own office letterhead to facilitate implementation of vision therapy. 
I remember helping assemble the books and the shipping boxes for their mailing. That was in the basement of our home in a room that also served as my home vision therapy room complete with a hanging Marsen ball. I remember as a child coming up with innovations for activities such as Back Space Ball that my father then included in updates to his VT procedures, which he shared with thousands of other ODs and vision therapists as he travelled the country for OEP. 
When Skeffington passed, he was tapped to replace him as President of OEP, a position he still served in while I attended SUNY State College of Optometry. SUNY’s lineage came from my father’s alma matter, Columbia University, back when the Ivy League had the honor of hosting a school of Optometry. It was ultimately the politics of competition between professions that won out over cooperation and collegiality that drove Columbia to close its Optometry school rather than elevate Optometrists to Doctoral status. 
To gain his OD degree, my father had to do further studies at NEWENCO in Boston. He also travelled to Yale, to study at the Gesell Institute for Child Development. I remember when, for homework, he tested his three sons for IQ. I was the last to be tested, and it was getting quite late as I continued to get correct answers on harder and harder questions. I was willing to go on, as it was quite a challenge sometimes taking a bit of time in this untimed testing format to visualize the problem presented and see the answer. I had to get a correct answer at least on every third question to continue. Ultimately he got too tired and gave up the process, but when he calculated my score on this ‘power IQ’ test, it was 186, and who knows how much higher it might have been if we had continued. Statistically, 186 is less than one in 200 million. Einstein only had a 160! It is my intention to apply the grace of that gift to understanding vision and health so that we can heal blindness and other forms of suffering. That will mean healing Science and Medicine… I am writing this now because after 40 years of intensive research, and after healing my own prognosis of blindness before age 50, and death before age 40, it is time to share what I have learned with the world.
Optometric visionary, Norm Haffner, OD, PhD was central in developing the Optometric Center of New York out of the school at Columbia. It became the largest outpatient vision clinic in the world, and was eventually transformed into the College we have today by legislative action. I had the honor of serving as research assistant to Dr. Haffner while he was Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences for the entire State University system. One white paper I wrote analyzing the health costs of cigarette smoking from a Systems Dynamics perspective was recommended to be sent to the White House for implementation, and in fact my recommendations were put into policy. Unfortunately, when the government increased taxes on tobacco to make the cost of purchase reflect the ultimate costs of health care, they failed to implement any policies that would have reduced the health burden preventively. Like other aspects of government, the regulatory agencies have been captured by the corporate interests they regulate, so additives are allowed to make tobacco much more addictive. Like disease generally, and war, it’s good for the economy because the economy is a measure of damage.
SUNY is rated alongside UC Berkeley in a tie for the best academic training for ODs, at least it was when I was there in the 70s and 80s. As a high honors science graduate of Dartmouth College, rated #1 for undergraduate education, I could have studied medicine anywhere, but I chose SUNY Optometry because it was by far the leader in the field that had transformed my own life, and that I knew I could provide me with a professional mission that could transform the lives of others: Vision Therapy. When I was in 2nd Grade, before VT, I was a C student. In 3rd grade and ever since, after VT, I was a straight A student. In High School I worked in my father’s office as a Vision Therapist.
I was particularly interested in the fields of nutrition and energy medicine as I grew up with a family doctor, Dr. Martin, from whom I got my middle name, who used these non-invasive methods exclusively at a time when they were virtually unknown. He had saved my father’s mother’s life in the 1950s when she was poisoned by DDT, leaving her diabetic but still able to serve a central role in my father’s practice for decades as the receptionist who would talk story with all the patients from her desk in the reception area. Prior to functioning as a naturopathically oriented family practitioner, Dr. Martin had spent 30 years in medical research. He came from a time, prior to the Flexner Report and the subsequent colonization of Medicine by the Rockefeller and Carnegie interests in patent medicine. At that time, five major philosophies existed in a free market of health care. Dr. Martin would have been in the Eclectic school, which used whatever means were most effective. He led early hospital based studies on the metabolism of Vitamin A, and he provided the medical side of Steinmetz’s groundbreaking physics research in energy medicine at General Electric. 
For those who don’t know, the 4 foot tall Charles Proteus Steinmetz was one of the world’s top mathematicians and engineers, known as the Wizard of Schenectady, where GE was centered. Their research delved deep into areas that are still on the cutting edge, including plasma and PEMF. In fact, they developed an early PEMF device for a wide range of healing applications in the Chiropractic profession that was then suppressed, with the medical profession claiming to discover the same technology the following year but only with application to heal non-union bone fractures. 
Even as a GP, healing patients under the radar because he never needed to refer to other MDs who resorted to widespread use of drugs and surgery, Dr. Martin also served as the forensic pathologist to the Police and Fire Departments.
Ultimately, I chose Optometry because I knew I could actually help people in VT, and I knew I would have to be a total recluse among my peers like Dr. Martin was as an MD. There was no specialty in Integrative Medicine or anything like it at that time, but I knew that Optometry was home to pioneers in nutrition and vision like Princeton graduate, Ben Lane OD. Ben was one of the many mentors in VT who I chose to visit and learn from while I was bringing VT to my first office in Tokyo, Japan. I saw how Ben was implementing Nutritional Vision Therapy with patients suffering a wide range of degenerative ocular pathologies in the early 1980s. I researched and began writing my books on the major blinding eye diseases, and applied those principles starting in 1984 when I became Medical Director of my father’s multidisciplinary clinic, Learning Disabilities Associates. I followed Stephan Rechtschaffen MD, founder of Omega Institute, in that role. He had found prevalent issues with both food allergies and heavy metals in the vision therapy population. 
Though it was an undefined ‘gray area’ in my Optometric license, I explored laboratory testing and innovative computer-based syndrome analysis to understand root causes, predict risks, and implement nutritional interventions in unusual and challenges cases. I also did a study on early cataract that showed that nutritional and lifestyle interventions could improve both lens clarity and ocular circulation in one month. 
My practice led to complaints by three MDs that I was ‘practicing medicine’ and a decision that ODs could not order lab tests. One complaint was from a Psychiatrist who claimed that when I shared a reprint of an article about full spectrum light benefits in Seasonal Affective Disorder with his patient whom he prescribed antidepressants for each winter, I was practicing medicine. One was from an MD who was shown the trace mineral lab results of a mutual patient. I believe it was a 5 year old boy with extreme photophobia who tested high in Lead. He was an extremely early reader who read the newspaper religiously from age 3. At that time there was still Lead in the ink for newsprint. I remember attending a large press conference on Lead toxicity convened by the Albany Medical Center where they were doing research on Lead toxicity. During the Q&A session that followed, I asked about non-invasive screening for Lead in the hair, and the MDs said it had no merit. Then a PhD researcher spoke up and said that it actually was shown to be valid. They were not pleased, especially since the media was there. The Medical Board decided that non-invasive trace mineral testing of hair samples, a method I learned from Dr. Lane, would be outlawed in New York State, which it still is to this day. They also outlawed the popular funcitonal medicine lab I used for that test, Doctor’s Data, as it still is to this day. That ruling later metastasized to neighboring Connecticut and New Jersey and remains in effect today. 
The third complaint was actually the most interesting to me. I saw a 14 year old girl who had virtually no accommodative ability. Behavioral Vision Therapy did not appear to be a rational option. Instead, I ordered some basic metabolic blood tests (SMAC) as well as a trace mineral test. I sent the results by mail for syndrome analysis by a computer program, as this was well before there was an internet. The analysis found a high risk for acute pancreatitis, for which the girl had no history. It also recommended a list of nutritional supplements which the girl’s mother ordered, but the girl refused to take… About 3 months later, she landed in the hospital where they diagnosed her with acute pancreatitis. When the mother met with a roundtable of all the girls medical doctors, she asked why none of them saw this coming except for Dr. Swartwout. They asked “Dr. Who?” as they only knew the names of the local MDs, certainly not the ODs… None ever enquired how I could have acquired better predictive health information than their standard of care. Their concern was to protect their economic turf, not to advance the health of their patients. I remember my father commenting to remember that if someone is trying to kick you in the butt, it means you are out ahead of them… Fortunately, practicing in Oregon and Hawaii, I never had another complaint from an MD. And I never had a single complaint from a patient or client anywhere. I always held that my primary and only real responsibility was to the living being I’m serving, rather than to legal fictions like governments, licensing boards, and insurance companies. Psychological analysis shows such corporate entities to be sociopathic, as they serve first the interests of their stake-holders rather than the people they claim as their constituents or consumers.
I was also quietly warned by the Optometry Board (whispered privately through my father) to separate my Optometric practice from my Naturopathic practice. I had to do the natural healing work out of my home after that. I sometimes wonder if I was the first Naturopathic Optometrist since Spitler, who founded the College of Syntonic Optometry. When I attended Naturopathic school while practicing in Oregon, the first required textbook in our introduction to Naturopathy was still Dr. Spitler’s classic Basic Naturopathy. Once a burgeoning field with thousands of practitioners, Syntonic Optometry was destroyed by the federal regulatory agencies as it competed with drugs. Only a few isolated practitioners remained when Ray Gottlieb, OD, PhD rediscovered them in his research at Berkeley. In those little towns, people still knew that if you had problems with sinus headaches, for example, you go to the Optometrist and look at the blue-green light, and you don’t need to take drugs for the rest of your life.
Ironically, in Oregon the one source of political friction came from the school itself. While I was allowed to teach European Biological Medicine to interested students and faculty, there was a student in her final year of training that was under pressure to undergo a kidney biopsy to determine if her kidney cysts were benign or malignant. She was in her 60s and didn’t want to comply with the school’s pressure to undergo the invasive procedure in order to graduate. She had only two practitioners in her corner, an experienced Homeopath from India and myself. Together, we won that battle, and she and I went on to share adjacent offices in Hawaii for years afterward. I sometimes contemplate how I became not only the southernmost Optometrist in the States, but also one of the most holistic. After all, I was named Holistic Optometrist of the Year already in 1985. I know that most of my colleagues haven’t heard or seen much from me in the last 40 years, but now I know it is time to give back to a healing profession of light that traces its roots to the craft of gems and silver smithing rather than butchery and illusory ‘healing’ with toxins. I look forward to the process, as there are now a few VT offices that are implementing aspects of my systems for Accelerated Self Healing, and applying some of my Functional Formulations to reverse ocular pathologies. As we begin to release these methods and the underlying Clinical Theory and Clinical Praxis more broadly, Optometry is in a great position to expand the concept of Vision Therapy beyond the realm of healing the effects of head trauma and stroke, as my father and I were doing when I practiced with him in the early to mid 1980s, to include all pathological, degenerative, and aging-related processes.
The pursuit of this expansion of Vision Therapy has led me to rethink many of the tenets of consensus science and medicine. I find that many of the challenges and mysteries have visionary solutions that have been proposed by other thought leaders. Together, these solutions shed light on the human condition, on processes that underly health and disease, on our place in the world, from quantum to cosmos, and ultimately have led me to propose a Clinical Theory of Everything, which answers perhaps the most fundamental questions of all: about consciousness, of which vision is the crowning jewel. I now have a proposed solution to the ‘hard question of consciousness’, that is ‘how do sensory qualia actually manifest?’ The corollary issue of the ‘binding problem’ that is ‘how the different sensory qualia become unified into coherent gestalt?’ also finds its answer in my Clinical Theory. I am hoping to find an audience of thought leaders in vision science who will be intrigued enough to seek more. I am forming an initial study group of beta testers from those interested in deeper understanding of healing. I invite you to reach out if you are open to learning new information, perspectives and solutions drawing on all of the sciences in order to create the medicine of the future. As Einstein saw it, “the medicine of the future will be the medicine of frequencies.” There is so much more to unpack, but that opens the door. And I have to give honor and appreciation to my father for making it all possible through VT.