Helping Babies Reach their Developmental Milestones with Dr. Sarah Lane

Denise discusses tips for assisting optimal development in babies with neuro optometrist, Dr. Sarah Lane. In addition to being an optometrist, Dr. Lane is a certified yoga teacher, a HypnoBirthing Childbirth Educator, and a student of many body movement and reflex integration methods.  As of March 2023, she is also a certified Functional Medicine Health Coach, well on her way to becoming a certified functional medicine practitioner. She seamlessly weaves these strategies into her holistic vision practice.

Resources mentioned in the podcast: 

https://www.drsarahlaneod.com/store/p20/USA_ONLY_Meaningful_Moves%3A_guide_for_everyone.html

https://www.movewithyourbaby.com/

https://www.focusvisioncenter.com/

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Transcript

Denise:  Welcome today to the Healing Our Sight podcast. I'm your host, Denise Allen, and I have here with me today, Dr. Sarah Lane. I'm going to give you a little introduction to her. She is a holistic optometrist who practices at the Focus center for Vision and Learning in New Jersey. She is passionate about the connection between the whole body and the visual process. After graduating from Pennsylvania College of Optometry, Dr. Lane completed residency at SUNY Optometry in 2006. She is a certified yoga teacher, a hypnobirthing childbirth educator, and a student of many body movement and reflux integration methods. As of March 2023, she is also a certified functional medicine health coach. Well, on her way to becoming a certified functional medicine practitioner, she weaves all of these strategies into her holistic vision practice. I met Dr. Lane when I went to the COVD annual meeting in April, and I was struck by how passionate she is about working with babies. So, we're making that our focus in today's podcast. Hi, Sarah.

Dr. Sarah : Hi, how are you? Thanks for having me.

Denise: Thank you for being here. Or should I call you Dr. Lane?

Dr. Sarah : That's totally up to you. A variety of things.

Denise: All right, tell us a little bit about your path to becoming a developmental optometrist.

Dr. Sarah : My path to a developmental optometrist. The optometrist was really the only healthcare provider that I saw on a regular basis as a child. I started wearing glasses in second grade and always, you know, needed a stronger and stronger prescription. You know, I was developing nearsightedness, and I was actually always struggled with reading as well and was always the one kid in my class who needed extra tutoring for reading, not realizing I had a vision problem. And so, when it undergrad, I was studying medical laboratory science, and when I realized I didn't want to be behind the lab bench anymore and wanted to actually interact with people, optometry came to my mind because I. I knew that field in healthcare. So, when I started at the Pennsylvania College of Optometry, I just thought I was going to be an eye doctor. You know, a doctor with no emergencies was basically what I had in my mind. And then I was diagnosed with a binocular vision problem where I was getting headaches and blurry vision and all kinds of different visual symptoms that I didn't know where they were coming from. And I went through vision therapy at the Eye Institute of Pennsylvania College of Optometry, and that changed the trajectory of my career. Yeah, when I started optometry school, I had. I had no clue that vision therapy existed, that there was such a thing as a developmental optometrist, because I had not interacted with any optometrist who practiced that way as a young child, so.

Denise: Right. Well, there haven't been so many until more recently, I would say.

Dr. Sarah : Yeah. I grew up in Northern Vermont, and there are still not a lot of options for vision therapy in that area. Yeah, maybe none, but there could be somebody that I don't know of, so.

Denise: Oh, yeah, that's. That's crazy. You have a lot of other things that you pursue along with optometry, though. So how. How are you fitting all this together?

Dr. Sarah : Yeah. So my path when I discovered vision therapy and that it was what I wanted to study and focus on for my career, one of my doctors that oversaw my vision therapy in Pennsylvania helped me formulate what my internship and externship program was going to look like in my third and fourth year of optometry school. So I ended up in Southern California working with a doctor who specialized in working with traumatic brain injury cases, and mostly younger traumatic brain injury cases, Children and adolescents and young adults, which was also very different than what I had seen in school, because when we think of, you know, brain injury, we think of stroke and an elderly person and, you know, there's a lot more that different things that come along with that. And then I was introduced to some movement as it relates to vision during that internship process. And that also sparked just my learning for how can I integrate all of these things into a practice and have it make sense and be cohesive and have people understand what we're working towards as a whole body organized, not just eyeballs rolling in by themselves. We're connected as a whole being.

Denise: Right.

Dr. Sarah : That all started very early. So, I would have. That would have started in 2003 and four was when I first was introduced to the idea that it was more than just glasses and contacts and eyeballs.

Denise: Okay, awesome. So today we're gonna just talk about babies mostly, just so we can focus your different ideas a little bit on one topic. So. And I thought it was really interesting as we were planning this, that you mentioned the prenatal part of vision. I don't think anyone I've ever talked to has said anything about what happens before birth with our vision. Do you want to elaborate a little bit on that?

Dr. Sarah : Sure. My year of residency, I spent researching the impact of birth on development and visual skills. So, I had a research project that I coordinated that I was trying to gather more information on birth history and try to see how that related to, you know, visual skills and development along the way. So having spent that time during residency with all that research before I was married, before I was pregnant, before I even knew I was having my own children when I became pregnant, there was a lot of that information I had that helped guide the choices and decisions that I made. So, in that research, it showed that the experiences that the baby has during those early phases of development do set the stage for a lot of those developmental milestones and skills and sensory regulation and things like that. So, you know, it started off where I told myself I didn't want a C section because I wanted the baby to go through the birth path, which going through the birth path normally activates all kinds of reflexes and cascades of different, you know, physiological events that the baby is supposed to experience.

Denise: Right.

Dr. Sarah : So that's where it started. And then it just kind of snowballed, you know, into everything where, you know, exposure to ultrasound I dramatically limited compared to what, you know, is traditional care, exposure to medications and testing, and, you know, ultimately did have, was able to have both of my children at home with no intervention or medication and very, very gentle entrance into the world. So.

Denise: Right.

Dr. Sarah : That all. It all matters, you know, and it started with an academic research project and then trying to put into place in my life the things that I had learned. You know, how do they apply to real life? And so, I've tried to, over the years, kind of incorporate those things into my practice as an optometrist by educating people about what, you know, they can do to make a difference.

Denise: So, what do you typically tell people? Just kind of what you tell people about limiting all of the intervention kind of things?

Dr. Sarah : Yeah, I mean, I think a theme for, you know, preparation is to clean up. Right. So we often will think of declutter your house before the baby comes, but that cleanup is in so many different categories. And we have a lot of of us are very busy and very distracted and have way too many things going on. So, we can clean up that aspect of our lives, find more time for relaxation, find more space to just be. Because when you're pregnant and have a young baby, like, they need you to be present. They don't need you checking your email 50 times a day while you're trying to nurse and those types of things. They need you to be present so you can start to cultivate, you know, some of those lifestyle changes that allow that space. And then we can clean up how we eat, you know, the eating fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, clean meats, unprocessed foods, you know, avoids a lot of toxins that can build up in the body and then get transferred over to the baby. You know, we can make sure that we've don't have any thyroid conditions, we don't have any, you know, gut imbalances. All of those things can be cleaned up before you have a baby, before you become pregnant, to, you know, just set the stage for the healthiest, you know, development possible. And then we clean up our houses. We clean up, like, do we have mold? Do we have dust? Do we have off gassing mattresses? Do we have detergents with lots of fragrances? It's just a whole. It can snowball pretty quickly. Like, the categories that we can work towards to setting the stage for development as nature intended, not kind of impeded by exposure to a whole bunch of different toxins and things in our world that weren't there several decades ago.

Denise: Right. Awesome. Okay, and then you also mentioned that you do hypnobirthing. Does that play into your practice also?

Dr. Sarah : Yes. I don't currently teach hypnobirthing, but I spent about six or seven years teaching hypnobirthing as kind of a side gig. And I used to joke that my training in hypnobirthing and my work with these families was really to put my developmental optometric practice out of business. Because if we could work early and eliminate, you know, all the stress around birth, like, then maybe we would have less children who were struggling, you know, with, you know, sensory regulation issues with eye movement conditions and all of that. Because it was the hypnobirthing course, as it's taught. We do focus on that time during pregnancy and then the birth and then the immediate postpartum time as, you know, opportunities where we can encourage, you know, development in different ways. So that's what I used to say. I mean, the hypnobirthing philosophy is that birth is a normal process that we can support, and when we know the process, we can allow the process to happen. Now, it's an intense process. There's no way to get around the fact that birth is intense.

Denise: Right.

Dr. Sarah : But we don't have to be scared of the intensity. And when we learn and prepare ourselves for that intensity, we can allow our bodies to function normally and birth a baby normally, because that's what we were designed to do. So, it's really routed in calming the nervous system, keeping ourselves out of the fight or flight response and staying in that, you know, rest and relaxation phase where we have the chemicals in our body are keeping us calm and healthy and ready for something new instead of running from tigers.

Denise: Yeah, well, and my last three daughters all had babies last year and all of them, and people who've been listening to me have heard that. But the, they all looked at hypnobirthing in some degree. I think my daughter who had her baby at home probably went through the whole recorded course and then she shared it with her sisters whose babies were born later. I don't know how much they got into it, but is it better to go to a live class than to do a recorded type of an experience? Or, how would people find a local person? I guess I don't know how they would have done anything different than what they did because it's not like out there all over, right?

Dr. Sarah :  Well, there is … the hypnobirthing.com I think is the website. So, it's the hypnobirthing institute. And they have certified practitioners all over the world who offer classes in a variety of formats. Some of them I think can be, you know, virtual at this point. Some of them are in person. I think that the in-person format for a young mom, young family, it provides a sense of community and connection that can help support the process. So, I, anytime we can come together in community and figure out how to support each other, I think people get more of a benefit out of that. But it's a training process. It's not like where you can put on a tape and just listen to it once and you feel that you got the best. Yeah, you've got everything I need to do. And you know, hypno, I've done hypnobirthing. It really is a months long kind of conditioning in self-hypnosis and relaxation so that when the intensity hits like your body knows where to go. I don't think I've done anything in my life without it being influenced by my hypnobirthing practice. You know, from the time that I practiced first, you know, it was 16 years ago and everything, you know, I learned how to breathe, I learned how to calm myself, you know, in variety of different scenarios. So, I think it's not just for birth. It's really strategies to understand the status of your nervous system and keep yourself in a safe place so that you can move forward and do what you need to do.

Denise: That's awesome. So, after the baby's born, what are some of the things that you recommend people do to optimize their baby's development.

Dr. Sarah : When babies are born, they need to be safe. And the safest place for a baby is with mom, with dad, with partner, whoever with the connected with a person. You know, I do advocate for a lot of the philosophies of, you know, attachment parenting where we are paying attention to the needs of the baby. You know, we're not trying to sleep train a baby too early. We're not trying to put babies on a feeding schedule too early. We're really just practicing our intuition. You know, what this being that we've brought into the world needs, you know, for support in those early phases. That can go a long way to helping create that safety and just that foundation for sensory regulation, like can I gather information from my surroundings and feel as though I can integrate it well. And that comes from a place of, of being safe. So right now, you know, I mean, my youngest is 12, so a lot has shifted in the last 12 years. When he was born, I don't think I had a smartphone yet. I definitely didn't have like a device where we could watch TV in my hand all the time. I was not checking my email, you know, 40,000 times a day. But now that's something that young families have to encounter, have to manage really is that distraction of always having that device and how do I focus on what this being needs here when I might have to Check Facebook or TikTok or I want to make this post and show everybody what's going on when ultimately, the more connected you can stay with your baby, the better it's going to be for your development as a parent and the baby's development as a well-adjusted, grounded person. Those are some of the basics. And we've also gotten into this, you know, where we need to keep the baby safe, right, in a car seat, in a bucket, and they need to stay in the bucket, and they never come out of the bucket because I might drop them or I move them in a different way. But babies close to you experience the movements that your body makes naturally. So I'm a big advocate for baby wearing and baby wearing young ones where they're facing towards you so that they're just kind of cocooned, you know, into you and experiencing your breath pattern, your heart rate, the movements that you make throughout the day really help to activate what's called their vestibular system, the balance and coordination system, which then we get into a little bit of the vision development piece because all of our visual skills are really routed in, you know, our vestibular System. So, we want to make sure that babies are getting exposure to movement in safe ways that their bodies can integrate in order to kind of set that foundation for their visual skills.

Denise: Awesome. You also have specific movements that you encourage parents to do with their babies, right?

Dr. Sarah : Yes, that. So, the Meaningful Moves. Yeah, the Meaningful Moves program or kind of book that I have put together also was a evolution of things because there was a period of time where I was teaching prenatal yoga and then mommy and me type yoga classes. And during the time that I was teaching all of those classes, I was also going through training in some reflex integration strategies. And I was already a certified yoga teacher, so everything kind of came together. I was never able to teach yoga as a. Not an optometrist, the same way I'm not really able to be an optometrist without also being a yoga teacher. Like, just. It doesn't separate. And I've become comfortable over the years with the fact that it doesn't need to be separate. 

Denise: Right. 

Dr. Sarah: But in teaching those mommy and me classes, it started to realize, like, that this really had a lot more power than I was advertising. Right. Like, it's a come have fun with your baby and all of this. But I was really teaching moms a lot of things about their child's development and how. And giving them the power to understand how their interactions with their child really did help organize their nervous systems for a better chance of developing well.

Denise: Okay.

Dr. Sarah : And I think especially because we've. We limit the movement of a lot of babies given recommendations of some traditional providers, you know, that they need to stay in the bucket, that they need to sleep on their backs, that they need to be sleep trained and they need to be, you know, eating food by six months of age. You know, there's a lot of those recommendations that I don't advocate for. You know, we have to pay attention to what our individual person needs. 

Denise: Sure

Dr. Sarah: But so, as I became less available from a time perspective to teach those baby classes, as I kind of was brainstorming how can I make this more accessible to most babies out there? Like, most babies don't need to see, like, a vision specialist for a long period of time. Like after the initial screening, you know, we have. We do advocate for that first eye exam to happen within the first year to kind of rule out big stuff.

Denise: Right.

Dr. Sarah : But after we've ruled out the big stuff, then what do we do? You know, we're still very active in the developmental process, and even if we see little missteps, we're not necessarily going to intervene in a big way until we've watched and observed, you know, over the course of a period of time, you know, how is the system going to settle out? So that's really where the Meaningful Moves program book has come into play, is being able to give families some power to intervene, you know, or to introduce these experiences that organize the visual system, the vestibular system, the sensory system very, very well in a series of simple exercises that can be done every day. You know, a lot of times, what I hear from families who have babies who are struggling is that early intervention, the therapist will come. But therapists aren't necessarily teaching the parents about the process. Parents aren't necessarily left empowered on what they can do to help. So Meaningful Moves is really about, like, every diaper change. We can do the hand map, and we can do the foot map, you know, or the I have hands, I think I call them in the book. And I have feet.

Denise: Right.

Dr. Sarah : You know, I can go side to side, and I can go upside down and all of those things. Like, those things can be done as part of your routine to really help encourage the development of all different kinds of skills. It's really a holistic whole-body experience when we do all five of those exercises.

Denise: Yeah.

Dr. Sarah : Because right now at my practice, I do only see babies who have a very significant history and need maybe more than those five meaningful moves. Right. Like, they need a little bit more attention because they do have an eye turn or they did have a significant, you know, traumatic experience that it needs a little bit more. But they pretty much all do start off with the home exercises of those five meaningful moves, regardless of what we need to do extra upon that, you know. But it really has been a great opportunity to every chance I get, just to empower parents really, like, you can be an active participant. We don't need to just wait and see. You know, is my child going to crawl on time? Is my child gonna walk on time? Are they gonna talk on time? Are they gonna develop any, you know, missteps along the way in development? Like, well, we can do things that help encourage us to move forward. Yeah. Also, I think my children. I wasn't able to be a mother only. I was always a therapist in my own house. And I remember times where my son would have his hands on the edge of the bathtub. You know, you're not supposed to stand in the bathtub. It's slippery. Right. But he would start to, like, you know, stamp his foot and make splashes. I'm like, okay, well, now let's try it with the other foot. You know, can we switch sides? We do it five times with our right foot and five times with our left foot. I mean, he was probably less than a year old, and I'm already encouraging him to make those conscious changes. You know, look at my. Oh, I can make the other one move now. I can make the other one move. Just becoming aware of where our body is and how we can use it can happen very, very early for babies. And, you know, if we know that that's a possibility, we don't have to just sit back and wait. We can be active participants in it.

Denise: Right Well, I had one. One granddaughter who was trying to skip the crawling phase. And I told my daughter, you cannot let her skip crawling. And so I had her at my house, and I said, “Look, Hazel, we have to get down on our hands and knees, and we're going to crawl.” And I would show her how. And. And my daughter thought I was a crazy person, I think. And she's crawling now, so I'm not going to take credit at all because, you know, obviously I only did that the one time. But just the fact that we're modeling for the babies, you need to do these developmental things, I think is really important.

Dr. Sarah : Yeah, I mean, that's like you said. You got on the floor with her and crawled around so she could see you. Hey, there's a person that I know who is doing these crazy things. Maybe I'll try them. It's not just that we put the baby down on their tummy for tummy time while we go, you know, check our email and check our Facebook and things like that. Like, we need to be present and actively participating, you know, So I think the meaningful moves of main goal is to get people more connected and paying attention and, you know, knowing that it's okay to put away those distractions and focus on only what is happening right here with the baby. That's one of the goals with it. But the crawling phase is so important for wiring the body to coordinate the right and left sides, the top and bottom. I talk a lot about midlines of the body. You know, traditionally we talk about the midline being the right and the left, but we also have a midline for top and bottom, and we also have a midline for front and back. So, navigating all of those midlines and making sure we're coordinated and have experiences around all of them is. Is crucial to development and crawling. I have many, many of the babies I've worked with. who are you know, like I said, have that complicated history, have been three years old and not walking. And the physical therapists and early intervention therapists are like, they're too young to crawl. We have to teach them to walk. And I have been very adamant that, no, we need to teach them to crawl. And we've been very successful with having the eyes straighten out with teaching crawling and then teaching walking. You know, educated by reflex integration strategies, as opposed to just like stand up and move a foot. You know, there's different reflexes that we can activate, you know, to encourage that hierarchy of skills that need to be there to get the person ready for it.

Denise: Yeah. Well, it's interesting because this child's parents both walked really, really early, and so they thought it was perfectly normal and fine. You know, and I think actually her father didn't crawl. Her mother made sure she crawled. I think that tendency kind of played into what she was doing and their expectations, perhaps even.

Dr. Sarah : Right.

Denise: It wasn't important or whatever. And I said, no, it's vital.

Dr. Sarah : Yeah, I think I don't. My. Both of my boys walked around 13 months, and could they have walked earlier? Probably, but I was absolutely not doing anything to get them on their feet before they did it on their own. 

Denise: Okay. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah : Yeah, we were definitely crawling a lot. Exploring a lot on hands and knees. And actually, the older kids that I work with in my office a lot of times, like, they need to learn how to crawl in a patterned way in order to set that foundation for their visual skills. Even adults, we do a lot of coordination on hands and knees, like switching balance between right and left side of the body and front and back of the body and things like that. It's just foundationally such an important thing for the body to know.

Denise: Right.

Dr. Sarah : And I have patients I work with who have experienced brain injury, and often their body forgets those foundational patterns. And we cannot assume that just because this is a big person that they have those foundational skills. We can't just work on the eyeballs. It has to be the whole body. And little, teeny, tiny movements and activation of different patterns and reflexes can make a huge difference.

Denise: Right.

Dr. Sarah : To allowing somebody to. To spring forward really, with improved skills.

Denise: That is awesome. So, you know, I bought your book and I was looking for all the explanations of the. Of the meaningful moves, and they weren't in there. So, tell us a little bit about how you made that decision to not put all of the sciencey stuff in the book or all the explanations of why we're doing these meaningful moves.

Dr. Sarah : Yes. So, I think a lot of that decision came from my life as a parent over the years. Right. And meeting other moms and really as a doctor decide trying to figure out like what my goals were with sharing this book. And my goals are to empower people to go through the exercises. I can talk them through a little bit of the explanation. But when somebody sits down to look at something like nobody has any attention these days. You know, we were talking about the podcast and it's like, you know, if they're an hour long, people don't get through it. If they're 20 minutes, you know, that's like the perfect amount of attention time that people have. So, I needed to create something that, you know, was on paper because I don't want moms sitting there with a video to show their kid with a different move.

Denise: Yeah.

Dr. Sarah : But that was small enough to be digestible and empower them to move through those things without feeling like they had to read a 300-page book. I have bookshelves full of those, you know, 300-page books that have a hundred exercises you can do with your baby to encourage development. And they're great. They're wonderful resources. They're textbooks.

Denise: Yeah.

Dr. Sarah : And most people out there are not going to pick up a textbook when they just want to figure out what can I do with my baby? You know, that's, that's fun and encourages development. We need it to be small and manageable, easy to access, easy to remember.

Denise: Right.

Dr. Sarah : Those types of things were really the reason. And someday maybe I'll write the, the Dr. Explanation book, you know, lecture or on those types of things. But for now, that primary goal was to have the person sitting in my office, not the academic, not the physician, you know, the everyday person who really just wants to know what more can I do to encourage vision development and development in general.

Denise: Right. And it definitely does do that.  I think I would, I just like to hear some of that. To. What am I trying to say? Just to give me more impetus to do it. Right, 

Dr. Sarah: Right. 

Denise: It's nice for me to go, oh, it's because it's integrating this and this and this, you know, And I think that it's perfect that, you know, it's what it is because then they can just take it and do it and just trust that you're the expert, you know, you've done all the research, you know, why these things help. And just doing those simple things is really so empowering.

Dr. Sarah : Yeah. I mean, most people don't have the mind space to remember all the different names of all the neurological patterns that we're working on. They don't want to hear about the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. They don't want to hear about all these things. I just wonder about how can I keep my baby calm, cool, connected, sleeping, you know, get into a deep neurology lesson on it. Or we can just, you know, go through these things, and get to the same place.

Denise: Yeah.

Dr. Sarah : And not feel more overwhelmed. You know, there's enough to overwhelm us, enough to kind of put on our to do list that may or may not happen. So, I wanted to create something that was small and accessible.

Denise: Yeah.

Dr. Sarah : And I get good feedback. I have a lot of people who come to me, like, oh, I gave your that book to so and so is a shower gift. Or I've been doing those exercises with my baby, and I really notice a difference. They love them. Nice. I. I mean, it's been over 10 years since I was teaching the mommy me classes. So now there's, you know, real big kids.

Denise: Yes.

Dr. Sarah : Who've been doing these exercises for a long time. And some of the moms tell me that the kids still like the hand and the feet exercises. They're. They'll ask for their moms to, you know, rub their hands or rub their feet when they're feeling like they want to calm down or. Yeah. All of those things. So, it's neat.

Denise: That is neat. That's really great. I noticed that on your website you also have some movements in a booklet for older children and adults. Is that related? I didn't actually go through the exercises to check that out.

Dr. Sarah : Yeah, they are all. It is all related. It's all that philosophy, that organizing around those three different midlines, the right and the left, the top and the bottom and the. The front and back midlines can help to set that foundation for improved visual skills. And that also has been an evolution. And that that pamphlet came to be during shutdown when I felt like, again, I needed something accessible. I needed something that wasn't like, sit down and find all kinds of equipment to do your vision therapy. What can I do to set the foundation for a calmer nervous system that will then allow my visual system to function easier? So that set of meaningful moves for the older children and adults is really about keeping the nervous system in that rest and learn phase and out of that emergency response mode. And again, I have seen tremendous success with using that in my office with people of all ages. You know, I have five-year-olds who I teach those exercises, and they know how to do them on their own. And that's an exercise that they can do, like on the playground at the beginning of recess if they feel like they need to. You know, I could do a little bit of stretching. I can know that when I twist my body, I'm, you know, doing something good and it feels good and I feel calmer. I've had adults, you know, with dizziness and disorientation and kind of dysregulation of eye movements and they feel as though that those exercises are the things that hold them together. You know, they might do more complex vision therapy exercises while in active vision therapy, but what do I do every day to set the foundation? And honestly, like, doing those exercises I have in that pamphlet, there's five of them there as well. Every day at the beginning of your day, like, is never going to be a bad thing, 

Denise: Right. 

Dr. Sarah: You know, and does it mean that vision therapy wasn't successful or all like. No, it's like we are learning strategies to every day clean the slate, get ourselves into that. Like I said, rest and learn phase out of the emergency response phase so that we're calmer and can pay better attention and can go throughout our days easier with access to our improved visual skills.

Denise: That is awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about what kinds of things you are able to do with babies when they do have a significant vision issue?

Dr. Sarah : Yes. Beyond the traditional optometry, right. I mean, we need to make sure that there's no pathology. You know, we need to make sure that there's nothing that, that needs that medical attention. We need to make sure that there's not like a significant refractive error, meaning like a high need for glasses. And then we're looking at eye alignment and eye movements and then really development, right. How does the body respond to different things? So, once we've ruled out the big stuff, right, like the need for medical attention, the need for strong glasses, which most babies don't have those big things, right. So, then I go into, you know, working with the meaningful moves that are in that book. So, the hands reflexes, right? Activating the fingers, activating the hands. Like when there's some exercises that we do where baby just starts to look at their hands, it's like, oh, I have hands. These things, they're moving. They can do things for me. But they might not have had that experience. Depending on the scenario of things, you know, and the feet, like, it just organizes their sensory environment within their body so much more. And then the other exercises, the side-to-side exercises, organizes us around that right and left midline. The up and down is the top and bottom midline. And the upside down gets the kind of like all three of thing, those, those midlines going, and you activate so many different reflexes. People are often scared to do the upside-down exercise. That's illustrated in there. And you have to be strong enough to hold your baby upside down without dropping them. So, there's always that disclaimer, like, if you don't feel safe, don't do it. But babies spent a lot of their time head down before they were born, right. And when they come through the birth path, they're also head down. The head is leading the way. And so, when a baby is upside down, they actually activate a lot of those reflexes that they use during the birthing process.

Denise: Okay.

Dr. Sarah : And so, for a baby that may not have gone through that birthing process in the easiest way, or maybe didn't go through that process at all, whether it was a planned C section or an emergency C section, doing that exercise can really help to pattern the body through that.

Denise: Okay.

Dr. Sarah : And that may require more of a professional intervention to kind of work through it. If baby doesn't like it, you know, it's a lot for their system because they haven't ever been through it. Like, it's not all babies can jump right to all of those exercises. So, we have to kind of titrate. Like if there's a baby that, you know, might need to see some other type of body worker or therapist before we, we get to those. But I've definitely had the experience where through gentle introduction of those exercises, we're able to get to the point where the baby can do all of them. Easy.

Denise: Okay.

Dr. Sarah : And we see changes and how they, they move and interact with the world and look at things, move their head around to different sides and things like that.

Denise: Does that work for a. Let's just postulate a scenario where the baby has their eyes very turned in and both eyes are in. And the ophthalmologist will say, there's not anything we can do except surgery. Right. Does the baby, because they're integrated that way, do their eyes stop turning in like that? Have you seen? Because that's an extreme example.

Dr. Sarah : And I actually have a case like that right now. So, we'll see how things work out. But the goal of the meaningful moves, like when an eye turns in or when an eye turns out, it's a response to stress of some kind, like the body and the brain are adapting to something. We may never figure out what it is that that system is adapting to. But to assume that that adaptation needs to be adjusted surgically right away eliminates the possibility that we can figure out what is underlying. Like, why is the system needing to make that eye turn? So, I advocate for craniosacral therapy. I do not do craniosacral. Have therapists, I refer to, you know, good physical therapists, occupational therapists, chiropractic care. Like, and then the meaningful moves too. Like when we're in that scenario where we have a significant history, we need to work together, we need a multidisciplinary approach to kind of uncover why the system is choosing to adapt in that way.

Denise: Right.

Dr. Sarah :  And the goal is to create movement within the system. So, if I can take a baby whose eyes seem to be turned in a lot of the time and create a moment where the eyes straighten out, create a moment where the eyes move into side gaze in either direction, like, those are opportunities where we're breaking down that adaptation. So things like the meaningful moves book, like where I'm advocating for parents to do this all day, every day, like as many times as you can in those types of scenarios, like, every opportunity you get, you're paying attention to how your baby is moving, where you're placing objects for them to look at and grasp. Like, every moment of every day becomes therapy.

Denise: Yeah.

Dr. Sarah: And empowering parents to do that is one of my big goals. And that starts with the meaningful moves, but then also with all the other different things that come in when we have a baby that has that significant history.

Denise: Yeah. So, okay. I often see when I'm on the Facebook groups that there, it's starting to become more normal for someone to suggest vision therapy, sometimes to even mention cranial sacral stuff. But it's not as often as I would love to see. And so, I really feel strongly that it's important that we get the word out there that there are other things you can do besides just having surgery.

Dr. Sarah : Yeah. I mean, there's a. There's politics to it. I always say too. It's like we've got the traditional medical approach and then we've got the non-traditional approach that involves all kinds of other modalities and therapists and things like that. So really a person has to sit with if they're comfortable with the answers that they're getting. Some people are perfectly happy with the answer from the surgeon that says, let's do surgery and let's let you fix that problem. And other people are uncomfortable with that and want to address the underlying potential cause of what's going on here. And that's the person that needs to be empowered to seek these extra professionals that are out there that can, can really help to work through whatever the baby is working through. And it's not, it's often not a quick and easy process.

Denise: Yeah.

Dr. Sarah : It takes time, it takes work, takes money. There's an investment of all of those things.

Denise: Yeah.

Dr. Sarah : You know, into it. That is. This requires more than just letting your health insurance pay for a surgery. So, there's an exploration in all of that. Typically with these cases.

Denise: Can you share a success story with us?

Dr. Sarah : I have a success story that's in evolution. I have one baby, probably the baby I've worked with the longest, with the most significant history. This baby was born at 22 weeks gestation.

Denise: Wow.

Dr. Sarah : And he was in the NICU for 18 months. 

Denise: Oh, my word 

Dr. Sarah: on his back. Came home around 18 months still with a trach, eyes turning in most of the time. Intensive therapy, 24-hour in-home nursing care, things. I had worked with some of the older siblings of the family. So, the mom knew right away to kind of get me involved in the process. So right away, you know, when he got home, after he was 18 months old when he got home from the NICU. So, I didn't, I probably saw him for the first time when he was 19 months old, 20 months old. I think he's seven now. And he struggled with giving feedback. You know, we can see his eye turning. He can't necessarily tell me any letters on my letter chart or any symbols. Like subjective feedback is really challenging. He's getting to the point where he can give us some of that. So, there's a lot of trial and error and intuition and movement that comes into, you know, his case. Right. Like I've taught. He's. He's the one who I insisted that he learn how to crawl based on reflex integration strategies. And we did far beyond the meaningful moves type things all incorporated with his vision development. And he crawled beautifully and then learned to walk and is now doing very well with all of that. And just this past week I saw him for a follow up and I changed his glasses a little bit and he was able to put on his new prescription and say, like, I can see things clearly, you know, and his eye is still turning some of the time, but it is not buried in towards his nose. It is not turned all of the time. He is able to move that eye, you know, into lateral gaze a lot of the time. So, I mean, that's what we're looking for is we're looking for things not to be stuck.

Denise: Yeah.

Dr. Sarah : And I do get the feedback from a lot of moms that I have taught the exercises kind of unofficially, not within my optometry practice that, you know, they do feel that these things have kept them away from needing more therapy. You know, like whether it was a crawling delay or whether it was a colicky baby or whether it was, you know, having a hard time moving the head to each side. We're doing the exercises help. Oh, we don't have that problem anymore.

Denise: That is awesome.

Dr. Sarah : So, yeah, there's always a way, there's always a time to make sure that we make an appropriate referral and pay attention to, you know, do we need extra care? But I think there's that foundation that can be there. It's really powerful for parents to set. Yeah.

Denise: That is wonderful. So, would you like to give any final recommendations for parents as we wrap up our podcast today?

Dr. Sarah : I think the. The main take home message I've gathered over the years is that we are always moving forward with new information. And it's important that we don't get stuck feeling like we made mistakes yesterday that mean that we can't move forward to do something different and better today. Parenting is the hardest job we will ever be faced with. And to enter it with a sense of calm and a sense of grace, knowing that each day is an opportunity to do something better, different, and moving yourself forward.

Denise: Awesome. Before we go, let's mention for our listeners your websites so that they know where to go to find all of this information that we've been talking about today.

Dr. Sarah : Great. So, the main one for families with young babies is movewithyourbaby.com and on that website there are videos, there's a cartoon that illustrates all the five movements. There are individual videos of each one, and I think a couple bonus moves as well. And then there's also links where you can purchase the physical copy of the book on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Denise: Okay. And if they want other information for older children or adults, where's the best place to go?

Dr. Sarah : My main office website is focusvisioncenter.com and an additional website that has access to some professional resources and the pamphlet for adults and older children would be drsarahlaneod.com. So that's Sarah with an H. Yes.

Denise: And I will include those in the show notes for everyone as well.

Dr. Sarah : Very good.

Denise: Yeah. Thank you for sharing today and I think this will be very helpful. For people. Thank you for listening to the Healing Our Sight podcast. I'd love to hear from you. If you like this episode, please share it. And please join our Facebook community at Healing Our site to leave suggestions or comments. Have a great day.