“Our eyes, messengers of our emotions” To progress towards greater well-being! And what if seeing more clearly in us could correct our vision?

Pascal Barbey is an optometrist: optimistic but restricted? Well, not at all. In his first book he proposed exercises to have “Good eyes for your entire life,” and in this second book it is the opposite: a good life for good eyes!

If you only see an “eye doctor” when you need glasses, you do not know what you’re missing! But reading his books, you will have an idea.

A little frustrating side anyway: he uses some miraculous machines to initiate his diagnostics, or so it appears from the first chapters! Giving the impression that one is forced to go to see him. Then it gets better when he reviews various conventional vision problems (such as cataracts, or glaucoma, amblyopia, or nystagmus that you probably never heard of) indicating tracks that we can travel with other practitioners, including seemingly unrelated with eyes such as acupuncturists.

And as he has searched everywhere, at the turning of a page you will learn lots of things, such as that EMDR is now recognized by the WHO! (In fact since 2013!).

Or that aspartame is safe… if you’re a frog or a snake, or any cold-blooded animal in a country not too equatorial, because above 30 degrees Celsius: boom! This is now ethanol. It will prevent you to be manipulated by the EFSA (European Food Safety Authority or the US equivalent [FDA?]) who will swear that they run independent tests. I will eventually come to the conclusion that when an organization is entitled “Authority” that must hide some threat, especially if it comes in addition to the word Safety like here: we can be sure that we are in danger, if we rely on their propaganda.

But I’m digressing…

Pascal and I don’t necessarily have the same heroes, but he is a funny guy who does not hesitate to travel the world to go see if something is interesting and this leads him to cast a wide net. A kind of Mirandola of the eyes, and of what goes around them, namely the body, the soul and the spirit! As if the usual medics had forgotten those environmental issues…

Not easy to talk about this book…

Already it is not “summarisable”, otherwise we would write another volume: it provides a multitude of details, which led me to choose some trivial examples to force you to read the rest! It is found, at Amazon, or at the Fnac or at the Procure.

Pascal’s bio reveals he began his fascination for perceptions when 14. But if you look at his picture, he clearly looks younger than the 254 years we would deduce from his encyclopedic knowledge.

He also managed to return from Canada to France without accent!

But I still think I should not have gotten into this adventurous review of an unreviewable thing or just to tell you that you can be caught by the contagion of his thirst to learn, drowning you in his references drawn from every corner of every field, from numerology that one wonders what it has to do here (but read, you’ll understand), to the details of the connections of physical or psychological problems that make your eyes drooling through the inevitable: the MTC, he also attended.

I should have guessed that he was not a “standard” guy, when he was presented to me by an etiopath, Marie Noelle Guibé. Etiopaths are a developing French seed in support of osteopaths and chiropractors issued from emigrants from the Perfidious Albion! With their excellent results, they forced poisoners to gather together in the AMA, whose members pledge to never produce drugs without side effects… (I love to hammer this nail down so that we know that these inevitable effects are deliberate and not accidental…). So Pascal is obviously inscribed in the list of charlatans of so-called alternative medicine[???].

However it seems they start to overlap the Hippocratic oath to: “first do no harm”. Or support the naive (and discouraging) discovery of Francis Bacon: “We command nature only by obeying its laws!”… Which are sufficiently thick to have a need for a Barbey to navigate there and “see” anything at all.

An important place is left to the diet, which means that your health, if you let yourself be inspired by what your eyes tell you, and interpreted by Barbey, your health I said, will launch you in dietary recommendations of a rare complexity (!), which unlike the criticism that I often make have nothing of a funfair medicine (like 5 fruits and vegetables a day, no salt, no sugar, no grease, and no-wax or hairspray either!), since you have the elements to guide your prescription. Ah! If every nutritional advice could provide even only a third of what Barbey reveals!

Since the detailed table of contents would be too long for a blog post, I’d settle, to not leave you hungry for the content of the appendix! Have a look!

First, the “Plutchik model of emotions” with a nice picture you should cut to make your own circumplex! Something he found in Florida, and no, I will not tell you what it is! Buy the book, and do not look on the Internet just to see it in color…

Then it will be the “scale of stress from Holmes and Rahe”, a valuable tool for socialos who insist that the poor work less and less to be more and more poor…

Then something about the “glaucoma screening exams” to complete what he says in the body of the book,

And also an “assessment test of the quality of your tears” that I intend to use the next time I see Hollande, Valls or Sarko on TV,

And finally a micro dictionary of the small trades of vision to know all about the differences between ophthalmologists, orthoptists, opticians and ocularists: i.e. all those believed to be competitors of optometrists, on whom Barbey keeps an eye! Well done, right?

In the midst of all these valuable tips there is still a detail that I find creepy, to borrow the (untranslatable) pun of one of his clients, it is when he lets us alone with our pharmacist who will choose the probiotics that would be necessary for our eyesight… As if a pharmacist knew his food supplements, and in addition had the slightest idea of how stuff for the belly may be useful for peepers… The field of pharmacists is poisons, anti-biotic, not probiotics, to use a snob word for stuff that produces lactic acid that we were buying from yoghurt merchants to serve as reinforcement to our intestinal bacteria.

More seriously, the book is very well organized with lots of framed texts and many inserted references from one page to another. But the profusion of information would have deserved an index! So I disclose my solution for you: I’ll scan the book and have it read by Fine Reader into a .DOC file! That way, I could wander at will for choosing my subjects.

If you are too lazy to do the same, at least give a try to the exercises of the 4th part, you will then have time to read the rest to find out what you’re damn in! And take a look at the examples at the end of the 3rd party which may evoke something to you… And you may be tempted, you too, to thank Sylvie, Pascal’s companion, who forced him to write all these pages as he does in his own thanks!

Summary