The Moment That Started Everything
In 1995, working as a young locum optometrist at OPSM Highpoint in Melbourne, Michael saw an elderly Italian gentleman whose family thought he'd been drinking. He hadn't been drinking. His balance was gone — and nobody had connected it to his eyes.
In a half-hour appointment, Michael experimented with prisms, adjusting how light entered the visual system. He asked the man to come back that afternoon. When he put on the adjusted lenses, he walked out of the practice balanced, upright, steady — as though he was a young man.
The family came back. "His whole life has changed for Papa."
That moment planted a question Michael has spent three decades answering: if a prism can shift balance in thirty minutes, what else is the visual system connected to?
The answer turned out to be everything — posture, movement, cognition, emotional regulation, the way the nervous system organises itself.