hey what's up great seeing you this is Dr. Allen here from the dr eye health show and today this is
a very special episode of doctor eye health where in fact i'm going to show you a little sneak peek
where i got to be interviewed by dr dave from dr dave's 411 if you haven't met dr dave before he
is a practicing board-certified cardiologist with an extreme passion for sharing medical knowledge
and preventative medicine. So let's just jump straight into the interview as we share how a
simple eye exam can tell you a lot about your heart and your overall health hi dr
alan thank you for joining us on on call with dr dave um preventative cardiologist from new
york we talk about preventing heart disease and i bet you're wondering how the heck did i end up on
this channel i'm an eye doctor in fact i am dr eye health so welcome to the channel and i'm really
looking forward to speaking with you well thank you so much for having me on uh this is exciting
and uh there's as i'm sure you you probably know but uh there's a lot that goes on with the eyes
that's related to the heart so i'm excited to get into some stuff that's great so why don't we just
get to it um so as a practicing cardiologist um when we perform physical exams we're
looking at just about everything and the most one of the most obvious areas we look at in general
we speak to people and communicate is their eyes and um of course they've been called the windows
of the soul but i also think they're windows of general health now from if you don't mind take
us from the moment you look at somebody's eyes and then you can go into the exam further if you wish
are there any clues in general that you would say to somebody hey you know
i'm concerned about x y and z and maybe you should consider getting your heart checked
absolutely uh so right away when we see a patient in the clinic of course you just generally look at
your patient's face you look at them in the eyes just without even getting close with a slit lamp
or a microscope like we use in the clinic you can already tell some subtle things especially
like yesterday i had a patient who already had developed some yellowing around their eyelids
which we know is called xanthelasma so immediately i asked them hey when's the last time you went
into you see your family doctor before i even got into even doing the exam and he asked he's
like he's like why is that i'm like well i can see you got some things growing on here and he's
like oh yeah i've had those for a few years and so i told him yeah we should get your cholesterol
levels checked and you know he was only in his early 40s so that was that's an early tip off not
super common but uh that that was just an example a couple of other things is looking at just the
colored part of the eye i know a lot of people ask me why am i getting this bluish or yellow ring
around the colored part of their eye we call that arcus senilis and that even though after the age
of 40 it's somewhat considered normal it is a sign of elevated cholesterol levels and some people
have a really remarkable level of that that's just on the front surface of the eye really what tells
us more about cardiology your heart health and really your whole bodily health is when we examine
the inside of the eye and we're able to look at the retina in the back because the back of the
eye is just pure network of blood vessels in fact the retina has a dual blood supply it's got blood
vessels on the inner side of the retina and then it's got blood vessels in the back of the retina
but it like you yourself um you you guys do echocardiograms you do angiographies uh you know
do you guys do crowded ultrasounds and you kind of look at the blood vessels through these separate
mediums in eye care we look directly into the eye and you can see the blood vessels in action so if
you can see their blood vessels getting damaged from something like diabetes from high blood
pressure from cholesterol plaques getting stuck in the arteries i mean we have a direct line to
view what's going on and what else could be going on inside the body so a lot of times you know i'll
see a blood vessel changes that are indication of high blood pressure so we'll check blood pressure
there in the office and sure enough it'll be like 180 over like a hundred and so immediately we're
like okay we need to get you we need to get you referred on over to the hospital across the street
uh so that's just a couple examples but uh yeah we it's it's remarkable how often we'll catch
uh it's not just glasses and contacts so we're checking on basically everything in the body and
so what strikes me about your answer and what is so incredibly important and it's so important for
people to go for regular eye exams is everything you mentioned cholesterol diabetes high blood
pressure all part of silent killers right they don't come up to the person and say hey my here
i am diabetes your sugar's high right or hey your blood pressure's been running a little bit higher
than it should be or you know um you have high cholesterol here i am these are things that astute
clinicians such as yourself will pick up so again i'm a preventative cardiologist so i love to hear
this stuff this is the stuff that it gives us an opportunity to intervene before the stroke before
the heart attack before the limb loss before the kidney disease so those are such great points and
you know definitely need to be incorporated i'll say one more thing the sign of a of a
good clinician is not just focusing on their world alone but opening up no pun intended their eyes
to what else is going on so i really appreciate those comments that was excellent so what a huge
honor it was to be interviewed by dr dave himself and to be featured on his channel if you want to
learn additional information from dr dave go ahead and check out all of his different social
channels between his facebook page his youtube channel all those different things i'll put links
to those all in the description below but first let me know and drop a comment below this video
uh anything cool about the eyes and heart health or bodily health that you know about
and what would you like to discuss with dr dave himself here on this channel
we're gonna plan to have him back on and discuss cool things what kind of video
what kind of topics and things like that would you like to learn from dr dave
otherwise thanks so much for watching love you guys keep an eye on it and we'll talk to you soon
you