- (upbeat music)
- Welcome my friends to the Bob and Brad podcast
produced by Bob and Brad,
the two most famous physical therapists on the internet.
I am Bob and exactly one half of the Bob and Brad team.
And my guest today is Dr. Joseph Allen, an optometrist,
from Minnesota by the way,
and he has a great YouTube channel called Doctor Eye Health.
We'll talk about that, we'll talk about his background.
But he's got a lot of great advice for you.
If you have one or two eyes, I would check it out.
Thanks for watching.
Welcome to the program Dr. Allen.
- Hello, and thank you so much, I appreciate it.
- Well, I'm gonna go to the first question,
and it's gonna be a selfish question
because I have eye floaters in one eye.
I got 'em probably about three years ago
and I looked it up
and it made it sound like it wasn't really a problem.
So I've kind of adapted to it
but how do you get rid of eye floaters?
- So, that's a really common question.
As, you know, first off is understanding like you did,
you researched to figure out
hey what are these things, what am I experiencing?
I think a big thing is just understanding
floaters are a normal occurrence.
A lot of people,
if you're not sure if you've experienced them,
especially on like, if it's a blue sky day
if you look outside,
- Right, exactly. - and you look side to side.
- That's exactly it.
- You see those little floating spots,
they look like gnats almost.
You maybe think that there's bugs flying around you.
- Yeah.
- Those little spots are really shadows of light
that are being cast onto the retina inside the eye
by clumps of collagen and protein fibers
trapped within the gel on the inside of the eye.
- Hmm.
- And so those little floaters, you know, when you're young,
a lot of children and young adults don't really have them
but as you get older, they are more common to be found.
- Sure.
- Especially over the age of 50
and the older you get the more common,
more likely you are to have them.
- Here we go! (laughs)
Makes sense.
- So, thankfully they are not typically a medical emergency
unless somebody has all of a sudden hundreds of them.
You know, one day it goes from nothing
to all of a sudden, you're seeing many of them,
it looks like a snow globe maybe,
or if they're associated with flashes of light
or any loss of vision.
- Gotcha.
- If somebody has that, then they of course
want to contact an eyecare professional
right away just to be seen
so that the doctor can inspect the back of the eye.
As these floaters, this gel inside of the eye changes,
the interface, the connection of the gel to the retina,
can separate kind of like your peeling Velcro,
that's how I like to describe it.
But unfortunately, when that gel separates
it can tug on the retina
and sometimes cause a hole or a tear in the retina.
- Sure.
- Which then allows fluid to seep behind the retina
and cause retinal detachment,
which, if not caught early,
can lead to vision loss and blindness for some people.
So, again, if somebody's listening to this and-
- they just recently saw that- - Gotcha.
- like a sudden change,
then definitely contact your - Beware
- local eyecare provider.
Otherwise, to get rid of floaters,
'cause a lot of people come in,
they're like, maybe like you have,
you're like, I'm seeing these spots,
they're kind of driving me crazy a little bit.
Right?
- I've adapted. - Yeah
- They don't bother me.
- Most people are like you, they learn to adapt
and they usually get better,
when you first notice 'em,
they usually improve over the first six months.
People either adapt to it, they get used to it,
or they maybe drift out of view a little bit,
- Sure
- and you don't notice 'em as much.
For the people who are really bothered by them,
like you have trouble functioning, driving,
being able to see, you know,
enough in order to live your daily life,
then there are some operations,
some surgical operations to remove them.
The oldest one is called a vitrectomy,
and that's where a surgeon will surgically remove the gel
from inside the eye
and replace it with an alternative fluid.
That does remove all of the floaters.
Most surgeons, though, don't like to do that procedure.
(laughs)
- Sure.
- It comes with some risks.
Namely, if you still are phakic,
meaning you have the natural crystalline lens
you were born with,
you are going to rapidly develop a cataract afterwards.
- Oh wow.
- So there is some connection between
the gel inside the eye,
providing a lot of nutritional content
to the crystalline lens inside the eye,
so once you do start to develop floaters
in this gel separation
you rapidly begin to develop a cataract.
And just the surgical procedure
causes a lot of inflammation,
which also speeds up cataract development.
And most surgeons don't like to do that procedure
because there is always allowed a 2% risk
of having either an infection
or some sort of retinal tear or detachment
just due to the procedure.
- Sure.
- And nothing's worse to an eye surgeon
than for somebody to come in with relatively 20/20 vision
but symptomatic for floaters.
They do that procedure and oh no,
now they caused a retinal detachment
and now they have permanent vision loss.
That doesn't look good for-
- Of course. - for liability.
- Even two percent is high.
- Yeah, it's higher than zero. - You're high and dry.
- And then the other procedure
which is a little bit newer is using a laser
called a YAG laser to do what's called laser vitreolysis.
I have videos on this,
but they use the laser to zap the large floaters in the view
of your vision.
- Gotcha.
- They don't a 100 percent get rid of all the floaters,
but they do disperse them.
They make them much smaller, less noticeable.
And,
that's currently the two,
at least most commonly used procedures
to help people with their floaters.
- So Dr. Allen, I only have it in one eye,
is that common?
- You know, it starts, it's usually asymmetric.
So it's starting usually in one eye
and then the other eye may follow.
- Sure.
- And I haven't done an examination on your eyes
but I imagine your eye doctor has probably seen
at least the beginning or some development
of the floaters developing in the other eye
that you're not really experiencing it in, so.
- Something else to look forward to as I get older.
- You can learn, try to make friends with them right?
- (laughs)
- Some people I know
they name them - Oh funny.
- because they see them all the time.
- Hilarious
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