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- 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.
Well, this next topic is an option that's always offered
to me when I buy glasses and I didn't know what they were.
- Hmm.
- What it is is anti-reflective coating.
- [Dr. Allen] Yeah.
- So I always thought, "Is it like a undercoating for a car?
I mean, is it a scam or?"
(laughs)
- No, that's a good question.
I think, you know again, that's part
of the reason why I started my YouTube Channel,
was to help educate people what these things are
and the options that are available
because if you're not in the optical world,
you have no idea.
- Yep.
- And so I wanted to break things down
and literally show people what it is
they could be investing in.
So anti-reflective, or non-glare coating,
is a real thing in the optical world,
and it's not just eye care and glasses.
This anti-reflective coating is on all the camera lenses.
If you buy a high-end camera, DSLR camera,
they're on those camera lenses.
- [Bob] Hmm.
- They are even on the camera lenses
in the cell phone that you have.
On the webcam I'm using right now,
these anti-reflectives are on there too.
The big issue with any sort of glass, like,
you have light that hits the front surface
of the glass, it bounces off.
But then the light also penetrates through that glass,
and the back surface of the glass, light also reflects
off that black surface because it's a change of interface,
and that can not only cosmetically not look good.
So if you're wearing glasses that don't have anti-reflective
and you're, like, outside with lights and everything,
people are just going to see these reflections
bounce off your glasses.
- [Bob] Sure.
- They won't be able to see your eyes.
So, there's a cosmetic benefit for it.
But then optically, you will get more light information
to your eyes and you usually notice less glare,
less, kind of, white washing of colors.
And you typically are going to see sharper
through those lenses.
I think the downside of anti-reflective,
especially like you said, if you go to buy glasses
and you feel like maybe, "Is this a real thing?
Am I just being upsold something?"
- Right.
- There's a claim that these lenses
will help you see better at nighttime
and you'll have less problems with headlights.
Now I personally, kind of, love/hate that analogy
because it is true.
I think everybody has trouble with headlights
when they're driving at nighttime.
- Exactly.
- I think if you're somebody who doesn't need glasses,
having glasses with an anti-reflective on it,
isn't going to necessarily get rid
of that glare problem with headlights.
It's not going to do that.
But if you're somebody who does wear glasses,
and if you had to compare without anti-reflective to
with anti-reflective, you are probably going to have
less symptoms, not of the headlights straight ahead of you,
but headlights off to your side
because the light coming in at obtuse angles
is going to bounce off those lights and reflect back.
And that's going to cause more of a disturbance.
But it's not as dramatic as a lot
of the marketing companies make it out to be.
- Sure.
- That's the one issue I have with it.
But the anti-reflectives is a real thing
and it does help you.
And there's different options out there too now,
because you can have anti-reflective
with blue light filters.
You can have anti-reflectives
that do more scratch protection.
You can have anti-reflectives that really help,
like 30% less reflections versus a standard one.
So there's different options out there.
- Yeah. Actually, if you go to Dr. Allen's channel,
his YouTube channel, Doctor Eye Health,
I saw one point where you were comparing one
to another, I mean anti-reflective against not
and it was quite a difference.
- [Dr. Allen] Yeah.
- There was a lot more reflection.
- Yeah.
The thing is that it's come a long way in technology.
Anti-reflective coatings are put
on through metal oxides that are more
or less vacuum compressed onto the lenses.
It's like incorporated into the lens material these days,
versus it was like 30-40 years ago.
It used to be something that was, kind of,
like painted onto the surface of the lens.
- [Bob] Right.
- [Dr. Allen] It's not quite like that anymore.
- Yep. I remember having glasses where something
was kind of peeling off.
- Hmm.
- [Bob] I don't know if that was it, but -
- It very well could have been.
There are certain lens treatments that used to be, kind of,
more put onto the lenses in that form.
But now everything these days is usually kind
of incorporated into the lens material itself.
- Sure, sure.
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