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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.
Let's go on to a big one,
that seems like a lot of people are worried about,
is bags under their eyes.
When even though they had a good night's sleep, you know?
- Right.
So the bags under the eyes, there's different
types of terms people will use for this.
And there are different types of eye bags.
but the tough thing is, is that when you're really
young your eyes may look more sunken in or swollen
especially if you are around allergies.
If you have dry eyes, perhaps the salt content left
staining on the eye from the evaporation of the tears
in the dry eye world, can cause irritation and inflammation.
So eyelids can look puffy and swollen.
A lot of people notice this in them early mornings
so that can have that appearance.
For most people as we get older, though,
there is a layer of tissue around your eye that
holds the eye in its place, as well as the fat
around the eyes that's called the septum.
And so for a lot of older individuals
this tissue becomes more elastic
and starts to kind of bend outward.
So the fat around the globe of the eye starts to push
against this elastic tissue and it starts to bulge outward.
And just due to gravity, this happens on the lower eyelid
more than it would on the top eyelid.
And so people start to see these eye bags and they
get really frustrated because makes their appearance
look more tired or older. (laughs)
- Sure, sure.
- So thankfully, if your eyes are just puffy
from either you cried the night before,
you watch a really sad movie, or you have allergies,
cold compresses do help just getting cold to them.
Just like if you have inflammation of your elbow
or something, it's a little bit swollen getting cold
to that helps.
the antihistamines, if it's an allergy, can help as well.
There's some, cost benefit to that if you're using
antihistamines, because that can also dry out the eyes,
dries out the body, so may or may not help,
but so there's some rules to that.
And that kind of goes to why everybody thinks
that they think, "Oh, I'll put cold cucumbers on the eye."
I saw that in a TV show, or something at a spa once.
And that's what it's doing.
It's really adding, the temperature difference
is gonna constrict the blood vessel.
- Cold spoons, Right?
- Right. Yeah, yeah.
That was a that's-
I've seen some funny tricks on that online.
And so you have to kind of comment on that, but it's just
about getting cold there to constrict the blood vessels.
- Sure.
- And that helps with inflammation.
The true eye bags that people develop as they get older.
Unfortunately, there's really nothing to get rid of that
long term, other than to have a surgery done,
more or less tighten up the eyelids.
- Gotcha.
- There are different serums and creams that
are always sold online.
It's like, "Oh, act now and get, for this cream
for $11 or $15."
They often do help momentarily,
they just tighten up the skin.
- Sure.
- But they don't last long term.
It's not gonna get rid of it forever.
- When you say momentarily, you mean an hour or?
- Yeah, It usually lasts for a few hours.
I personally haven't, I think I've tried
one or two of them, just because I was gonna talk about it,
and I felt like I needed to investigate it myself more.
And it does tighten up your skin.
I even know some cosmetic surgeons who formulate and sell
this themselves, because some people just don't wanna
go through surgery.
It's like, "Well, we have to give 'em some alternative."
- Sure.
- And in general, the eyecare community, again,
we're a little hesitant about cosmetics right now.
So I don't typically recommend them to anybody, but-
- Sure.
- It is an alternative.
- Makes sense.
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