- (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 - (upbeat music)
