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Speaker 3: Oh hey, it's your uncle's corduroy jacket that smells like
Speaker 3: pipe smoke and breakfast sausage. Ali Ward back with another
Speaker 3: episode of ologies. Okay, so this one's special because your
Speaker 3: ears are about to get a real mouthful about your eyes.
Speaker 3: So it's a very multisensory affair, like, hey, ears, will
Speaker 3: you pass this highly informative binder paper note to Eyes
Speaker 3: and Ears is like ooh, hell yeah, but I'm gonna
Speaker 3: read it first and it better not talk shit on me.
Speaker 3: And I'm like, okay, Ears, thanks, you're great. One day
Speaker 3: we're going to do an episode about you. I promise,
Speaker 3: just not this week. Eyes all eyes are on you.
Speaker 3: I mean all ears are on you, Okay. I stuff
Speaker 3: makes your old pod dad a little squeamish. So my
Speaker 3: goal in doing this episode. I did it intentionally because
Speaker 3: I was like, ooh, I wanted to get over my
Speaker 3: eye squeamishness and stop shoving eyes into a corner. No
Speaker 3: one puts eyes in a corner. Eyes, here's looking at you. Okay.
Speaker 3: But first a little business, So thank you to all
Speaker 3: the Instagram powers. This week little milestone, we crossed ten thousand.
Speaker 3: I did a very small private dance in an airport
Speaker 3: alone about it and was like, oh, thank you to
Speaker 3: all the patrons who support the show and submit questions
Speaker 3: for the ologies. At patreon dot com slash ologies. You
Speaker 3: can support for as little as a quarter a week
Speaker 3: twenty five cents a week. So this is totally independently
Speaker 3: published and produced show. It is like I'm literally recording
Speaker 3: this in my closet and I recorded on the road
Speaker 3: when I'm working. I just love making it. So thank
Speaker 3: you for making it possible literally by your Patreon support.
Speaker 3: So if you want to find other ologites in the wild,
Speaker 3: you can pick up ologies shirts and dad hats and
Speaker 3: pins and totes and backpacks and such at ologiesmerch dot com.
Speaker 3: Also thank you to anyone who rates and reviews and subscribes.
Speaker 3: That costs no money, takes a couple of minutes, and
Speaker 3: it helps keep ologies up here in the charts for
Speaker 3: other people to discover. It takes like seconds. Also, I'm
Speaker 3: a known lurk. I lurk and when I'm feeling like
Speaker 3: so jet lagged that i want to go live in
Speaker 3: a hollowed out tree and talk only to squirrels. Your
Speaker 3: iTunes reviews roways remind me that there are folks out
Speaker 3: there who are listening and cheering me on to keep
Speaker 3: making more. And it helps so much. And to prove it,
Speaker 3: I read one out loud each week so you know
Speaker 3: that I actually look and this week I'm actually going
Speaker 3: to shout out. I think I'm going to shout out
Speaker 3: to because they're quick, okay, easy, Anielo says literally life changing.
Speaker 3: Ten out of ten, this podcast inspired me to pursue
Speaker 3: my interest in bugs, and now I'm working in an
Speaker 3: utopology lab. Huh, that's so exciting. Thanks Ali. Every episode
Speaker 3: is super fun regardless of the topic. Listen to them all. Congratulations,
Speaker 3: this is amazing. Also, Trista Edwards wrote, this podcast is
Speaker 3: like the manifestation of all of my obsessions. Every episode
Speaker 3: is like experiencing an auditory cabinet of curiosities. As poet,
Speaker 3: this podcast generates so much creativity and inspires a poem
Speaker 3: with every episode. Thanks Ali. Soon I may have a
Speaker 3: whole book of poems inspired by ologies. Trista Edwards hell,
Speaker 3: yes to that. Please keep doing that. We'll buy your book.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 3: Back to optthalmology, which is a word that is like
Speaker 3: a letter party where someone invited too many h's, Like,
Speaker 3: oh damn, why can I not spell this word? Just
Speaker 3: keep adding hus. That's the secret and the etymology. If
Speaker 3: you guessed Russian, you are not correct because it's Greek.
Speaker 3: It's just Greek guys. Ophthalmolos means I. Okay, but what
Speaker 3: does it mean to be an ophthalmologist? Okay? Well, I
Speaker 3: called upon a longtime pal of mine, a friend who
Speaker 3: is not only super dedicated to his work, but he
Speaker 3: is one of the few truly sane people I know
Speaker 3: in LA. Like he stands out at barbecues because it's like,
Speaker 3: what's that guy's deal? He seems nice and like he
Speaker 3: has his life together. It's so weird. He hasn't taken
Speaker 3: a picture of himself smoking or mentioned an impropt troupe.
Speaker 3: He's all so the type of friend that you can
Speaker 3: text a medical problem too, and if it's related to eyes,
Speaker 3: he'll weather your questions. He'll hook you up solid dude.
Speaker 3: And I just wrote the Yelp reviews for his medical practice.
Speaker 3: People love him. He's like everyone's favorite super smart cousin.
Speaker 3: The reviews are like five stars. Would get treated for
Speaker 3: pink eye again. So I sent him a message. I
Speaker 3: was like, Hey, can I podcast your brain or what?
Speaker 3: And he was like, sure, dude. So I drove the
Speaker 3: half a mile to his house. Have I mentioned I'm
Speaker 3: based in Los Angeles? Also, it was so hot out,
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, And we sat at his kitchen table and
Speaker 3: had a merry old talk about eyeballs and he helped
Speaker 3: me face my squeamosity head on, and we talked about
Speaker 3: why evolution hasn't weeded out bad vision, and what to
Speaker 3: do if you screw up on your eye tests, and
Speaker 3: what to eat to have healthier peepers, and if phones
Speaker 3: are making us maybe a little cross eyed, and maybe
Speaker 3: very briefly some very bad ocular accidents, and what mascara
Speaker 3: is really made of and Mari Juanna, and do I
Speaker 3: have eyeball tumors? And we dress diabetes and so called
Speaker 3: color blindness in air quotes and why we cry and
Speaker 3: dogs who wear glasses. So there's so much happening. Please
Speaker 3: get ready to have a ball with ophthalmologist doctor reed Wayous.
Speaker 4: Let's do this. I haven't I listened, Like I said,
Speaker 4: I listen to podcasts every day. I probably listened to
Speaker 4: an how I have the podcasts almost every day?
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I listening to.
Speaker 4: A podcast when you walk out to the door.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: Okay, I just have to get read in here like friend,
Speaker 4: like ptend like I'm on the radio now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's great, look at this, we're rolling all right? Yeah? Okay,
Speaker 3: doctor Reid Wayness, you are an ophthalmologist. Yes, I know
Speaker 3: you get this question. I feel like everywhere like rental
Speaker 3: car counters, cocktail parties, whatever. What's the difference between and
Speaker 3: ophthalmologists and optometrists. I'm sorry, I have to ask you that.
Speaker 4: It's the question everybody asks, so it's a good one
Speaker 4: to start with. So optometrists and optthalmologists do a lot
Speaker 4: of there's a lot of overlaps, so they do a
Speaker 4: lot of the same things, which is examinize and treat
Speaker 4: eye conditions.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 4: Optometry school focuses on diagnostic pathways, so learning to diagnose
Speaker 4: certain eye diseases, learning to do refractions, which you check
Speaker 4: patients for glasses and get them seeing well, do vision
Speaker 4: therapy like contact lenses and low vision specialties where they
Speaker 4: really focus on your vision.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 4: Ophthalmology is more of a disease focused specialty. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: you go through medical school, so you're focusing on the
Speaker 4: diseases and treating the diseases, whether that's medically or surgically.
Speaker 4: So it is definitely overlap. But optthalmology is more of
Speaker 4: the medical side of things, but that's blurred a little
Speaker 4: bit more in recent years. So optometrists are doing nice
Speaker 4: pun right intended aphalmology pun.
Speaker 3: So refractions is what you call it. When they're just
Speaker 3: checking to see if you can read the idea.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the torturous number one or number two, which is
Speaker 4: more clear that everybody hates.
Speaker 3: I just did that. I just had an eye appointment on.
Speaker 4: Tuesday, which I and you didn't see me.
Speaker 3: I did not see you, can you? But do you
Speaker 3: do refractions? To you?
Speaker 4: Do I do?
Speaker 3: Okay? I didn't know that you only cut eyeballs open.
Speaker 4: No, I mean I can. I don't do it as
Speaker 4: my mainstay of my work, but usually for friends and
Speaker 4: family and people I know, I do that.
Speaker 3: I had no idea, okay, I thought that I thought
Speaker 3: you were the big guns. Like you go to you
Speaker 3: and you're like, I think I have cancer in my eye.
Speaker 4: Well sure, I mean for that, you'd probably go to
Speaker 4: an oncologist specialist, which you know, you could see me first,
Speaker 4: and if I see cancer in your eye, we'd refer
Speaker 4: you out to one of those, thankfully. But you know
Speaker 4: that's pretty rare. You don't have cancer.
Speaker 3: I didn't realize until I said that that I have
Speaker 3: been told I do have an eye tumor.
Speaker 4: You have a trigium. I know, yeah, I remember.
Speaker 3: So a side note, I forgot that i'd made read
Speaker 3: look at my gross eyeball like seven years ago. Also,
Speaker 3: a trigium takes its name from the word putter, meaning wing,
Speaker 3: and it's this webby wing shaped film that grows in
Speaker 3: your eyeballs if you move somewhere with bleached bright light
Speaker 3: and you don't wear sunglasses for a few years. The
Speaker 3: condition varies in severity. Mine's not that bad. But it's
Speaker 3: also called surfer's eye, which is appropriate because it is
Speaker 3: clinically speaking Helen Narnar anyway, Yeah, do I still have them?
Speaker 4: Well, they don't just go away? Yeah, God, I have So.
Speaker 3: I have a benign tumor in my eye.
Speaker 4: Right, a tumor. It's more of a degeneration of the
Speaker 4: membrane covering your eye. Terygium is the medical term for it.
Speaker 4: But it's just a uv damage to the white part
Speaker 4: of your eye that causes it to get a little
Speaker 4: It loses the elastic portion, so it kind of swells
Speaker 4: up a little bit and grows a little differently than
Speaker 4: it normally would.
Speaker 3: And so can I use I have eye tumors as
Speaker 3: an excuse to not go to things.
Speaker 4: You can do whatever you want, whether you know, if
Speaker 4: there's an ophthalmologist or an optometrist at the party. They'll
Speaker 4: know you're full of something, but you know you can
Speaker 4: pull it off.
Speaker 3: I'm full of it. Tumors can't go to your birthday.
Speaker 3: So how did old doctor Waynis who I'm let's be honest,
Speaker 3: I'm just gonna keep calling Reid because we're like bros
Speaker 3: in real life. How did he decide to go to
Speaker 3: medical school for ophthalmology?
Speaker 4: I went to medical school not knowing that I wanted
Speaker 4: to be an ophthalmologist, but just knowing that I wanted
Speaker 4: to be a physician.
Speaker 3: Really, so what convinced you? At what point during medical
Speaker 3: school were you cutting into a cadaver and you're like,
Speaker 3: you know what, eyeballs?
Speaker 4: So definitely not when cutting into the cadavers, although that
Speaker 4: was some fun times as a first year medical student.
Speaker 4: A few people lost their lunch that first day. I'll
Speaker 4: never forget that really pretty kine. Oh yeah, actually reserved.
Speaker 3: So in his third year of medical school, Read came
Speaker 3: to a fork in the road, will he take medical
Speaker 3: path or the surgical path? That was me being like
Speaker 3: a witchy oracle deciding his future. If you're like medical surgical, Like,
Speaker 3: what's the difference? Okay? One involves the phrase.
Speaker 4: So for me, early on, I knew I wanted to
Speaker 4: do something on the surgical side. I always loved doing
Speaker 4: model cars and building stuff, so I knew I wanted
Speaker 4: to do something like that with my medical.
Speaker 3: Training, but with live bodies.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but with live people exactly.
Speaker 3: There's something to me. I'm like the leap between, Like
Speaker 3: I like working on like model ships, and like I'll
Speaker 3: cut into an eyeball. There's a very large, canyon size
Speaker 3: leap that one makes. How did you do that?
Speaker 4: So I don't think it feels that distinct when you're
Speaker 4: doing it, Like it just feels kind of like a
Speaker 4: natural progression of life, or like I want to be
Speaker 4: a physician, and I always liked working with my hands,
Speaker 4: so it's like a natural next step for me, and
Speaker 4: for me, all the surgical specialties just were much more fun.
Speaker 4: I just enjoyed those things more. I enjoyed doing things
Speaker 4: physically to help people be better. Oh thank god, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Thank god there are people like you that exist.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 3: I'm like, I can't cut a raw chicken, and so
Speaker 3: thank god that there's someone that's like, yeah, I'll hop
Speaker 3: in there and do that, who would fix people's eyeballs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what I'm here for.
Speaker 3: Like no one, so you were, was it kind of
Speaker 3: the altruism of it, like knowing that they're going to
Speaker 3: come out of this surgery it provided you're not drunk,
Speaker 3: that you're they're going to come out of it better
Speaker 3: sort of.
Speaker 4: I mean, I don't think I've ever thought about it
Speaker 4: from that perspective. It's an interesting way to think about it.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think I just it felt normal to
Speaker 4: want to do something to make a difference in people's lives.
Speaker 4: But I never thought about, like, oh, the reason I'm
Speaker 4: doing this is altruism. It's more about just seem normal.
Speaker 4: I want to do something where I can help people,
Speaker 4: and it just fit. So for me, it was kind
Speaker 4: of like there was never a light bulb moment. It
Speaker 4: was just kind of it just always seemed like this
Speaker 4: is what I should be doing with my life. Medicine
Speaker 4: that is, Oh, this is what I like. I really
Speaker 4: like treating eye conditions and helping people see better, and
Speaker 4: it just is enjoyable.
Speaker 3: You know what, I just realized, you have glasses.
Speaker 4: I do.
Speaker 3: How long have you had your glasses?
Speaker 4: So I've worn glasses pretty much since high school?
Speaker 3: Why is it so common? This is my biggest question.
Speaker 3: So many people have bad vision. If you put me
Speaker 3: in the wild or like on Survivor, and you took
Speaker 3: out my contacts, I would die in the first like
Speaker 3: twenty four hours, Like I have no chance. I can't
Speaker 3: see anything without them. So why have we evolved to
Speaker 3: have such shitty vision?
Speaker 4: Sure, so that's a good question. I think a lot
Speaker 4: of it comes back to what you just said, which
Speaker 4: is it's evolved. So we didn't necessarily evolve to have
Speaker 4: that bad of vision. You know, if you go back
Speaker 4: hundreds of years ago, we probably didn't have people who
Speaker 4: had minus ten prescriptions and these super strong glasses and contacts.
Speaker 4: That wasn't as common. We've seen a big boom in myopia,
Speaker 4: which is nearsightedness of having strong, strong need for glasses.
Speaker 4: In really the modern world, there's debate about what causes
Speaker 4: that one hundred percent. You know, we think that being
Speaker 4: indoors more, a lot of close work like reading computer's phones,
Speaker 4: all those things raise the risk of having a stronger
Speaker 4: prescription when we're at a young age doing that thing.
Speaker 4: Those things that we all do definitely affects that. So
Speaker 4: some of it is not about historical evolution of humanity,
Speaker 4: but kind of our behavioral changes over the last hundred years.
Speaker 3: So wait, what you're saying is wearing glasses really does
Speaker 3: mean you're a nerd because that means you were staying indoors,
Speaker 3: like not getting any sunlight, probably reading. Then you're wearing glasses.
Speaker 3: Thus you're a nerd.
Speaker 4: So a chicken or the egg, right, I don't know,
Speaker 4: but yeah, probably works that way a little bit. If
Speaker 4: you're spending more time indoors, you know, playing games and
Speaker 4: doing things up close, you're probably more likely to wear glasses.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: One of the treatments they recommend for kids to reduce
Speaker 4: myopia is to spend more time outside. Really yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 4: Oh damn.
Speaker 3: That's the one thing I feel like we're getting worse
Speaker 3: and worse probably.
Speaker 4: Probably yeah, And we're just going the exact opposite direction
Speaker 4: of that.
Speaker 3: I guess like your kid reading an iPad outside doesn't
Speaker 3: cut in, right.
Speaker 4: Probably not? Probably not.
Speaker 3: So do you think that like dogs and apes and
Speaker 3: giraffes and stuff have shitty vision and they're just like, man,
Speaker 3: I would I can't read that sign?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 4: Some do? I mean yeah? I mean you've can tell though,
Speaker 4: if an animal can't function because of their vision, then
Speaker 4: they're gonna be walking into stuff. So you know, again, evolution,
Speaker 4: I think hits those kind of animals a lot harder
Speaker 4: than they do us at this point, since we're pretty domesticated.
Speaker 4: But you know, a dog that can't see. We all
Speaker 4: see dogs with cataracts as they get older, and you
Speaker 4: can see the cloudiness in their eye and they're bumping
Speaker 4: into the walls. But most young animals don't have problems
Speaker 4: like that because just their behavior and evolution over the
Speaker 4: years hasn't created a situation where they're reading things up close.
Speaker 4: You know, even if your dogs inside all day, they're
Speaker 4: not reading the newspaper.
Speaker 3: Do that dog would rule?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean Garfield probably would mean glasses eventually, but
Speaker 4: other than that, most pets are good to go.
Speaker 3: Quick aside, I needed to see photos of animals and glasses,
Speaker 3: so I googled animals and glasses and it did not disappoint.
Speaker 3: I soon found myself on a website called doggles dot com, which,
Speaker 3: as you may have guessed, sells goggles for dogs, just
Speaker 3: dope as hell, prescription lenses, sunglasses for pups. And for
Speaker 3: a second, I forgot all about the world's troubles. Also,
Speaker 3: one study found that gorillas, are you ready for this
Speaker 3: need reading glasses when they get older? So what is
Speaker 3: happening when you get older and you have to hold
Speaker 3: shit further away from your face?
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 3: The muscles in our eyes, they make it harder to
Speaker 3: squish our lenses to change focal length. So it's kind
Speaker 3: of like your hand getting too tired to work a
Speaker 3: zoom lens. But I feel like instead of reading glasses
Speaker 3: for gorillas, they would technically be like lice picking glasses. Okay,
Speaker 3: how much do you notice eye problems and other people? Like,
Speaker 3: for example, my eyes are garbage. My eyes are tiny
Speaker 3: balls of garbage, Like I have turigium, which are I'm sorry,
Speaker 3: there are tumors in the eye. I'm telling everyone. I
Speaker 3: my eyes get red when I'm hungry. I don't know
Speaker 3: why they get read all the time. Like how much
Speaker 3: are you diagnosing people when you're talking to them?
Speaker 4: Not that much? Surprisingly, I'm not just talking to people
Speaker 4: out in the street and really like looking, Oh do
Speaker 4: they have a red eye? Do they have a contact
Speaker 4: in their eye? Do they have trigium? Do they have
Speaker 4: a cataract?
Speaker 3: Now with the influx or rather now with a change
Speaker 3: in policy toward wacky tobacci. Do you notice a lot
Speaker 3: of stony eyeballs in Los Angeles and California and also Denver?
Speaker 5: So?
Speaker 4: I think it's hard to tell, because you know, you don't.
Speaker 4: I think I just assume at this point everyone in
Speaker 4: Los Angeles is stone. So I can't tell who's just
Speaker 4: got red eyes from dryness out there and who's actually stone.
Speaker 3: Why do people's eyes get bread when they're stone? I
Speaker 3: can't believe that. I didn't realize that. I meant to ask.
Speaker 4: Sure, So we have blood vessels on our eyes, and
Speaker 4: when they're dilated the blood vessels, they look more red,
Speaker 4: and when they're shrunken they look less red.
Speaker 3: So heads up. It's the THHC levels in the wacky
Speaker 3: tobacci that lower the blood pressure and then cause blood
Speaker 3: vessels to just bloom and dilate into something beautifully bloodshot.
Speaker 3: But that very decrease in the intraocular pressure is what
Speaker 3: helps the glaucoma patients. So if you're somewhere it's legal
Speaker 3: and you want the other medicinal benefits of cannabinoids but
Speaker 3: do not wish to look like mugshot, you can go
Speaker 3: for lower TAC products instead of just like buying vizine
Speaker 3: by the leader jug.
Speaker 4: You know, if you take vizine, it just a vasoconstrictor.
Speaker 4: It shrinks the blood vessels on your eye so they
Speaker 4: don't look as red. That's what vizin is doing to
Speaker 4: people's eyes are clear eyes. Any of that stuff I.
Speaker 3: Hear that stuff is garbage. It's so bad, terrible is it?
Speaker 4: So it hides the redness, but it doesn't actually treat
Speaker 4: the problem, and then what ends up happening is your
Speaker 4: eye gets addicted to it. So once you stop taking it,
Speaker 4: the blood vessels aren't trunking down anymore. They kind of
Speaker 4: dilate up really really big, and then your eyes look
Speaker 4: super red, and then you put more in because you're
Speaker 4: stuck using it, and then you're just in a cycle
Speaker 4: where anytime you don't use it, your eyes get super
Speaker 4: super red and you feel like you have to use
Speaker 4: it every day. So it's very addictive.
Speaker 2: It.
Speaker 4: Don't use it every day because it's you know, your
Speaker 4: guy's gonna get hooked on it, and you don't use
Speaker 4: it for dry eyes. Use it for occasional redness relief.
Speaker 3: That's totally cool, okay, But in general, treat it like
Speaker 3: a special occasion type of vasoconstrictor exactly. I hear you
Speaker 3: can use it on zis though, and it makes them
Speaker 3: less red.
Speaker 4: I haven't heard that. I mean, I will try it.
Speaker 4: I've got some samples.
Speaker 3: I mean, you're also talking to someone who's put hemorrhid
Speaker 3: cream on their face, So don't listen to anything I say.
Speaker 3: So let's back up and say, let's just back up
Speaker 3: and look at how does vision work? Like in a nutshell,
Speaker 3: because it's kind of crazy that we have these eyeballs
Speaker 3: in our faces. What are they mostly made of? Are
Speaker 3: they mostly empty? Okay? So this in a nutshell in
Speaker 3: one paragraph explains like the miracle a vision and it'll
Speaker 3: change the way you think about your own eyeballs forever.
Speaker 3: It's crazy, okay, so stay with us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so the inside of it, it's mostly just an
Speaker 4: empty gel. It's kind of like a watery, guey fingelly
Speaker 4: almost okay. But yeah, your eye's like a camera. I mean,
Speaker 4: we know how cameras work, and well people don't even
Speaker 4: worcaus are all digital. But we used to know how
Speaker 4: cameras work with you know, film and all that fun stuff.
Speaker 4: But your eye has a lens that has a retina
Speaker 4: which acts like the film in the camera, so light
Speaker 4: hits your eyeball, and the cornea the front surface of
Speaker 4: your eye, and the lens inside both kind of refract
Speaker 4: or bend the light coming into your eye and help
Speaker 4: focus it so the light passes into your eye, it
Speaker 4: gets focused down to your retina, okay. And then the
Speaker 4: retina has the rods and cones and it senses the
Speaker 4: light and the colors and puts it all together. And
Speaker 4: then the nerves on the retina colate together and send
Speaker 4: it back through the optic nerve up to your brain
Speaker 4: where the brain interprets the image.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'm just gonna repeat that just in case you
Speaker 3: spaced or like someone in the park was walking a
Speaker 3: cat on a leash and you got distracted, Because this
Speaker 3: is real life, that shit happens. Okay. So the cornea
Speaker 3: is the clear dome covering the iris, which is the
Speaker 3: colored part which lets light into the lens below, and
Speaker 3: the lens is a biconvex aka that just means eminem
Speaker 3: shaped jelly blob that works like a camera lens, so
Speaker 3: light enters, gets bent and then goes through your eyeball.
Speaker 3: Jelly to the back of the eye where it hits
Speaker 3: the retina film, which has all the rods and cones
Speaker 3: to pick up light and color, and then your brain,
Speaker 3: if you're sighted, takes that information and forms a picture
Speaker 3: you perceive as a reality. Now, just as cameras can
Speaker 3: have different like mechanical hiccups, soaken eyes. So the top
Speaker 3: few causes of losing sight are cataracts, which is a
Speaker 3: clouding of the lens. There's glaucoma, macular degeneration, diabetic retinal damage,
Speaker 3: and in some parts of the world there's also things
Speaker 3: like river blindness, which is caused by a filarial worm
Speaker 3: that hangs out in a black fly. Now, those are
Speaker 3: just some of the top causes here in the US,
Speaker 3: A whopping Are you ready for this? Seventy five percent
Speaker 3: of adults need vision correction, which means read can change
Speaker 3: people's lives and also has wicked job security.
Speaker 4: So you know, you've got a lot of cool stuff
Speaker 4: going on. But it's basically just a poor man's camera
Speaker 4: or cameras, a poor man's eyeball, I guess are the
Speaker 4: way around?
Speaker 3: I guess you don't. You don't need much money to
Speaker 3: have eyeballs. Which is kind of good. Does the light
Speaker 3: go through the cornea, through the lens, through the jelly,
Speaker 3: and then hit the retina type of film in the
Speaker 3: back and now it rods cones. What's happened?
Speaker 4: So, rods and cones are the sensors inside the eye.
Speaker 4: The rods are sensing the amount of light that are
Speaker 4: hitting the retin or flying into the eye there, and
Speaker 4: the cones measure the amount of the wavelength of the
Speaker 4: color essentially coming into the eye. So you know, you
Speaker 4: think of ROIDGBIV like you know, the rainbow, red, orange, yellow,
Speaker 4: and whatnot. That each of those colors has a different wavelength,
Speaker 4: and so the cones in your eye are sensing what
Speaker 4: wavelength that light ray is coming into your eye at,
Speaker 4: and that's how it knows what color it is. Ah,
Speaker 4: You've got tons of those little rods and cones in
Speaker 4: the eye, and so every little detail in the center
Speaker 4: of your vision can pick out how much light, how
Speaker 4: much color, and then the brain does all the interpreting
Speaker 4: once it gets up there.
Speaker 3: Do you ever just space out and think like it's
Speaker 3: so weird that we can see anything at all, and
Speaker 3: what if I'm seeing everything in a totally different color?
Speaker 3: Spectrum than other people, and like what's reality?
Speaker 4: I think half the second half, yes, I think that
Speaker 4: what's reality? Like consciousness throws me for a total loop.
Speaker 4: But just the fact that we all have consciousness and
Speaker 4: thoughts and all those things. Yeah, I you know, in
Speaker 4: my head, I assume we all see things mostly the same.
Speaker 4: But you know, obviously we all have different color palettes
Speaker 4: because there's people with color blindness. I don't know if
Speaker 4: what I see as red as what you see as red.
Speaker 4: Who knows?
Speaker 3: Right now? Are you colorblind? One and twelve?
Speaker 4: Dude's right, Yeah, it's a pretty big number. I don't
Speaker 4: know if it's exactly one and twelve, but it's something
Speaker 4: like that.
Speaker 3: I think it's one in twelve for men and one
Speaker 3: in two hundred for women.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's pretty common. But again, most people don't know
Speaker 4: that they have a problem. The just that's how they
Speaker 4: experience the world.
Speaker 3: So real quick. Those rods in the retina are for
Speaker 3: low light vision, and the cones detect color. So we
Speaker 3: have three cones. They each pick up different ranges of
Speaker 3: light and color. Vision deficiency tends to happen when one
Speaker 3: of those cones isn't working right. So the story goes
Speaker 3: about a decade or so ago. While making protective eyewear
Speaker 3: for surgeons who worked with lasers, there was a California
Speaker 3: scientist named Don McPherson, and he accidentally stumbled upon some greatness.
Speaker 3: So he invented glasses that separate certain wavelengths so that
Speaker 3: the eye can detect differences between like red and green
Speaker 3: or blue, and so for people who have an issue
Speaker 3: with their cone holmes, this makes flowers and sunsets and
Speaker 3: leaves go from muddy because those wavelengths are overlapping to
Speaker 3: just like acid trip vibrant. Now, if you feel like
Speaker 3: bawling your face off, look up and chroma glasses on
Speaker 3: YouTube or Instagram. Just google color blind glasses videos And
Speaker 3: side note, the more accurate terminology in recent years is
Speaker 3: color vision deficiency, but people still use the hashtag color
Speaker 3: blindness all over the place, so it's a good bread
Speaker 3: crumb trail to follow now. Either way, These videos ough
Speaker 3: of sometimes these like stoic dad types trying on their
Speaker 3: special sunglasses. It just destroys your composure and like the
Speaker 3: best way, there's this one video, one of the first
Speaker 3: ones I ever saw, posted to YouTube by Aaron William's
Speaker 3: Melee has two million hits and features him. Oh, he's
Speaker 3: like he nervously puts on this pair of these like
Speaker 3: three hundred and fifty dollars and chroma glasses, and with
Speaker 3: this quiet dignity, just very calmly loses his shit.
Speaker 4: I feel him, dude. It's weird.
Speaker 3: He seems to almost struggle to keep his balance. He's
Speaker 3: just like washed over in this orange glow of a
Speaker 3: Virginia sunset, like the first sunset he's ever seen in
Speaker 3: full color?
Speaker 4: Can do? Is it very noticeable difference?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 4: I'm shaking.
Speaker 3: Ten out of ten would weep to anytime. I honestly
Speaker 3: just watched no fewer than twenty of these videos. My
Speaker 3: eyes are so swollen. I just kept watching it, just
Speaker 3: kept crying. I knew what I was doing. I loved it.
Speaker 3: You just see all the it's so yeah crying, It's like,
Speaker 3: oh God, it's wrenching.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, what kinds of things do you have to treat? Like,
Speaker 3: what's a typical day for you? How often are you
Speaker 3: like scrubbed in Gray's Anatomy style and in the O R.
Speaker 4: So I'm in surgery one to two days a week,
Speaker 4: depending on the week. Okay, I was in surgery today,
Speaker 4: but mostly I'm doing cataract surgery, so, you know, helping
Speaker 4: people see who can't see anymore because their cataracts have
Speaker 4: developed from aging. I'd see a lot of cataract patients,
Speaker 4: glocoma patients, people with dry eyes, macular degeneration, diabetes, all
Speaker 4: sorts of stuff that you affects their eyes. But I
Speaker 4: spend three or four days in the office seeing patients and.
Speaker 3: How many of your patients are stone cold awake when
Speaker 3: you're operating on them, and how many are just knocked
Speaker 3: the fuck out?
Speaker 4: So probably fifty to fifty honestly. Yeah. So we give
Speaker 4: people anesthetic to you know, relax them and ivy you
Speaker 4: know that fun stuff, and everybody just responds differently to it.
Speaker 4: And I always tell people like, we're gonna give you
Speaker 4: just enough sedation that you're comfortable, because you know, the
Speaker 4: more you give the risk. Here it is, and there's
Speaker 4: no need to do that with eye surgery because it's
Speaker 4: pretty quick, Like cataract surgeries take like eight minutes. What, Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's crazy so fast?
Speaker 3: How is that possible? I've waited for smoothies longer than that.
Speaker 3: How is it? How can you do cataract surgery both
Speaker 3: eyes or one.
Speaker 4: I just want eye. Oh yeah, yeah, per ee. So
Speaker 4: most people do one at a time. The surgery is
Speaker 4: eight minutes, but the whole process is like an hour
Speaker 4: and a half. So, but the surgery is quick. You
Speaker 4: just go in and you make a little incision that's
Speaker 4: like two and a half millimeters. You go in and
Speaker 4: kind of vacuum out the cataract and you put a
Speaker 4: new lens implant to replace it, and you're done quick.
Speaker 3: I don't get that though, because the cataract, So do
Speaker 3: you take out the lens that's there or do you
Speaker 3: put another lens on top of the lens?
Speaker 4: We take out the lens, so yeah, the cataract is
Speaker 4: the lens itself getting cloudy. Oh so I always tell people, like,
Speaker 4: think of your camera. If you get an old camera
Speaker 4: with a cloudy lens, you need to replace it with
Speaker 4: a new lens. That's what cataract surgery is. It's just
Speaker 4: a lens replacement. So we take out the old one
Speaker 4: and put in a new plastic artificial one that's clear
Speaker 4: so people can see better. Again.
Speaker 3: My dad had that surgery done one at a time,
Speaker 3: not by me, not by you. I'm so sorry, we
Speaker 3: had no idea. I should have been like, dad, come
Speaker 3: down here. But in low light, he has the most
Speaker 3: like shimmery cartoon unicorn eyes. They just like they're like,
Speaker 3: why is that?
Speaker 4: Yeah? So the lenses plastic, so you're catching a reflection
Speaker 4: off of it when you see it. So what happens
Speaker 4: in the low light is as pupil gets big, so
Speaker 4: it's pupil dilates, so you can see more of the
Speaker 4: artificial lens, so you get more reflections off of it.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh. So next time you know someone with
Speaker 3: cataract surgery, just like like take a gander, you'll.
Speaker 4: See a twinkle, Like you'll see like it'll be a
Speaker 4: light off in the distance and you'll catch that twinkle
Speaker 4: off someone's eye, and yep, you know they have implants
Speaker 4: from cataract surgery.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're like, what are you Santa Claus? Like, where
Speaker 3: did that covered? Just like exactly, so different color eyes
Speaker 3: now the iris is the colored part, correct, Okay, so
Speaker 3: what's the function of that? And also I heard that
Speaker 3: everyone who has blue eyes is related to each other
Speaker 3: somewhere down the line by one person who just had
Speaker 3: crazy eyes.
Speaker 4: Well, technically we're all related. If you go by far enough,
Speaker 4: so probably true, yes, But the different color eyes. So
Speaker 4: if you evolutionarily wise, if you grew up somewhere your
Speaker 4: ancestry that was Nordic and there wasn't as much sun,
Speaker 4: you're more likely to have light colored eyes because it
Speaker 4: doesn't matter if too much light's coming in the eyes
Speaker 4: because there's not a lot of light. If it's just
Speaker 4: like having darker skin or lighter skin, it's melanin deposits
Speaker 4: in the eye. It's the same thing as why we
Speaker 4: have dark skin versus light skin. If you grew up
Speaker 4: you know your ancestry along the equator, you're gonna have
Speaker 4: much darker skin because there's much more light and your
Speaker 4: body needs to adapt to that.
Speaker 3: And melanin can be the blue.
Speaker 4: So it's not that the melanin is blue, it's the
Speaker 4: amount of melanin in your eye changes what it looks like.
Speaker 4: So if you have a really light colored eye, you
Speaker 4: don't have as much melanin in your eye.
Speaker 3: So then why are eyes blue or green? Like? What's
Speaker 3: causing those colors all again?
Speaker 4: It goes back to the wavelengths coming out of your eye.
Speaker 4: It's like why is the sky blue? It's that same
Speaker 4: age old question. It's not because the sky is blue.
Speaker 4: It's because the light that bounces off the sky is
Speaker 4: coming at the wavelength that is blue.
Speaker 3: I'm glad someone explained that to me, because I still
Speaker 3: sometimes struggle with that concept. So side note. The physics
Speaker 3: of the blue sky is called Rayleigh scattering, and that
Speaker 3: has to do with the size of the particulates. But
Speaker 3: in the eye, in the iris, it's called the Tindal effect.
Speaker 3: So it's not that like Frank Sinatra or your neighbor's
Speaker 3: cool husky has blue pigment up in their all peepers,
Speaker 3: but really a lack of pigment that lets the shorter
Speaker 3: wavelengths in blues scatter and reflect back. So it's called
Speaker 3: a structural color. And it's why if the light changes
Speaker 3: in the room, or if one were to wear a
Speaker 3: different shirt, eye color can appear to shift a little,
Speaker 3: because they're just like freaky translucent bounce boards. Now, speaking
Speaker 3: of colors, I did not know that different colored lasers
Speaker 3: can do different things, and read mentioned that a red
Speaker 3: laser can penetrate through different types of tissues than say
Speaker 3: a yellow laser, which then maybe be like, oh shit, man, lasers, Okay,
Speaker 3: have eyelasers been a real game changer?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, thankfully for me, I had to experience
Speaker 4: that too much because they were around long before my time.
Speaker 4: But eye lasers in some capacity have been around for decades.
Speaker 4: People use lasers for laser and treating diabetes in the
Speaker 4: eyes and all sorts of other things, which is that's
Speaker 4: been around for you know, many US thirty years. But
Speaker 4: you know, there's newer technologies and newer types of lasers
Speaker 4: all the time, and people always trying to figure out
Speaker 4: new uses for that stuff.
Speaker 3: When you did your first surgery and you're like, I'm
Speaker 3: about to work on a live, a living person's eyeball,
Speaker 3: were you nervous as hell?
Speaker 4: So probably I don't remember it too well. Now it's
Speaker 4: been a few years. You have somebody sitting with you.
Speaker 4: It's not like you're just out in the wilderness operating
Speaker 4: on somebody, and you know, if you're doing something wrong,
Speaker 4: they're going to say, okay, step aside, let me take over,
Speaker 4: and they'll get things back on course for you. It's
Speaker 4: not like all of a sudden you're just out on
Speaker 4: your own trying to operate on somebody and you just
Speaker 4: hope for the best.
Speaker 3: Sounds that I picture I picture someone. It's just like
Speaker 3: there's like maybe a nurse and an antesthesiologist in the room,
Speaker 3: and everyone's like, all right, doctor, go for it, and
Speaker 3: you're just like shit out of luck. You can't look
Speaker 3: anything up, like if you screw up or you sweat
Speaker 3: on someone, like it's your own I just picture you
Speaker 3: being totally on your own.
Speaker 4: No, so thankfully, unless you went to some terrible training program.
Speaker 4: By the time you graduate and you go out to
Speaker 4: the real world where you do have to be on
Speaker 4: your own, you feel pretty confident. But it is still
Speaker 4: a weird feeling that first time you operate out in
Speaker 4: private without you know, a teacher with you. It's definitely
Speaker 4: a weird experience anytime you're doing something you don't know
Speaker 4: how to do well yet you feel out of your
Speaker 4: element and you feel like you're pretending a little bit,
Speaker 4: and you learn and you get better and better until
Speaker 4: you're really good at it.
Speaker 3: All right, I'm about to spill like a thimbles worth
Speaker 3: of tea about my personal life here, but so Reed
Speaker 3: and I are like bro buddies now. But before he
Speaker 3: met his amazing, smart, super badass hot wife Aaron, years
Speaker 3: and years ago friends tried to set up me and
Speaker 3: read I remember because full disclosure, we've been on a
Speaker 3: couple of dates. True, sorry, And I remember like eight
Speaker 3: years ago. I remember me being like, how how was
Speaker 3: your day at work? And you said the words ruptured
Speaker 3: globe and I was like, say no more. And I
Speaker 3: remember being like I would be the worst girlfriend because
Speaker 3: I would be like, I can't even I couldn't process,
Speaker 3: like what your job entailed, Like it seemed like a
Speaker 3: war zone where it was like ruptured globe, Like how
Speaker 3: does that happen? Was there like a paintball accident? Was
Speaker 3: there like a car? Oh? Like does this ever affect you?
Speaker 3: How does it? And like how much of the details
Speaker 3: of your job do you tell your wife?
Speaker 4: So you know, when I was in training, I trained
Speaker 4: at a county hospital, so you saw a lot of
Speaker 4: crazy stuff, Like I have some crazy stories. Tell me
Speaker 4: crazy I will, I'll get to that. But my wife,
Speaker 4: you know I'm in I'm boring private practice now, so
Speaker 4: I don't come home with crazy ruptured globe stories too often.
Speaker 4: But you know I come home my wife's like how
Speaker 4: is your day? Normal husband and wife kind of stuff,
Speaker 4: and if something crazy happened I'll tell her, but usually
Speaker 4: it's not that not that gut wrenching these days and
Speaker 4: my day to day work so ruptured. Globe stories, I mean,
Speaker 4: I got those coming out of the kind of coming
Speaker 4: out of the ears.
Speaker 3: So what's a story? Then you can tell me that
Speaker 3: I won't throw up in a garbage can right now?
Speaker 4: So should I get a garbage can ready? Like? Do
Speaker 4: I need to be prepared?
Speaker 3: I'll throw down my shirt.
Speaker 4: It's okay.
Speaker 6: So the craziest story I've had is I'll tell the
Speaker 6: story the way I like to tell it because I
Speaker 6: think you save what it actually is till the end
Speaker 6: and it makes the you know, had some drama.
Speaker 4: But so I'm on call. I'm at the hospital and
Speaker 4: I get a call from the emergency room downstairs, and
Speaker 4: it's getting kind of late in the day. So they
Speaker 4: call me and they say, we got a guy down
Speaker 4: in the emergency room. He fell off his bike four
Speaker 4: days ago and his eyes swollen and red and he
Speaker 4: can't see very well. He saw an eye doctor in
Speaker 4: the community and they told him he needed a cat scan,
Speaker 4: so they send him here and I said, cool, we'll
Speaker 4: get the cat scan and call me back. So this
Speaker 4: was at like, you know, six seven pm at night,
Speaker 4: I'm like checking the radiology program on my computer, like
Speaker 4: looking to see when this cat scan pops up. And
Speaker 4: I'm just sitting in the on call room like hoping
Speaker 4: I can get to go to catch some sleep soon.
Speaker 4: I pull up the scan and I see.
Speaker 3: All right, just please prepare for this. Also, I was
Speaker 3: editing this while I was making tea, and I didn't
Speaker 3: know that the kettle was done because in my headphones,
Speaker 3: my screams sounded the same as the high pitched tea whistle, screaming. Okay.
Speaker 4: I pull up the scan and I see a picture
Speaker 4: of a nail that's probably five inches long, I swear
Speaker 4: to God, going through his entire eye and up into
Speaker 4: his brain and with the front of aelbe of the brain.
Speaker 4: My God, and I was like, uh, I think I
Speaker 4: need to run downstairs to the emergency room to see
Speaker 4: what's going on here.
Speaker 3: Oh my God.
Speaker 4: So patient had no idea it was in there, and
Speaker 4: I swear to so it was the real He lied
Speaker 4: and said he fell off his bike when he came
Speaker 4: to the emergency room, But the real story was he
Speaker 4: was working construction and the nail gun he was using backfired.
Speaker 4: And it hit him in the face so hard that
Speaker 4: he passed out, So he didn't know what happened, and
Speaker 4: the nail went I wish the listeners could see your
Speaker 4: face right now. But the nail went through the side
Speaker 4: of his nasal fold and up through the eye, and
Speaker 4: he it went through so fast that you couldn't even
Speaker 4: see the incision where it went in because it was
Speaker 4: right on the fold of the nose. So it was
Speaker 4: like the perfect angle that he didn't even know what happened.
Speaker 4: He just knew his eye hurt.
Speaker 3: My fucking gun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So obviously we took him to surgery, took the
Speaker 4: nail out. He kept his eyeball amazingly, but he's not
Speaker 4: seeing very much out of that eyecause he had a
Speaker 4: retten on the attachment and all sorts of other problems.
Speaker 4: But he stayed at home for four days with that
Speaker 4: thing in his eye before he came to the hospital.
Speaker 3: I'm on the verge of throwing up, but I'm not
Speaker 3: going to. I'm swallowing a very a lot. Oh my god. Okay,
Speaker 3: two questions. Sure, did it touch his brain? Did he
Speaker 3: get to keep the nail? So?
Speaker 4: Yes? And no, it did touch his brain, but he
Speaker 4: didn't get to keep it.
Speaker 3: Why didn't he get to keep the nail.
Speaker 4: That's a good question. I think that's a question for
Speaker 4: the neurosurgeon who took it out.
Speaker 3: Oh, he should have given him the thing.
Speaker 4: I don't remember him getting to keep the nail.
Speaker 3: Did he Did it hurt his brain?
Speaker 4: No? I mean the front of lobe is kind of
Speaker 4: a you know, it's hard to quantify, but that hurts
Speaker 4: the brain or not? You know, if you remember back
Speaker 4: to the story of Phineas Gage, he had like the nail.
Speaker 3: Yes, see the eighteen forty eight accident in Vermont, when
Speaker 3: a twenty five year old railroad foreman had a three
Speaker 3: foot metal spike blast through and out of his skull
Speaker 3: and lived for twelve years after, albeit a little less inhibited.
Speaker 3: Side note Google image search Phineas Gage, and you will
Speaker 3: pull up like a dagera type with sultry lighting of
Speaker 3: a bizarrely honky dude. And he's just holding this railroad
Speaker 3: spike like a staff. After the fact, he traveled with it.
Speaker 3: He held onto it for the rest of his life. Also,
Speaker 3: I realize it's disrespectful because this involves massive head trauma,
Speaker 3: but the dude could still get it one hundred percent
Speaker 3: would still hit that.
Speaker 4: In the trained spike or whatever. It was, a railroad
Speaker 4: spike went through his frontal lobe, and it just changed
Speaker 4: his personality, like you can live a normal life, but
Speaker 4: it just like disinhibited him. But this was just barely
Speaker 4: in his brain. I don't think he probably did much.
Speaker 3: Oh my god. What if he's just like so good
Speaker 3: at dancing and Carrie.
Speaker 4: Could be yeah, and it's all thanks to that nail gun.
Speaker 3: He's just like, yeah, found out I'm an opera.
Speaker 4: Say there, he could be painting Picasso's like he could
Speaker 4: be the best artist in the world.
Speaker 3: Now, oh my god, was he Were you there to
Speaker 3: deliver the news?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I was there. We were more at this point,
Speaker 4: just so because he didn't tell us what actually happened
Speaker 4: that I was. We were like, come on, tell us,
Speaker 4: what really happened. We know you didn't fall off your bike.
Speaker 4: There's a nail in your eyeball.
Speaker 3: Oh my god. When you told him, was he in shock?
Speaker 3: Did he laugh? Did he cry?
Speaker 4: He was amazed? He was amazed, O my god. Oh,
Speaker 4: but obviously not surprised because he knew what actually happened.
Speaker 3: He's like, yeah, I didn't the face of the nail gun.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, full face moments from now on with
Speaker 3: nail guns definitely Okay. So picture an otherwise normal looking
Speaker 3: X ray film with just a giant nail floating in
Speaker 3: the middle of the brain. Just astonishing survival. And I
Speaker 3: googled to see if maybe this particular story like made
Speaker 3: the news, and you guys, I didn't find it, but
Speaker 3: I found several other stories of men who had nail
Speaker 3: gun accidents and didn't know until the X rays came back.
Speaker 3: The wounds were so clean, but nails lodged in their
Speaker 3: brains somehow. The stories I read everyone survived and was fine.
Speaker 3: I have no explanation for this, but I did ask
Speaker 3: and read another doctors will always do cat scans instead
Speaker 3: of MRIs in the case of any kind of trauma,
Speaker 3: just on the off chance that there's some metal up
Speaker 3: in your dome, which, if you remember from the radiology episode,
Speaker 3: would be very bad scene. Okay, but all those people
Speaker 3: that I read about happened to survive. Who Okay. One
Speaker 3: more story, but it's very intense and was inspired by
Speaker 3: just that chill Bible verse about any I that causes
Speaker 3: you to sin should be like eighty six. I'm just
Speaker 3: gonna give you literally the briefest of details, but.
Speaker 4: Took two pencils and you can imagine the rest. The
Speaker 4: pencils did not touch your eyes.
Speaker 3: Amazing, right, the good news in this story everyone lived
Speaker 3: bad news. Not with great vision. Have you ever had
Speaker 3: any close calls with your own bowles?
Speaker 5: Uh?
Speaker 4: No, I have not, think.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, have you ever worn mascara?
Speaker 4: I haven't.
Speaker 3: Or do you ever see eye makeup or beauty treatments
Speaker 3: and you're like, that is not good for your eye?
Speaker 3: Don't do it? Oh?
Speaker 4: All the time, really all the time. So there's people,
Speaker 4: you know, we see a lot of patients for dry eyes.
Speaker 4: People come in with their eyes are irritated, they burn,
Speaker 4: they scratch, they are tired, all that kind of normal
Speaker 4: stuff that we all complain about. Their eyes are teary.
Speaker 4: And then people come in the office to get examined
Speaker 4: and I look at their eyes and their tear film
Speaker 4: has just little black specks of mascara floating all in
Speaker 4: it because they put so much mascara on that is
Speaker 4: just floating in their tears. Like, of course, your eyes
Speaker 4: are irritated, your eyes are just sitting in mascara. Goop
Speaker 4: all day long.
Speaker 3: Oh no, that makes me want to cry because I
Speaker 3: think mascara is made of like wood pulp. Alarily, Yeah,
Speaker 3: like part of what we adhere to our eyelashes to
Speaker 3: lengthen them is like wood pulp. True story, I mean
Speaker 3: sort of. So mascara can contain rayon fibers which are
Speaker 3: processed cellulose derived from wood pulp on your eyeballs? Are
Speaker 3: we bat shit? I mean, baby? But is mascara is mescara? Well?
Speaker 3: According to the twenty ten episode of the Kid Rock
Speaker 3: Look and Rat Trapper show Billy the Exterminator.
Speaker 5: Guano's beneficial demand, the number one thing we use backguano
Speaker 5: for is mass scarra. Yes, ladies, when you use your
Speaker 5: mass scarra, you're painting back guano on your eyes. It's okay,
Speaker 5: they killed the diseases. It goes through a process, but
Speaker 5: that's all it is.
Speaker 3: Back Crab checked into this, and mascara does not contain guano,
Speaker 3: but rather it has this shimmery substance guanine, which, don't worry,
Speaker 3: this is simply derived from putting dead fish scales in
Speaker 3: an industrial blender like a fishy milkshake. Who's hungry? Speaking
Speaker 3: of is sugar rush. How does diabetes affect eyes.
Speaker 4: So that's a really important question because diabetes is like
Speaker 4: one of the leading causes of blindness in the world.
Speaker 4: Really yeah, absolutely, So what ends up happening in the
Speaker 4: eye is the retina, which is, you know, where the
Speaker 4: rods and cones are, like the film in the camera.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of blood vessels through there, and so
Speaker 4: the blood's not working properly. The tissues get what we
Speaker 4: call a schemic when there's not enough blood tissue perfusion.
Speaker 3: Blood tissue perfusion just means that blood is getting where
Speaker 3: it needs to go, like no traffic on the floural five,
Speaker 3: all is right with the world.
Speaker 4: The retina gets damaged from lack of perfusion, of lack
Speaker 4: of proper blood flow. And then the response is it
Speaker 4: signal to say, I need more blood vessels. So this
Speaker 4: isn't working for me. I need better blood. So all
Speaker 4: that vegaff or vascular endotheld growth factor floods into the
Speaker 4: eye and it kind of floats in the eye, and
Speaker 4: the eye starts making all these new little wispy, crappy
Speaker 4: blood vessels. Those blood vessels aren't good healthy blood vessels,
Speaker 4: and they break, they bleed, they scar, They cause all
Speaker 4: sorts of problems.
Speaker 3: So if left unchecked, these issues can lead to blindness.
Speaker 3: So go to the doctor if you can. Now. One
Speaker 3: thing they can do to help is use anti cancer
Speaker 3: drugs for it. Like, really, what in the sam hell
Speaker 3: how does that work?
Speaker 4: We actually inject it into the eye and it turns
Speaker 4: down that signal, so the blood vessels start to shrink down.
Speaker 4: So those new little, whispy, crummy blood vessels shrink, disappear,
Speaker 4: and you can reverse some of that. Some of the
Speaker 4: damage is permanent, but you can reverse some of it.
Speaker 3: Oh, I didn't realize that diabetes and eyesight were so linked.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I had no idea. So I'm sure you're
Speaker 3: seeing more and more in that.
Speaker 4: We see tons of it. Yeah. So you know, one
Speaker 4: of the really important things if you have family or
Speaker 4: friends or yourself are diabetic. Yearly eye exams are so
Speaker 4: crucial because if you catch it early, we can treat
Speaker 4: it with lasers or injections, different things that stop it
Speaker 4: from happening. So you know, we can really save people
Speaker 4: from going blind when we treat it early.
Speaker 3: Speaking again of eye lasers, okay, let's talk lasik. Sure,
Speaker 3: so many people have gotten it. I'm going to let
Speaker 3: you know so many people I know who have gotten
Speaker 3: it and had crappy experiences, and I'm scared.
Speaker 4: Of it bad.
Speaker 3: And I'm sure there are so many people I know
Speaker 3: that have gotten it and just said nothing. And it's
Speaker 3: only the vocal people who are like putting on Facebook
Speaker 3: that their eyes are bleeding or whatever. But what happens
Speaker 3: with lasik? How safe is it?
Speaker 4: So let's start with the number one thing is it's
Speaker 4: very safe.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 4: So you know, like anything, you hear the bad stories.
Speaker 4: You don't hear the good stories. So everybody who has
Speaker 4: a bad result is good to talk about it, right.
Speaker 4: The ninety nine percent of people who have a perfect
Speaker 4: result just going with their lives and are happy. Right,
Speaker 4: So you know, the loud people are the people who
Speaker 4: are unhappy and of anything medical procedures included.
Speaker 3: How can you haven't gotten it?
Speaker 4: So I don't mind wearing glasses. I have a small prescription, Okay,
Speaker 4: So I'm happy wearing glasses. I think I look dapper
Speaker 4: with glasses. I'm happy with them.
Speaker 3: It's a good look. And also it's on brand for
Speaker 3: you exactly there you go exactly, so you might say
Speaker 3: that for doctor Waynus, the glass is half full.
Speaker 4: So lasic is basically reshaping the eye to build your
Speaker 4: prescription into your eye. Okay, So your glasses work by
Speaker 4: bending light. So the way your eye works right now
Speaker 4: is we've talked about this earlier. The cornea and the
Speaker 4: lens bend the light coming into your eye, and it
Speaker 4: focuses on the retina. So if you don't need glasses
Speaker 4: at all, it means that's focusing in the right place.
Speaker 4: It's focusing right on your Oh okay, if you're near sighted,
Speaker 4: it means your eyeball is too long, so that focus
Speaker 4: is actually happening. The image is actually focusing on the
Speaker 4: middle inside of your eyeball and not making it all
Speaker 4: the way to the back of the eye to where
Speaker 4: it's supposed to be.
Speaker 3: No way, So I got long eyeballs.
Speaker 4: You've got long eyeballs.
Speaker 3: No way. I never realized that's my vision. How did
Speaker 3: I not ask that earlier?
Speaker 4: So that's the more near sighteds you are, probably the
Speaker 4: more elongated or the longer your eye is. Oh my god,
Speaker 4: the average eye is like twenty three twenty four milimeters long.
Speaker 4: I did I have a patient schedule for surgery that
Speaker 4: has an actual length or a length of their eyeball
Speaker 4: of thirty one milimeters, so they're really really near sighted.
Speaker 7: Wow.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you know, the longer your eye is, the
Speaker 4: higher your prescription. So anyways, so the way your glasses
Speaker 4: work or contacts is they bend the light into a
Speaker 4: different way. So the light coming into your eye is bent,
Speaker 4: it's hitting a focal point in the wrong spot. So
Speaker 4: the lenses that you put in front of your eye
Speaker 4: just change the way that light is bending so that
Speaker 4: it focuses in the correct place.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: So lasik is doing the same thing. We're reshaping the
Speaker 4: cornea to chain the way the light comes into your
Speaker 4: eyes so it bends and focuses in the right place.
Speaker 3: But you're not changing the length of the eyeball, correct, Okay,
Speaker 3: you can't change that. So with laser they flatten or
Speaker 3: they steep in the angle of that cornea, that dome
Speaker 3: that covers your iris, and that changes the way that
Speaker 3: the light bends before it hits your little jelly lens inside.
Speaker 3: And so why does it not work for some people?
Speaker 3: Or can your body grow it back to whatever bad
Speaker 3: shape it was to begin with?
Speaker 4: No, So your eye is not going to change. Your
Speaker 4: eye does change. So you know, if you laser your
Speaker 4: cornea to a different shape, it's not going to regress
Speaker 4: back to the old shape it was in because they
Speaker 4: actually remove layers of the cornea and they're gone. So
Speaker 4: that's what the laser does. The lasers ablating are destroying
Speaker 4: layers of your cornea to flatten it out. Okay, so
Speaker 4: it's pretty crazy stuff when you actually think about what's
Speaker 4: actually happening. But it's really amazing that it works. And
Speaker 4: then people figured it.
Speaker 3: Out and it doesn't hurt.
Speaker 4: It doesn't hurt. No, you numb the eye. You put
Speaker 4: a lit eye drop on there and it numbs it
Speaker 4: so it'll burn for like five seconds. When you put
Speaker 4: the numbing drop on, it doesn't hurt at all.
Speaker 3: And then when our eyes get worse and worse every year,
Speaker 3: is it because our eyeballs getting longer or what's happening?
Speaker 4: Most of it is the change in the lens inside
Speaker 4: of your eye, the corny inside the eye.
Speaker 3: All right, let's talk about eyes and phones. Okay, I
Speaker 3: feel like I worry that my phone is making micross
Speaker 3: eyed or giving me like one wonky eye. Do I
Speaker 3: have a wonky eye.
Speaker 4: You don't have wonky eye?
Speaker 3: Are you lying to me?
Speaker 4: I'm not lying, okay, And if I was, I wouldn't
Speaker 4: know which I to look at.
Speaker 3: Oh No, I feel like in pictures sometimes I'll look
Speaker 3: and I'll be like, where are my eyes looking right now?
Speaker 4: Yeah? You might have just not been looking at the camera. Okay,
Speaker 4: that's possible.
Speaker 3: Ps. So we took a quick selfie on his porch
Speaker 3: for Instagram after we recorded, and sure enough, I was
Speaker 3: just looking at the screen on my phone instead of
Speaker 3: the actual camera lens, and my eyes looked weird. And
Speaker 3: he was like, my god, what a dipshit. But our
Speaker 3: phone's doing terrible things to our eyes.
Speaker 4: So yes, and no, I mean they're not doing anything
Speaker 4: that bad. Our eyes more dry because when ends up
Speaker 4: happening anytime you stare at something really intently, like your phone,
Speaker 4: a computer, even a newspaper, you don't blink as much,
Speaker 4: and so your eyes get drier and drier, and the
Speaker 4: tears have different layers in them. We have oil that
Speaker 4: comes from our eyelids, and we know that doing a
Speaker 4: lot of close up work and using screens makes that
Speaker 4: oil production not work. Oh Properlately it don't work properly.
Speaker 4: It works, but it just doesn't work as it's supposed to.
Speaker 4: So we get blockages of the oil glands in our eyes.
Speaker 4: So it's very common we see people in our office.
Speaker 4: I look at their eyelids and I can see their
Speaker 4: oil glands are all plugged up. Really yeah, and you
Speaker 4: literally just put heat on it and that helps. So
Speaker 4: you put hot compresses on the eyes, or nutritional supplements
Speaker 4: like fatty omega three fatty acids. That kind of stuff helps.
Speaker 3: How can you tell are their little bumps?
Speaker 4: There are those little glands. So if you google my
Speaker 4: bomian gland, sure you'll see tons of Google images of
Speaker 4: people's my booming glands, and you'll see those little white
Speaker 4: dots right at the base of every eyelash pretty much,
Speaker 4: uh huh. And in somebody with blockages of those, they
Speaker 4: kind of look big and bulgy. So it's like a pimple.
Speaker 4: I mean, it looks like, you know, tiny little pimple.
Speaker 4: It's like a little ball of white goop that's kind
Speaker 4: of stuck there where the oil is not flowing out properly.
Speaker 3: Okay, So I didn't look this up, and oh god,
Speaker 3: So if you've completely desensitized yourself to doctor pimple popper
Speaker 3: and are looking for like a stronger barfier fix. Feel
Speaker 3: free to saunter into the dark underworld. That is a
Speaker 3: YouTube search for my bomium gland expression, wherein a doctor
Speaker 3: just gently wedges a metal paddle into your eye and
Speaker 3: then presses your lid into it, erupting what appears to
Speaker 3: be butter in a linear fashion like the Bellagio fountain
Speaker 3: in Vegas, only tiny, oily and out of your eyeballs.
Speaker 4: So that's what you're doing your eye when you're staying
Speaker 4: at your phone and you're making it dry. You're disrupting
Speaker 4: the oil mechanism of the eye. You're not like causing
Speaker 4: yourself to go blind. You're not going to cause any
Speaker 4: permanent problems. But you are just irritating your eye.
Speaker 3: Oh god, I had no idea. But it's but it's
Speaker 3: not going to be something permanent.
Speaker 4: No, I mean some of it. You know it's permanent,
Speaker 4: and that you're not going to give up your phone.
Speaker 4: So and I don't think we're gonna have a purge
Speaker 4: and I'll get rid of technology, and I don't know,
Speaker 4: maybe we will.
Speaker 3: I feel like the apocalypse is an I and possible.
Speaker 3: I mean that in a good way. Just start over.
Speaker 3: So side note read it also told me that the
Speaker 3: puff test at the doctor is measuring your intraocular pressure.
Speaker 3: Like if the air flattens, it not enough pressure, but
Speaker 3: if it barely budgees you might have a bulge issue,
Speaker 3: like possibly from glaucoma. So contrary to common beliefs, it's
Speaker 3: not merely a tool to scare this shit out of
Speaker 3: you and deliver perverse joy to eye doctors. Also, are
Speaker 3: tears different depending on if they are tears of joy
Speaker 3: tears of sadness. Have you seen that thing going around there? Are?
Speaker 4: Their tears are different. So I don't know about the
Speaker 4: emotional component of the tears, but there are definitely different
Speaker 4: proteins in your tears for different things. So we all
Speaker 4: have tears that are on our eyes one hundred percent
Speaker 4: of the time, and when we cry, we make a
Speaker 4: totally different type of tear. So if you've looked at
Speaker 4: it under micro's hope, they would look totally different. Really yeah,
Speaker 4: I think it holds true for different emotional states as well.
Speaker 3: So side note. A few years back, photographer Rose Lynn
Speaker 3: Fisher released a series of dozens of microscopic images of
Speaker 3: dried tears and tears. Apparently there are three types. There
Speaker 3: are basal tears, those are the everyday ones that our
Speaker 3: eyes used just to stain moists. There are psychic tears
Speaker 3: caused by grief or laughing or frustration. And then there
Speaker 3: are reflex tiers, which could be caused by like onion,
Speaker 3: vapors or dust. So Roselind Fisher collected over one hundred
Speaker 3: samples from herself and from volunteers, and they all dried
Speaker 3: in these really beautiful and wildly varying patterns, and they
Speaker 3: look like land from an aerial view, kind of like
Speaker 3: a stark, black and white satellite map. And so she
Speaker 3: called the project Topography of Tears. Now, some of the
Speaker 3: variation can depend on the drying conditions and the salinity.
Speaker 3: But psychic tears, the emotional ones, do contain more of
Speaker 3: a protein based hormone that acts as a pain killer.
Speaker 3: So when you're out there, like having a good face rain,
Speaker 3: watching a dude having a face rain, wearing color vision
Speaker 3: deficiency glasses, your body is like this much beauty, this
Speaker 3: much beauty. It hurts me, make it stop. Humans are
Speaker 3: so cute. Also, we get befuddled a lot, for example.
Speaker 4: But people always get really confused because they come to
Speaker 4: the doctor and they say, my eyes are watering, and
Speaker 4: I'm like, you have dry eyes and they're like, no,
Speaker 4: I don't have wet eyes. And it's like, well, no,
Speaker 4: your eye is crying because the tears that are supposed
Speaker 4: to be just sitting on the eye all the time,
Speaker 4: which are different type of tears, aren't there.
Speaker 3: That's so that's so funny because if I were at
Speaker 3: your page, I'd be like, I don't look at how
Speaker 3: wet my whole face is wet.
Speaker 4: Oh, so you're tearing to fix the fact that your
Speaker 4: eyes are dry with a different type of tear. That's
Speaker 4: not doing what you really need.
Speaker 3: Oh my god. Okay, okay, so quick aside, Reeds started
Speaker 3: telling me another story about his days in the trenches
Speaker 3: as an emergency eye doctor and a sixteen year old
Speaker 3: patient he saw and I'm gonna redact most of it
Speaker 3: and I'm just gonna let you visualize the rest.
Speaker 4: But firework wasn't working. Homemade firework. Of course, it's always
Speaker 4: a homemade firework. Yep.
Speaker 3: Okay, that's all you need. Let's just say he has
Speaker 3: one glass eye now, or does he there.
Speaker 4: He was like an inspirational kid, you know, just like
Speaker 4: got him an artificial you know, fake eye and he
Speaker 4: was happy and look good and how do you live
Speaker 4: a normal life?
Speaker 3: How do those glass eyes work?
Speaker 4: And so they're not glass sized? Okay, so glass eyes
Speaker 4: is like maybe one hundred years ago he wile these
Speaker 4: glass eyes or I don't know when, but nobody uses
Speaker 4: glass eyes now. So basically you take out the eye
Speaker 4: and you put a ball in there. It can be
Speaker 4: like a silicone implant ball or like a little porous implant,
Speaker 4: and basically you cover it with the membranes that normally
Speaker 4: cover the eye. So you actually remove the eyeball itself,
Speaker 4: but you leave all like the membranes around it. It
Speaker 4: would the whole eye would just be white like your
Speaker 4: eye is now, so it would just like white across
Speaker 4: the whole thing. And then they get a little prosthetic
Speaker 4: shell that's like a giant contact and it sits on
Speaker 4: top of that and they paint it to match your
Speaker 4: other eye. So you probably have interacted with people that
Speaker 4: you don't even know have a fake eye because it's
Speaker 4: painted to look exactly like they're their eye.
Speaker 3: What's that job like?
Speaker 2: Is it like.
Speaker 4: It's an ocularist.
Speaker 3: Reed told me that this job is called an ocularist
Speaker 3: and case you needs someone, doctor Stephen hadad in La
Speaker 3: one of the best in the world. And wouldn't you
Speaker 3: know it, it was Friday night and I just found
Speaker 3: myself like seventeen photos deep on this ocularist's website. They
Speaker 3: have a patient gallery, and I'm just I am genuinely
Speaker 3: thrilled to report that it is extremely unsatisfying. Just a
Speaker 3: bunch of photos of totally garden variety, nice looking people,
Speaker 3: nothing out of the ordinary. Everyone just looks healthy and happy.
Speaker 3: So good job.
Speaker 4: There's just amazing artistic people that do phenomenal work.
Speaker 3: So under over the implant is actual your tissue.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so if you think about most people don't really
Speaker 4: understand the anatomy of the eye. But the eye, the
Speaker 4: weight of your eye is the sclera. But then there's
Speaker 4: the conjunctiva, which is the membrane that covers it. So
Speaker 4: you've actually got different layers there. So you can remove
Speaker 4: the eye but leave the kngent taiva. Oh, so the
Speaker 4: sclera would be gone because the eyeball itself is removed,
Speaker 4: but the membranes that kind of sit on top of that,
Speaker 4: those can be closed back up, so you put a
Speaker 4: fake eye behind it, and then you close those membranes
Speaker 4: on top of it.
Speaker 3: And then how often do you have to put in
Speaker 3: that kind of covering?
Speaker 4: So most people wear it all the time. You can,
Speaker 4: depending I think on the person's comfort level. It's like
Speaker 4: a giant, huge contact lens. But they give you like
Speaker 4: a little plunger so you can pull it out like
Speaker 4: a contact lens and everything.
Speaker 3: And then so some fun celeb trivia, So Sammy Davis
Speaker 3: Junior and Peter Falk, who played the detective Colombo, both
Speaker 3: had eye implants. And even cooler than that is that
Speaker 3: you've probably met a ton of people in real life
Speaker 3: who have them, but ocularis are such skilled wizards you
Speaker 3: just never know. It's like no biggie, Okay, onto one
Speaker 3: more thing that you don't know. Okay, are you ready
Speaker 3: for rapid fire around?
Speaker 4: Let's do it.
Speaker 3: Okay, now you've looked at these questions.
Speaker 4: I cheated.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I saw you became a patron, and I was like,
Speaker 3: number one, it's fine if you want to become a
Speaker 3: patron to look at your questions, but you don't have
Speaker 3: to give me five bucks a month. You could go
Speaker 3: it for a.
Speaker 4: Dollar a month, Okay, I support you.
Speaker 3: I was like, you could have gotten in for a
Speaker 3: lot less.
Speaker 4: You asked me to do this podcast, and I started listening,
Speaker 4: and now I enjoy the ologies, So I'm a patron now.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, but I was like, you didn't have
Speaker 3: to come in falling so hard.
Speaker 4: Oh no, I can handle five dollars.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, if you need to drop it down to
Speaker 3: one for reason you don't like.
Speaker 4: It, yeah, we need to start a college fund or
Speaker 4: something for the baby.
Speaker 3: Drop it down to one.
Speaker 4: We'll drop it to one.
Speaker 3: Colleen Thompson. I love also that if anyone hears any
Speaker 3: munching or bowl scraping, that's your well, your pop who
Speaker 3: has cataracts definitely does.
Speaker 4: He's sixteen years old. He's an old little guy.
Speaker 3: Do you ever want to do cataracts org you're on
Speaker 3: your dog?
Speaker 4: I don't. I don't know much about operating on dogs.
Speaker 4: And also people are much easier to anesthetize and keep
Speaker 4: still than a dog. I can't even brush my dog's
Speaker 4: teeth because he uses spath, so the thought of the
Speaker 4: thought of operating on his eyeball does not excite me.
Speaker 3: I just love that he's like, he's a good, a
Speaker 3: living demonstration of what cataracts are. Okay, so rapid fire questions,
Speaker 3: here we go. We're gonna try and get through as
Speaker 3: many as we can.
Speaker 4: We'll see do it.
Speaker 3: But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners,
Speaker 3: we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of
Speaker 3: the show. Sponsors. Why sponsors, You know what they do?
Speaker 3: They help us give money to different charities every week.
Speaker 3: So if you want to know where Ologies gives our money,
Speaker 3: you can go to Aliward dot com and look for
Speaker 3: the tab Ologies gives back. There's like one hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty different charities that we've given to already, with more
Speaker 3: every single week. So if you need a place to go,
Speaker 3: donate a little bit of money but you're not sure
Speaker 3: where to go. Those are all picked biologists who work
Speaker 3: in those fields, and this ad break allows us to
Speaker 3: give a ton of money to them. So thanks for listening,
Speaker 3: and thank sponsors.
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Speaker 3: Okay, your questions. Colleen Thompson asks, can you really get
Speaker 3: a weed card for glaucoma? Asking for a friend?
Speaker 4: It me, Well, thankfully, you can pretty much get a
Speaker 4: weak card for anything, So you just have to tell
Speaker 4: them I have anxiety and they'll give you a weak card.
Speaker 4: So marijuana, it's actually a common question about marijuana and glaucoma.
Speaker 4: So marijuana does help glaucoma. Glaucoma is a disease where
Speaker 4: the nerve in your eye gets damage, and the way
Speaker 4: we treat that is by lowering the eye pressure. And
Speaker 4: smoking marijuana or ingesting marijuana lowers your eye pressure. However,
Speaker 4: it does it for a very short period of time,
Speaker 4: so we have medications that work much much better. You
Speaker 4: put an eye drop in your eye once a day
Speaker 4: and it's going to lower your eye pressure for twenty
Speaker 4: four hours. You smoke a joint, it's going to lower
Speaker 4: your eye pressure for maybe an hour. So we don't
Speaker 4: prescribe it for that because it's not as good of
Speaker 4: a treatment as the other treatments we do have.
Speaker 3: Got it, but also it gives you feathery, feathery eyelashes, right,
Speaker 3: the glacoma medical.
Speaker 4: Drops you, Yeah, yeah, absolutely do. That's what latis is too,
Speaker 4: So it's it's the same thing. So if you ever
Speaker 4: go and buy Latise, you're just buying a glaucoma medication.
Speaker 4: So the reason they came up with lateise is the
Speaker 4: glaucoma patients, we're getting thick eyelashes. So people were taking
Speaker 4: these medications, they noticed their eyelashes were growing and getting thick,
Speaker 4: and so they were.
Speaker 3: Like, well, hot, nagty dog, we can make some real
Speaker 3: cheddar off this, That's what I'm guessing they said. Also,
Speaker 3: April far asked, how does latisse work. I thought you
Speaker 3: just painted it on your eyelid skin to make the
Speaker 3: hair grow thicker. But a listed side effect is possible
Speaker 3: darkening of your eye color. Should people be fooling around
Speaker 3: with this for the sake of spidery lashes?
Speaker 4: It can be true. Yeah, So the medication it doesn't
Speaker 4: done most people, but it can. So the lighter your
Speaker 4: eye is to be in with, the more likely it
Speaker 4: is to happen. So the medication has been shown in
Speaker 4: people with glacoma, same things, So it's a risk if
Speaker 4: you're taking it as latis because it's the same medication
Speaker 4: that it does get into the eye. That's how it
Speaker 4: treats your eye disease. And it can change the melanin
Speaker 4: in your eyeball, in your iris, and it can darken
Speaker 4: the color of your eye. So if you have brown
Speaker 4: eyes to begin with, it's not going to lighten your eyes.
Speaker 4: It's not going to change them patients, so it is rare,
Speaker 4: but you can have people with blue eyes kind of
Speaker 4: get darker eyes while they're taking that medication, So from
Speaker 4: glacoma can happen if you're using it with LATESE. It
Speaker 4: can happen as well with latise you're applying it more
Speaker 4: on the eye lashes, so it's probably less likely to
Speaker 4: happen if you actually think about it, because you're not
Speaker 4: soaking your eye in it, right, But it absolutely is
Speaker 4: a risk.
Speaker 3: I mean, I've looked into it. It's so expensive. It's
Speaker 3: like one hundred dollars a month.
Speaker 4: And then that's why it's nice. I get samples of
Speaker 4: the glacoma medication, so if my wife wants it, I
Speaker 4: can just bring her home some samples. Literally. We have
Speaker 4: lots of people who do that, Like you'll have technicians
Speaker 4: who in our office who take a bottle home and
Speaker 4: just put it on a mass kara dropper and then
Speaker 4: rub it on their eyelashes. Yeah, a lot of the
Speaker 4: reps do it. All the reps for the glacoma medications
Speaker 4: do that really absolutely.
Speaker 3: And I hear that it's way more expensive when it's
Speaker 3: latis versus when it's at glaucoma medication.
Speaker 4: Well of course it is. But yeah, they obviously when
Speaker 4: they're selling anything for cosmetic purposes, they're going to jack
Speaker 4: up the price.
Speaker 3: On the topic of this, Susan Kiro wants to know,
Speaker 3: how about are lash extensions for your eyes professionally done?
Speaker 4: So probably fine most of the time. Again, what anything
Speaker 4: can do that's a foreign body or foreign substance or
Speaker 4: out the eye is it can cause irritation. So it's
Speaker 4: not going to cause you to go blind, but you
Speaker 4: can have an allergic reaction. I've had people come in
Speaker 4: with laxis lash extensions, with super swollen eyelids and itchy Bernie.
Speaker 4: Kind of just a leisure reaction. If you've had the
Speaker 4: multiple times and you've never had a problem, it's not
Speaker 4: gonna cause any problems.
Speaker 3: Okay, it's so weird to be like, oh, we're just
Speaker 3: gonna glue some human hair on our eyeballs.
Speaker 2: Ye.
Speaker 4: Most people will do fine, so I wouldn't worry too
Speaker 4: much about it.
Speaker 3: Jessica bomb Gardener and someone named Liz both said, my
Speaker 3: eyes are green, but sometimes I think they change to
Speaker 3: blue or gray depending on what I'm wearing. Is that
Speaker 3: bogus or is it color really bringing out my eyes?
Speaker 4: As far as bringing out the eye color, your eye
Speaker 4: is not changing. So your eyes is the same. So
Speaker 4: if you wear a different colored shirt, it's gonna bring
Speaker 4: it out because of the contrast between the different colors,
Speaker 4: or it might be reflecting off something so you catch
Speaker 4: it in a different light. Things like that, Your eyes
Speaker 4: can look different and it comes it's not you sense
Speaker 4: the color based on the light bouncing back to you,
Speaker 4: not what the color actually is. So you could see
Speaker 4: the same item into different lights and it looks a
Speaker 4: little different because different colors come out differently when they're
Speaker 4: reflected by different amount of light.
Speaker 3: So it's like when I turn the lights off in
Speaker 3: this room, this table gets darker. Yes, is the table
Speaker 3: getting darker? No? It's no, Okay, got it. One day
Speaker 3: we're going to have chromatophores like octopuses and we'll just
Speaker 3: we're going to be able to change them at will.
Speaker 3: It'd be pretty cool one day. I'm sure that lilachice
Speaker 3: people are going to get on that. Anna Thompson wants
Speaker 3: to note. Do contacts make your eyesight worse over time?
Speaker 3: Or was that just something my parents told me so
Speaker 3: I would get glasses and some contacts In high.
Speaker 4: School, people do what's called ortho caratology, where they wear
Speaker 4: hard contact lenses overnight while they sleep, and it actually
Speaker 4: flattens your cornea out so when you wake up, you
Speaker 4: don't need glasses the next day. What Yeah, I swear
Speaker 4: to God. So it's actually a big thing in the
Speaker 4: Asian population, especially like in Los Angeles, and we have
Speaker 4: some offices out in like Roland Heights in St. Gabriel,
Speaker 4: which are big Chinese and Korean populations, and it's really
Speaker 4: big out there. So a lot of these patients, their
Speaker 4: kids are fifteen, they are near sighted and they don't
Speaker 4: want to be so instead of having to wear glasses
Speaker 4: or contact during the day, they sleep with these orthocatology
Speaker 4: contacts and then they wake up the next day and
Speaker 4: they can see. And then if you don't wear them
Speaker 4: for three days, you're gonna lose your You're gonna go
Speaker 4: back to being nearsighted again. But as long as you
Speaker 4: wear them every night, your eye kind of stays up
Speaker 4: and you know, it stays flattened out with the cornea
Speaker 4: so you can see.
Speaker 3: Well, it's like a retainer for your eyebones.
Speaker 4: I know, yeah, I like that analogy.
Speaker 3: It's like a waist trainer. It's like a Kardashian corset. PS.
Speaker 3: Before you go google these old school corsets that are
Speaker 3: racking up all kinds of new money, please note that
Speaker 3: a year or two ago, the ones that Kimmi Kay
Speaker 3: and the crew endorsed got sued for false claims and
Speaker 3: for misleading consumers, and they lost the lawsuit. So don't
Speaker 3: squeeze your organs into an elastic vice because you'll find
Speaker 3: the way you are. And social media is a lie. Okay, bye,
Speaker 3: I can't imagine it's comfortable. But whatever Julie wants to know,
Speaker 3: or no, actually, Laura Egert Crowe wants to know. How
Speaker 3: can you keep the whites of your eyes super white?
Speaker 3: Like what causes them to be yellow and ginger and bloodshot?
Speaker 4: Sure, so your eyes are white on the sclare, but then,
Speaker 4: as we talked about, there's atle membranes that cover it,
Speaker 4: like the kanjin taiva. There's blood vessels that flow through
Speaker 4: all that. The blood vessels are red. So when the
Speaker 4: eyes are red, it's those blood vessels getting dilated. And
Speaker 4: that could be because they're irritated. It can be because
Speaker 4: you ingested a drug that makes your blood vessels dilate,
Speaker 4: you know, whatever it may be. If your blood vessels
Speaker 4: are big, you're gonna have redder eyes. The yellow is
Speaker 4: usually little fat and cholesterol deposits in there as well,
Speaker 4: and that stuff just kind of comes out when your
Speaker 4: eyes are tired or dehydrated because you know, there's less
Speaker 4: fluid around there and things kind of stand out a
Speaker 4: little bit more. Really, the best thing you can do
Speaker 4: to control that stuff is to make sure your eyes
Speaker 4: aren't dry. So try putting in artificial tears, not the
Speaker 4: red nest removers, lubricating the eyes, you know, refresh sustain,
Speaker 4: any of those artificial tears that you see when you
Speaker 4: go to the drug store and there's like a wall
Speaker 4: of eight billion different products that you have to decide
Speaker 4: which one's going to work for you. But anyone that
Speaker 4: say artificial tears to lubricate the eyes will help.
Speaker 3: I can't believe that the yellowness is like fatty deposits.
Speaker 3: That's gross.
Speaker 4: It's not that gross.
Speaker 3: It's a little gross. I mean thinking of like just
Speaker 3: having like chicken fat under there.
Speaker 4: Well it's not chicken fat, it's.
Speaker 3: Like eye small Yeah, I mean a little bit, a
Speaker 3: little bit, who knews. Okay, So hydrate, yeah.
Speaker 4: Highrate is good. But again, it's not just about Diet
Speaker 4: plays a big role too, So it's not just about
Speaker 4: how much water you drink. It's about like what vitamins
Speaker 4: you're eating. So the American eyes westernized diet is very
Speaker 4: low in Omega three fatty acids, for example, and we
Speaker 4: know that having a high dosage of those things can
Speaker 4: help dry eyes.
Speaker 3: Oh, the next question on my list from Julie is
Speaker 3: what habits or foods can the average human do to
Speaker 3: extend their eye health.
Speaker 4: Thank you Julie for that wonderful segue. But you know,
Speaker 4: eating healthy, obviously is important for the health of everything
Speaker 4: in our body. But the eyes work just like everything
Speaker 4: else does. So you know, vitamin A, for example, is
Speaker 4: good for the health of the retina. And that's why
Speaker 4: they say eat your carrots because carrots have vitamin A.
Speaker 4: Eating things that have green, leafy vegetables which are have
Speaker 4: high antioxidant levels in them are very important for the
Speaker 4: health of the eye. So diseases like macular degeneration.
Speaker 3: Macular degeneration by the byet tends to affect more folks
Speaker 3: over sixty and it's when the central portion of the retina.
Speaker 3: Remember the film in the camera at the back of
Speaker 3: the eye deteriorates. It kind of looks like the center
Speaker 3: of your vision blurs. And I started looking up images
Speaker 3: of simulations, and then I started thinking of grandmas and
Speaker 3: grandpas not being able to see their own perth daycakes
Speaker 3: or trees or their grandkids. And then I started having
Speaker 3: these painkiller salt water things come out of my lachrymal glands.
Speaker 3: So how can we prevent this?
Speaker 4: We know that anti accidents are really important, So whenever
Speaker 4: somebody comes in and is diagnosed with macaula degeneration, we
Speaker 4: put them on an anti accident supplement.
Speaker 3: Ooh, like, eat more blueberries for God's sake.
Speaker 4: Oh, we give them a pill. But that's important too, Okay,
Speaker 4: So yeah, eat blueberries, eat raspberries, eat green leafy vegetables.
Speaker 4: All that stuff is really important for the aging health
Speaker 4: of your eye. Studies have come out that have showed
Speaker 4: that you're more likely to get a cataract if you
Speaker 4: have a diet that's low envitamin C. Really all the stuff.
Speaker 4: Just eat healthy. That's really what it comes down to.
Speaker 4: There's no magic bullet. Just eat healthy and your eyes
Speaker 4: will be given the best chance you can. And you know,
Speaker 4: sometimes you have genetic diseases that you can't control, but
Speaker 4: you know, the healther you eat, the better you're going
Speaker 4: to do.
Speaker 3: You know, I did have I had a makeup artist
Speaker 3: I worked with who had really lovely skin, and she
Speaker 3: was telling me that she she just takes a lot
Speaker 3: of vitamin C and it helped her skin a lot.
Speaker 3: And I was like, I never thought about vitamin C
Speaker 3: being helpful for anything other than colds. Oh yeah, you
Speaker 3: know what I mean.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean think about it. You didn't have vitamin C,
Speaker 4: people will get scurvy. That's like where scurvy came from.
Speaker 4: It's so important for the health of your body.
Speaker 3: I only think about it when it comes to being like, oh,
Speaker 3: I got a cold. I'm sorry vitamin C for just
Speaker 3: booty calling you when I'm sick. Here is Carl asks
Speaker 3: semi serious question. When will I doctors get equipment that
Speaker 3: can automatically detect what your vision is so you don't
Speaker 3: have to go through those nerve wracking questions about which
Speaker 3: is better.
Speaker 4: So number one, good news, Carl, we already have it.
Speaker 3: What Yeah, I had to go through this two days ago.
Speaker 4: Well, here's the problem. It's not as accurate. So we
Speaker 4: use that as a starting point and then we fine
Speaker 4: tune it. Okay, so go on a machine that will
Speaker 4: spit out your what it thinks is your exact prescription
Speaker 4: for your glasses. It's going to be pretty close to perfect.
Speaker 2: Whoa.
Speaker 4: So sometimes you'll do that and you put that in
Speaker 4: the little machine which call four opter where we do
Speaker 4: the one and two and you don't have to make
Speaker 4: any changes and it's right on the money. Wow. But
Speaker 4: sometimes you do yes.
Speaker 3: Okay, So Brianna Fauss wants to know what is happening
Speaker 3: when you're saying better one, better two? And also for me,
Speaker 3: and I thought I was the only person bout this way,
Speaker 3: but every single time, I'm like, what if I'm saying
Speaker 3: the wrong thing?
Speaker 4: And I can tell Yeah, so one or two. What
Speaker 4: we're doing is we're comparing two lenses, so we're flipping
Speaker 4: little dials inside that machine. So basically we're just playing
Speaker 4: hot and cold. That's what we're doing. Yeah, we're going
Speaker 4: higher and lower with the numbers till we kind of
Speaker 4: get to where we know you are. And if you
Speaker 4: think you're wrong, we double check. Oh, you don't have
Speaker 4: to worry. So yeah, so you're not gonna I mean,
Speaker 4: if you're like really really bad at it, you could
Speaker 4: screw it up. But ninety nine percent of people like
Speaker 4: you say one and then we test it again and
Speaker 4: then you say two. We're like, okay, this person needs
Speaker 4: like some triple checks or rouble checks.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So if you know, sometimes we'll see what's called
Speaker 4: going around in circles on the dial, So we'll be
Speaker 4: spinning the dial and you'll go right past where you
Speaker 4: started and you'll just keep going, and we know, Okay,
Speaker 4: this person needs a little more help to figure out
Speaker 4: where their trupbscription is because they're struggling to tell the
Speaker 4: difference between these numbers.
Speaker 3: So essentially, if you're like a train wreck about it,
Speaker 3: they'll discreetly keep asking without you knowing.
Speaker 4: So you know, we do things to figure all that
Speaker 4: out so you don't need to stress about it because
Speaker 4: we know that it's not as easy as as it
Speaker 4: should be.
Speaker 3: Do you ever see a certain temperament that's worse at
Speaker 3: making that call?
Speaker 4: No, not the temperament. I think the older you are,
Speaker 4: the harder it is. Sometimes.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's so scary. Every time I'm like, what if
Speaker 3: I just was spacing and gave them the wrong answer.
Speaker 4: It's the worst case scenario. Your glasses an't right, And
Speaker 4: there we make them like Okay, I know, I know,
Speaker 4: it's not the end of the world.
Speaker 3: And then sometimes I'm like, am I there's this little
Speaker 3: part of me. That's like it did I say it wrong?
Speaker 3: And I'm going to offend them and they're gonna know.
Speaker 4: What's worse is when I go one or two and
Speaker 4: the patient goes yes, which happens all the time, all
Speaker 4: the time, all the time.
Speaker 3: No, you're like, it is a binary question, but it's
Speaker 3: not a true of all. Yeah, Zach Marta Lucci asks,
Speaker 3: is it true that your eyeballs are the same size
Speaker 3: throughout your whole life?
Speaker 4: It is not?
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: Okay, so your eyes do grow over the first few
Speaker 4: years of your life. They're pretty much fully grown at
Speaker 4: some point in your childhood. Okay, but yeah, they definitely
Speaker 4: grow after your born.
Speaker 3: But apparently we are more likely to take care of
Speaker 3: a baby if it looks like it has big eyes
Speaker 3: because it's cutter.
Speaker 4: That's probable.
Speaker 3: I believe that, you know, why are babies with glasses
Speaker 3: the best?
Speaker 4: I think anytime you see something that's out of the
Speaker 4: norm of like what you're expecting, it's just adorable, Like
Speaker 4: a dog with glasses would be adorable.
Speaker 3: I mean, once again, doggles dot com killing game. Aki
Speaker 3: wants to know why is looking at the sun a
Speaker 3: bad idea? Is it worse to look at the sun
Speaker 3: during a solar eclipse? Are we just looking at the
Speaker 3: sun more during a solar eclipse?
Speaker 4: So it's easier to look at a sun during a
Speaker 4: solar eclipse because it's not as strong feeling, but the
Speaker 4: light rays hits you just as hard. So that's the
Speaker 4: problem with the solar eclipse. Normally, if you try to
Speaker 4: look at the Sun, it's going to really hurt and
Speaker 4: you're gonna turn away. So it's really really bad for
Speaker 4: the eyes. Like looking at the Sun for a few
Speaker 4: seconds can blind you. Oh and it literally just torches
Speaker 4: the center of your your phobia. They're center of your
Speaker 4: retina where you have like this really dense layer of
Speaker 4: rotten cones where you can see everything, So you lose
Speaker 4: like just the center of your vision. You wouldn't go
Speaker 4: blind completely, but the center of your vision would be torched. Yeah,
Speaker 4: So what ends up happening obviously during a eclipse is
Speaker 4: everyone's like, oh, let's look at the sun, and then
Speaker 4: people try to look at it, and because it's not
Speaker 4: as bright feeling, you look at it even harder and
Speaker 4: that can cause problems. And then people buy glasses on Amazon.
Speaker 4: They don't realize our counterfeit and then look at the
Speaker 4: sun and damage their eyes that way too. Oh and
Speaker 4: then you had like, you know, videos of the president
Speaker 4: staring up at it without glass at all, which was hilarious.
Speaker 7: Oh god, even the president saw it. But in a
Speaker 7: move that is not a complete surprise. He looked directly
Speaker 7: at the sun without any glasses. Perhaps the most impressive
Speaker 7: thing any president's ever done.
Speaker 3: So that was a real clip from Shoot what network
Speaker 3: was it? Where are my notes?
Speaker 7: Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was Fox News. Right, he's that strong, strong.
Speaker 4: It's impressive. Impressive.
Speaker 3: Sterristrated into the sun when told not.
Speaker 4: To true, that's true, he showed us. Oh god.
Speaker 3: Hillary Maser wants to know why do some newborn's eyes
Speaker 3: change color in the first few months. Is it always
Speaker 3: blue to brown or can other things happen?
Speaker 4: So it's usually blue to something darker, Okay, But essentially
Speaker 4: it comes back to the mount of melanin in the
Speaker 4: in iris. So they just still growing melanin and producing
Speaker 4: melanin when they're a baby. My son came out with
Speaker 4: blue eyes and they're they're kind of like a brown
Speaker 4: and hazel, but still little blue. They've definitely changed eight
Speaker 4: months old and they've changed oh, crazy.
Speaker 3: So they're just you're just read you're populating it with melanin.
Speaker 4: As you grow exactly.
Speaker 3: Oh, I didn't know that, Ariel Bell wants to know.
Speaker 3: I always get these painful styes in my eyes. What's about, she.
Speaker 4: Asks, Sure, So that's a good question, very common. So
Speaker 4: we have these little glands in our eyelids called the
Speaker 4: Mybomian glands, which we talked about earlier a little bit
Speaker 4: when we talked about dry eyes. But basically oil comes
Speaker 4: out of those glands and sits on top of your tiers.
Speaker 4: So your tears have layers, and the oil is the
Speaker 4: outer layer that kind of protects them from the world,
Speaker 4: so your tears don't evaporate. So you know, we all
Speaker 4: remember from cooking, oil and water don't mix. So the
Speaker 4: oil is there is like the final barrier for your
Speaker 4: tears to protect them. Oh, so that oil comes from
Speaker 4: your eyelids because it's kind of on the outer part
Speaker 4: of your eye. Those oil glands can get plugged and
Speaker 4: when that happens, they back up with oil and the
Speaker 4: form of stye. So it's basically just a ball of
Speaker 4: that oil that's just kind of formed and gotten stuck
Speaker 4: in there and can't drain out. So the number one
Speaker 4: way to treat that is heat. So if you feel
Speaker 4: that starting, put hot conferences on your eyes like crazy,
Speaker 4: the more the better and give it a chance to
Speaker 4: kind of melt that stuff out so we can drain
Speaker 4: out a little bit.
Speaker 3: Oh, that'll help it. Cut it a little hole. Correct,
Speaker 3: Why do they get plugged in the first place.
Speaker 4: So again, we think it comes back a lot to
Speaker 4: some dietary issues as well. But some people are just
Speaker 4: it just the enzymes that live kind of on your
Speaker 4: eyelid aren't doing what they're supposed to do. All the
Speaker 4: proteins on the eyelid aren't doing what they're supposed to.
Speaker 4: And again we know that it's staring at a screen
Speaker 4: all day where it makes this more likely. Some people
Speaker 4: have bacteria that lives on their eyelashes that grow way
Speaker 4: more than they're supposed to, or then get little mites
Speaker 4: on their eyelashes that grow all sorts of gross stuff.
Speaker 4: But that stuff all causes inflammation, which causes that to happen.
Speaker 3: Do you ever see mites on people's eyelashes or are
Speaker 3: they so you see them?
Speaker 4: Well, you don't see like the literal bug crawling around okay,
Speaker 4: but you know what they look like. They look like
Speaker 4: little giant clumps of dandruff, like in a little cylinder
Speaker 4: on the base of the eyelash. Really yeah, if you
Speaker 4: took them and put them under a microscope, you see
Speaker 4: the little bugs. But we know what it is when
Speaker 4: we see it, and it's pretty common. It's very common.
Speaker 3: I love that we're never alone. Like you have mites
Speaker 3: just hanging tough out.
Speaker 4: Your entire gut is just filled with bacteria that are
Speaker 4: with you all the time.
Speaker 3: I know you're never alone. We've gotten a lot of these,
Speaker 3: which is awesome. Hillary Blake wants to know. Was there
Speaker 3: anything in your tree training that stood out for you,
Speaker 3: like gave you that Yep, this is what I'm here
Speaker 3: for a moment.
Speaker 4: Definitely. I think the best thing about ophthalmology is when
Speaker 4: you take someone who can't see and you make them
Speaker 4: see again. The happy feely story here. So I was
Speaker 4: a second or third year in my training as a resident,
Speaker 4: and I did cataract surgery on this woman and we
Speaker 4: have her in the office the day after her surgery
Speaker 4: to take her patch off. So we sent her home
Speaker 4: with a patch over her eye, and she had really
Speaker 4: bad vision. I think she was legally blind from her cataracts,
Speaker 4: if I remember correctly, and sitting in the exam room
Speaker 4: with her, you take off her patch and she starts
Speaker 4: crying and I'm like, well, what's this is something wrong?
Speaker 4: Like what's going on? And I'm like, are you okay?
Speaker 4: And she's like, I've never seen my grandson's face before.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, yeah right.
Speaker 4: And like seriously, I was like, this is the best.
Speaker 4: This is why I'm doing this, Like nothing felt better
Speaker 4: than that. And I still have those experiences today. I
Speaker 4: have people that just like come in so happy because
Speaker 4: they can see again. And that's the best part about
Speaker 4: being an eye doctor is you can literally, with a
Speaker 4: ten minute surgery, take someone from blind to having normal vision.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, that's just like I can just already
Speaker 3: picture the montage of moments that you could put together
Speaker 3: to just make people ball their faces.
Speaker 4: Oh.
Speaker 3: Definitely one more question, because I know I'm peppering you
Speaker 3: with a million, but this is a question that we
Speaker 3: got from Collette Ayers, Melissa Cowan, Dan Engler, Bob Carlson,
Speaker 3: Tom Tarmo, twicken On, Kira Lichfield. So many people are like,
Speaker 3: what are floaters? Why do we get them, should we
Speaker 3: be concerned about them? Give us the scoop on floaters.
Speaker 4: So sometimes you should be concerned about them, but most
Speaker 4: of the time, no, thankfully. So a floater is just
Speaker 4: a little piece of the gel inside of your eye
Speaker 4: causing a shadow. So our eyeball is big, and it
Speaker 4: has to be filled with something to stay you know, big,
Speaker 4: but otherwise it would just deflate if it didn't have
Speaker 4: anything inside of it. Weird, So yeah, like if an
Speaker 4: I has really really low pressure, it can actually kind
Speaker 4: of get a little mushy. And if it's a really
Speaker 4: really got high pressure, like from glaucoma for example, it'll
Speaker 4: feel really firm. So again we need something to fill
Speaker 4: that space to hold it from deflating. So there's a
Speaker 4: thick gel inside there. As we get older, it kind
Speaker 4: of breaks apart. It becomes more watery, so you can
Speaker 4: think of it like a kind of a thick jelly.
Speaker 4: And then as we get older, it becomes more and
Speaker 4: more watery, and so little clumps of it break apart,
Speaker 4: and those clumps cast shadows onto your retina where you
Speaker 4: see light. So it light comes into your eye and
Speaker 4: there's a little stringy, floaty thing inside of that gel
Speaker 4: where a little piece of the gel broke apart and
Speaker 4: it casts a shadow, which is what you're seeing. And
Speaker 4: then as we get older, you can get the big
Speaker 4: floater or a big series of floaters. And that's because
Speaker 4: that jelly when we're younger is like really thick and
Speaker 4: attached to the wall of your eye, and it detaches
Speaker 4: from the wall of your eye at some point as
Speaker 4: we get older.
Speaker 3: So it's pretty normal unless it's not. So if you
Speaker 3: start to see like Rando disco lights and you are
Speaker 3: not in a disco called the doctor.
Speaker 4: And so if you see like flashbulbs go off in
Speaker 4: the corner of your eye and as a giant new
Speaker 4: sea of floaters, you need to get checked because you
Speaker 4: may have a tear in your retina which could lead
Speaker 4: to a full detachment.
Speaker 3: Mary m and also Anna M McDavid asked, what's the
Speaker 3: deal with detached retinas? Why do they happen? Can they
Speaker 3: be prevented?
Speaker 4: Sure? So, a detached retina is think of the retina
Speaker 4: like wallpaper and wallpaper. If you get water behind it,
Speaker 4: it's going to detach, right, It's gonna kind of pull
Speaker 4: off the wall. So inside the eye, the retina's attached
Speaker 4: to the wall of the eye and it's held in
Speaker 4: place by that gel, the vitreous gel, And as the
Speaker 4: vitreous pulls on it, it can cause a tear. And
Speaker 4: if that tear forms, fluid gets behind it, and just
Speaker 4: like your wallpaper, with water going behind the wallpaper can
Speaker 4: pull it off the wall. If water goes behind the retina,
Speaker 4: it separates it off from the wall of the eye
Speaker 4: and it detaches. So if we see a hole or
Speaker 4: a small tear, we laser it closed. So we put
Speaker 4: like a tack it down with a little ring of
Speaker 4: laser to hold it in place.
Speaker 3: Whoa, God, that's crazy. You can just shoot a laser
Speaker 3: and be like, all right, I glued it back.
Speaker 4: Yep, you're literally just tacking down the retina with lasers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like lasers in your eyeballs. Is like, it's it's
Speaker 3: crazy that this is the world that we live in.
Speaker 4: That's pretty cool.
Speaker 3: So I mean, what now, okay, what about your jobs sucks? Like,
Speaker 3: what is the worst thing about your job?
Speaker 4: The overhead dealing with doom, with insurance companies, pharmacies, all
Speaker 4: of those things that are just not why anybody went
Speaker 4: into medicine. So it's just such a pain no matter
Speaker 4: what your political beliefs are affiliations. Even if you think
Speaker 4: we have the best system in the world, the worst
Speaker 4: system in the world, it sucks.
Speaker 3: So we talked about how shitty the business side of
Speaker 3: medicine and insurance was for like seventeen more minutes. But
Speaker 3: you know, episodes can only be so long, and I
Speaker 3: don't want to make any of you shed any psychic tears. Okay,
Speaker 3: what is the best thing about being ophthalmologist?
Speaker 4: The best thing is just helping people see you again. Honestly,
Speaker 4: it's amazing when somebody comes into your office and they
Speaker 4: come back to see you and they're better. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's like any feel of medicine. When you can make
Speaker 4: someone better in a tangible way, it's awesome. But the
Speaker 4: instant gratification of having people come to me every day
Speaker 4: happy because I made an immediate impact in their lives
Speaker 4: is awesome.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you for fixing so man new people's.
Speaker 4: VISI oh, I love to do it. You need to
Speaker 4: thank me. I thank them.
Speaker 3: I hope I am never under your knife, but if
Speaker 3: I have to be under a knife in my eyeballs,
Speaker 3: I will let you know.
Speaker 4: If you want those trigiums. Remove. You know where to
Speaker 4: find me?
Speaker 3: Can I should I get them cut off?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 4: You don't need to get them cut off?
Speaker 3: At what point?
Speaker 4: Just because they're there, you don't need them remove. You
Speaker 4: get them removed when they're like causing severe irritation or
Speaker 4: blurring your vision.
Speaker 3: They look bad?
Speaker 4: No, they're barely noticeable.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 4: I only know they're there because I'm an eye doctor.
Speaker 3: Oh God, thank you for being on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm a pleasure. It's been It's been a lot
Speaker 4: of fun.
Speaker 3: My favorite ophthalmologist.
Speaker 4: Oh I am I the only one you know?
Speaker 3: Yes, but you're my favorite. Okay, So to gently stalk
Speaker 3: your new favorite ophthalmologist. If you're in the LA area,
Speaker 3: you have an eye ish, you can find him at
Speaker 3: acuityigroup dot com. I'll put the link in the show notes.
Speaker 3: You can call if you are you ready for this? Dad, pun?
Speaker 3: Get this their phone number one eight hundred eight nine
Speaker 3: eight twenty twenty. I'm literally proud of him for that
Speaker 3: pun of a phone number, like way to go. You
Speaker 3: can also google doctor Reid Waynus. His YELP comes right up.
Speaker 3: I'll link in the show notes too, So take care
Speaker 3: of your eyes. Don't be afraid of them. And if
Speaker 3: yours don't work so great or at all, I'm really sorry.
Speaker 3: And if they work even a little bit, well, ding
Speaker 3: dang boy howdie, that's something to appreciate. So if you're
Speaker 3: having any kind of bad day, just I don't know,
Speaker 3: take a sec like, pick a sense, whether it's vision
Speaker 3: or hearing or smell, and just go, whoa dude? That works?
Speaker 3: And I'm just a big lump of bones and water
Speaker 3: and carbon molecules who experiences stuff and has secret thoughts
Speaker 3: and eats bananas and gets to dream. So that's cool.
Speaker 3: Senses are cool, whichever one's you have. Let's appreciate them,
Speaker 3: and remember ask smart people suba questions because they have
Speaker 3: incredible crazy stories and no question is actually stupid. And
Speaker 3: our time here is short, so whatever now. Thank you
Speaker 3: to Aaron Talbert and Hannah and River Lippo for moderating
Speaker 3: the very great group of folks in the Facebook group.
Speaker 3: And special things go to Gauge Martin this week, who
Speaker 3: posted something in the Facebook group asking we didn't cover
Speaker 3: the HIV AIDS epidemic and last week's epidemiology episode. And
Speaker 3: I read that and like literally hit my own forehead
Speaker 3: being like, oh my god, I'm so sorry. So I
Speaker 3: just want to say I'm so so sorry that we didn't.
Speaker 3: That was a huge oversight on my part. I had
Speaker 3: a Patreon question selected about it, but we went too
Speaker 3: long in the interview and I rushed the rapid fire.
Speaker 3: So I'm so sorry I didn't address it in an
Speaker 3: aside because HIV awareness and research is a cause I've
Speaker 3: been committed to personally, my omitting it really disappointed me.
Speaker 3: I really fucked that up there. Thank you Gage for
Speaker 3: being so cool and asking and we had a really
Speaker 3: nice chat about it on Facebook Messenger. Anyone can check
Speaker 3: out this podcast will Kill Youse episodes on HIV and AIDS.
Speaker 3: They're well researched and great. Also on Instagram, I posted
Speaker 3: a photo of the CDC's tick laden muffin and y'all
Speaker 3: lost your shit just barfing in the comments And for that,
Speaker 3: I am not really sorry. I'm just not did it
Speaker 3: because I loved you. Be careful of Dick's. Also, thank
Speaker 3: you Bonnie Dutch Happy birthday, and Shannon Feltis for helping
Speaker 3: run the merchsite ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you as always
Speaker 3: to the Man the Mustache, Stephen Ray Morris for editing
Speaker 3: these episodes together. I would be screaming into the void
Speaker 3: were it not for him. Nick Thorburn of the band
Speaker 3: Islands wrote and performed the theme music, And if you listen
Speaker 3: to the very very end of the show, you know
Speaker 3: I tell a secret at the end of each episode
Speaker 3: and this is both relevant and timely and kind of gross.
Speaker 3: But literally, I'm writing and recording this episode. I wake
Speaker 3: up with a stye in my eye. I haven't had one,
Speaker 3: and I swear to God like a decade, and I
Speaker 3: was like, are you fucking kidding me with this? I episode?
Speaker 3: So I looked in my super upclose mirror, the one
Speaker 3: that is like horrifyingly informative, and then I had to
Speaker 3: take a cue tip and kind of like swab at it.
Speaker 3: Very gratifying, but also really bizarre timing, like, is this
Speaker 3: how manifesting? Were works? Did I use the secret to
Speaker 3: get an eye pimple? What is life? Okay?
Speaker 4: Bye?
Speaker 3: Bye? Pacodermatology, hobbiology or doo zoology, lithology and technology, meteorology
Speaker 3: and paradology, anthology, zeriology, selenology.
Speaker 1: Not the first, not the first?
Speaker 4: Ah, I love my eyes eyes? Oh no,