#373 - "Silent Epidemic!" - No. 1 Eye Doc WARNS of Blue Light Lies & "Cowboy" Doctors | Joseph Allen

Summary

Julian Dorey Podcast #373

“Silent Epidemic! – No. 1 Eye Doc WARNS of Blue Light Lies & ‘Cowboy’ Doctors”

Guest: Dr. Joseph Allen (“Dr. Eye Health”, Optometrist)
Host: Julian Dorey
Date: January 13, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the “silent epidemic” of eye health issues exacerbated by technology—specifically the myths and realities around blue light, skyrocketing rates of myopia (nearsightedness), the intricacies of eye surgery, and how screen-dependent lifestyles are impacting both adults and children. Dr. Joseph Allen, a leading optometrist and well-known science communicator, joins Julian to break down cutting-edge eye research, popular misconceptions, and practical advice on protecting your vision in the digital age. The conversation also covers diet, supplements, evolving medical tech, and the psychological effects of living online.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Anatomy of the Eye & Cataract Surgery (00:00–25:23)

• The Eye as “the Window to Your Brain/Health”:
  • Dr. Allen emphasizes how the retina is an extension of the brain and offers a rare look at internal health without invasive tests.

    “...if there was enough light, you would not just see my eye, you would see my retina in the back of the eye... you’d be actually looking at my brain.”
    — Dr. Allen (00:00)

• Difference Between Optometrists vs Ophthalmologists:
  • Optometrists (like Dr. Allen) are primary care for eyes; Ophthalmologists are surgeons for complex cases (06:00–07:03).
  • Training pathways, and why Dr. Allen chose optometry over surgical specialties after fainting during a pediatric strabismus surgery (07:03–08:34).
• Cataract Surgery Evolution:
  • Historical (painful, crude) techniques vs. modern ultrasound-based phacoemulsification.
  • Story of Dr. Charles Kelman, who adapted dental ultrasound tools for cataract removal (17:12–18:34).
  • Modern surgery takes ~10–15 minutes and is highly successful but still requires immense precision (21:25–25:24).

    “If you’re off by a millimeter—whoops, there’s someone’s blind.”
    — Dr. Allen (25:00)

2. Dr. Allen’s Personal Story & Motivation (35:39–38:13)

• Developed early interest in eyes after getting glasses as a child; contact lenses gave him freedom and social confidence.
• Desire to help kids struggling with vision and self-esteem.

3. Eye as a Health Barometer & Myths (38:13–41:26)

• The eye can reveal systemic health issues: diabetes, hypertension, anemia, neurological problems.
• The classic red-eye effect in photos is a reflection off the retina/blood vessels.

4. Vision Development, Myopia Crisis, and Kids’ Screen Use (63:53–72:10)

• Historically, only 20% of American kids were nearsighted; now it’s up to 40%—expected to reach 50% worldwide by 2050, with some East Asian regions already at 90%.
• Myopia isn’t just about glasses: elongated eyeballs increase risk of blindness, retinal detachment, glaucoma, and macular degeneration (64:09).

  “That extra strain and stretch increases your risk... all potentially vision-loss, blinding conditions...”
  — Dr. Allen (64:09)

• Key factors:
  • Increased time indoors, near-work (reading, screens), and genetics.
  • Outdoor play (at least 2 hours/day) shown to reduce risk; some countries legislate outdoor time for kids (71:17–71:48).

Myopia Control Innovations (67:39–72:10)

• Special glasses and contacts to slow myopia progression (orthokeratology = “sleeping in braces” for your eyes).
• Atropine eyedrops (off-label in the US), red light therapy under research (but with safety concerns in some studies).

5. Blue Light: Separating Facts from Hype (124:20–131:58)

• Myth-busting:
  • Blue light is far less damaging from screens than marketed; the energy is too low to cause disease or significant eye damage.
  • All light (not just blue) delays melatonin and sleep; newer screens and LEDs just emit more blue, intensifying the issue (124:20–126:38).
  • Blue light is only a marginal factor in sleep disruption compared to total screen use, brightness, device proximity, and content engagement.

    “The vast majority of blue light from screens is such a low energy, it’s not going to make a clinically meaningful impact...”
    — Dr. Allen (128:00)

• “Blue Light Glasses” = Overhyped:
  • Only very dark orange lenses have measurable impact (127:46). Adjusting device settings to yellow (“Night Shift” mode) is ~90% as effective.
  • Dry eyes and eye strain from screens are due to blink rate dropping 75%+, reduced blinking, and constant near-focus—not “blue light toxicity.”
• What Matters Most?
  • Take frequent breaks, use proper screen distance, minimize high-brightness at night, get natural daylight in mornings.
  • Encourage kids to spend more time outdoors and less on close-up devices (71:17–72:10).

6. Eye Health & Nutrition (85:57–110:48)

• Core Diet Recommendations:
  • Leafy greens, oily fish, nuts/seeds—protect against diseases like macular degeneration (85:57–87:43).
  • As little as two servings of leafy greens and oily fish weekly substantially reduce risk.
• Supplements:
  • AREDS2-backed formulas with lutein & zeaxanthin for patients at risk of macular degeneration; some evidence for improved contrast, color perception, glare reduction, and even cardiovascular protection.
  • Fish oil/omega-3: Quality and molecular form matter for brain/retinal absorption—dietary fish still best proven route (87:52–94:08).

    “The vast majority of people only get about 1-2mg of lutein a day... you should be getting somewhere between 10 to 30 milligrams.”
    — Dr. Allen (105:55)

7. Gut Health, Fasting, and Vision (98:12–120:23)

• Gut microbiome influences eye health; gut inflammation and dysbiosis linked to eye diseases and even autoimmune issues.
• Fasting/intermittent fasting: Some evidence for lower intraocular pressure, possibly protective against glaucoma and diabetic retinal complications, but human data is early (115:47–119:50).

8. Digital Habits, Ergonomics & The Real Problem with Screens (132:29–142:28)

• The “Screen-Childhood” Problem:
  • Most young patients’ main complaints: headaches, eye strain, and trouble seeing distance due to screen overuse.
  • Accommodative spasm: Eyes “locked” in near focus, sometimes requiring clinical intervention (133:25–133:51).
• Physical Consequences:
  • Blinking plunges from ~20 to 4-5/minute at screens, causing dry eye and gland dysfunction.
  • Extended horizontal eye movement triggers persistent neck tension—”cervicogenic” headaches.
• Best Practices:
  • The classic 20-20-20 rule (every 20 minutes look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds) is too short to be clinically meaningful; 2–5 minute breaks (“Pomodoro” technique) recommended.

9. Psychological & Societal Implications (146:24–155:32)

• Extended screen use = chronic sympathetic (“fight or flight”) state, dilated pupils, and possible long-term autonomic effects.
• COVID’s acceleration of tech/lifestyle trends in kids, and uncertainty about AI’s future role in medical diagnostics, patient care, and social development.

  “...as the world becomes more dominated by AI, the value of human connection is going to become even more important.”
  — Dr. Allen (114:53)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On blue light glasses and sleep quality

  “If you just turn that on [yellow mode], you probably don’t need those blue light glasses... So the best practice is to shut off the device, switch to a paperback book at night, have yellow toned lights in the evening.”
  — Dr. Allen (128:35)

• On dietary eye health

  “People who ate at least just 2 servings of green leafy vegetables a week... had like a 24% reduction in developing macular degeneration just from that.”
  — Dr. Allen (87:16)

• On addiction and technology’s impact on kids

  “The extra strain and stretch increases your risk for cataracts... for glaucoma... for retinal detachments, all potentially vision loss, blinding conditions.”
  — Dr. Allen (64:09)

• On AI and medical future

  “Doctors are going to end up being kind of like software engineers in a way. We’re just going to be sitting behind a computer... but ... the value of human connection is going to become even more important.”
  — Dr. Allen (114:22–114:53)

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Important Timestamps

• Dr. Allen’s Path & Optometry vs Ophthalmology: 04:51–08:34
• Cataract Surgery History & Modern Techniques: 13:52–25:24
• Myopia Epidemic/Screen Time & Kids: 63:53–72:10
• Blue Light Facts & Myths: 124:20–131:58
• Nutrition/Supplements for Eye Health: 85:57–110:48
• Gut-Brain-Eye Axis: 98:12–103:06
• Fasting & Eye Health: 115:30–120:02
• Practical Habits & Screen Fatigue: 132:29–142:28
• Long-Term Societal/Tech Implications: 146:24–155:32

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Summing Up & Practical Recommendations

• Don’t fall for “blue light panic”; protect your sleep by using screen night modes, reducing overall evening light, and prioritizing natural daylight.
• Take longer, intentional breaks from close-up work; use ergonomic setups; get out and look far away whenever possible.
• Encourage outdoor play for children; limit screen use and enforce true device-free time.
• Emphasize leafy greens and oily fish for eye health—supplements may help, but food sources are more effective.
• See an eye doctor regularly—even if your vision feels “fine”—to catch early signs of disease detectable in the eye before elsewhere in the body.
• Remember, the eye is not just a window to the soul, but a vital indicator of your brain and systemic health.

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Dr. Allen’s YouTube Channel: Dr. Eye Health
Find him on Instagram, TikTok, and stay tuned for his own upcoming podcast for deeper science dives.

Host: [Julian Dorey – All links and ways to support the podcast available in the episode description.**

Transcript

[Dr. I Health]

Right now, if there was enough light, you would not just see my eye, you would see my retina in the back of the eye. You'd be actually looking at my brain. Because the eyes are actually the window to, like, your health. There's even some investigations into red light therapy, but that may be a way to slow down myopia too.

[Podcast Host]

How are they using red light to do that?

[Dr. I Health]

This one specifically is like looking to a laser pointer. And this is all again, happening in East Asia because the rate of myopia is like 90% of the population here in the U.S. it's like 40%. Expected to be 50% of the world population by 2050.

[Podcast Host]

What is it about the red light itself that makes this potential elixir of health?

[Dr. I Health]

I try to be very clear about where the science is and where it's kind of speculation. I have a whole lecture on this.

[Podcast Host]

So this thing right here.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, we're not like how we used to develop as human beings, but not outside. So it's not just, oh, I'm on the screen. You actually are moving your neck all day long. You can actually take your hands, face toward me. Shift your eyes far left and as far right.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, you can feel the muscle move.

[Dr. I Health]

Did you feel that?

[Podcast Host]

Oh, that's so interesting.

[Dr. I Health]

It tenses up. So people come in with a lot of, not just headache, but they can't see in the distance. Now, now the problem is that just blue light will affect you.

[Podcast Host]

Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you.

[Dr. I Health]

That's something I wish I could have incorporated more into my, My content is all my, my personal fascinations with movie references, video games, all of that. That's something I still aspire to somehow get into, into my, into my content as a doctor. Yeah, it's just my personality coming.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah. What, what were your favorite movies growing up?

[Dr. I Health]

Oh, so growing up, you know, as a kid, I was not a Disney kid. My parents, they're, they're amazing parents. They, they loved me and everything, but they, they, they had like HBO and stars, those sort of channels. So when I was not, I was pretty mature as a kid already, but. And like I was like 8, 9 years old watching, you know, rated R movies. And so I was having conversations with like my teachers in school that were way above like, maturity level than. Than what? Than other classmates were. And they'd go to a friend's birthday party at 10 and they're like, we're gonna watch this Disney movie and I'm like, what's this? So. So, yeah, growing up, I don't know, I watched tons of stuff, but were.

[Podcast Host]

You an only child or did you have siblings?

[Dr. I Health]

No. Thanks for asking. I have an older brother. His name's Ken or Kenny. He's about three and a half years older.

[Podcast Host]

He show you the ropes A little bit with the HBO subscription?

[Dr. I Health]

Maybe a little bit. I don't know, late, Late night stuff, right? Oh, for sure.

[Podcast Host]

That's where my head was going.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, you definitely grow up with those curiosities. And then you get in trouble once or twice getting caught watching stuff.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, it's a different kind of rated R movie, if you will.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I don't think you want to reference those on YouTube. That's okay.

[Dr. I Health]

I mean, I think it's a realistic thing, though. And they're growing up. I mean, kids nowadays, they have Internet access. They can find whatever they want. And I didn't even have a. My family didn't have a computer or access to a computer till I was at least 10 or 11.

[Podcast Host]

See, that is such an advantage, too, because, like, you know, the world before that and before this in your hand, there's a reality of, like, you know, no pun intended, but going out and touching grass. And now we see things like this are an amazing tool that we do demonize because of the ways we misuse it. But those misuses are spreading across society and causing massive problems, which we're going to talk about today as it pertains to your expertise.

[Dr. I Health]

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll tell you, so I'm a late adopter to smartphones. I didn't get my first smartphone till 2016.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. I Health]

So I was finished with my residency and. And was still using the classic flip phones, barely texting people. And I'll be honest, I think I fell into the smartphone trap, where people started endlessly scrolling and just getting kind of sucked into it, where it even pulled me away from being present with family and friends. And it took a really close friend and my close friend's mom to pull me to the side and be like, you need to unplug. Like, this is a problem. And I wasn't even conscious that I was doing it. It was just something I had fallen into.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. That's interesting. When you're older, too, you get into that pattern.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. And part of it is because now my business is somewhat reliant on understanding YouTube culture, social media a little bit. And so I always kind of threw it up. That I was studying. Right. I'm kind of studying what's going on. I'm studying what other people are doing to get attention or what's going on, what's trending for sure.

[Podcast Host]

So now, did you. So you are an ophthalmologist, technically, a doctor of optometry. Doctor of optometry. What's. What's the difference there?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. Good. This is a great question. I think especially here in the US it's confusing a little bit. So the. The simple, fast answer is, the doctor of optometry in the US Is like seeing your family care doctor for the eyes, right? So we go to school for your undergrad pre med for four years, then you do optometry for another four years, which is all of the same kind of early first two years of what med school is, except then we go this track of just studying the eyes, pathophysiology, disease, pharmacology, treatments, some surgical procedures, and then we may or may not do a residency, and I did mine in ocular disease at the VA Medical center in Minneapolis. It was kind of a primary care mix of disease because the va, you see a lot of disease.

[Podcast Host]

These guys next door have been doing some construction. Can I go over there and just tell them to chill for like, two hours?

[Dr. I Health]

If you can. All right.

[Podcast Host]

Give me one sec.

[Dr. I Health]

I can tell you want. That's what you want to do. I was gonna say, you guys got raccoons, man. How do they get all the way up here?

[Podcast Host]

It's a whole story. All right, sorry, doc. Where'd I cut you off?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So just back to kind of optometry versus ophthalmology in the US if an optometrist is your kind of your primary care physician for the eyes, kind of like you're seeing your family doctor, then an ophthalmologist is like seeing your cardiac surgeon. Right. If you're seeing your family doctor for blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, they manage the vast majority of it. But when it hits that advanced stage where it's beyond their scope or someone needs surgery, then that's where an ophthalmologist comes in. So for an ophthalmologist, they do their pre med and then they do their medical school, whether it be an MD or a, do a doctor of osteopathy, and then they subspecial specialize in just eye surgery and study of the eyes. So they do. They can do anything, but usually they go really deep into either being an expert in cataract surgery or maybe a LASIK anterior segment refractive surgeon or they go into pediatric pediatrics and they do eye surgeries for kids who have an eye turn going one way or the other. Or they do retina surgery and they go to school for like 13, 15 years. And they are very, very good at.

[Podcast Host]

What they do 13, 15 years, depending.

[Dr. I Health]

On their fellowship and their subspecialty. So they. So I had the opportunity to go either direction. Did I want to become an ophthalmologist, an optometrist? I knew I wanted to do I. Since I was a kid. And when I shadowed both, I went and shadowed an ophthalmologist. And during surgery, cataract surgery was fine. There's no blood with cataract surgery usually. And so that was cool. It was really fascinating. But then they had like a pediatric case where they did do strabismus surgery where they had to cut the eye muscle and resect it. And part of it could have been seeing it on a kid, but the other part was just seeing blood. And I found out at that time and I'm really lucky I did that. I just don't have the constitution. I don't have the constitution for blood and guts. Right. Movies, no problem. I think in real emergency situations, I don't know, something else kicks in. But I basically passed out in the or.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, nice. Yeah, that's a sign.

[Dr. I Health]

And so I give a, I give a shout out to all the doctors and I recommend to anybody who's thinking, going into any medical specialty, shadow the doctor, shadow different professions because it saves me a lot of pain and headache if I would have gone down that path and then found out that like, oh, crap, I'm. I don't think I'm prepared to handle the training. And all the cases that do require seeing a lot of blood that I'm just not. That's not going to be my specialty.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, no, it's a different yin, different yang for different docs, for sure.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So for me, as a doctor of optometry, I get to stay in the clinic. I still get to treat all forms of disease. I do pre, I do manage pre and post surgical care and I do some surgical procedures that I do in the clinic. So if somebody has a foreign body in the eye, I remove that. I do a lot of procedures on the anterior segment for dry eye disease. And then for people who need some, like glaucoma surgeries, there's some laser procedures that I hold my license for. Oh, cool. And so there, anything that can be done in the clinic, I handle. But when somebody needs cataract surgery, they need invasive surgery. Then I hand it to the surgeon who has advanced training and skill set.

[Podcast Host]

Right. How does cataract surgery work?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So cataract surgery is fascinating. One of the most successful surgeries ever invented. So for everybody, do you know what a cataract is?

[Podcast Host]

You know, I know what a Cadillac is.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Cadillac. All those. So inside the eye, when you're born, you're born with a lens and it's thin. When you're a young little kid, it's thin, it's flexible, and it's perfectly clear. And that lens, when you use your muscle inside the eye, it flexes and changes shape and that's what allows you to see really up close and then relax it to see far away. Now, as you grow older, this lens actually gets thicker over the course of your lifetime and more rigid. It becomes crystallized. So I hate to say it, but by the time we're all like 45 getting into our 50s, you start seeing people have to wear either reading glasses or bifocals. So that's that lens getting thick and rigid actually gets hard. So even though the muscle is still pulling on it inside the eye, the lens doesn't change shape. So that's called press Biopia. And then people need again, bifocals, progressive glasses. But then add another 10, 15, 20 years of life. That lens is still aging and it starts to oxidize.

[Podcast Host]

Oxidize?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So the same process of basically rusting of the car.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

And the lens inside the eye is avascular. There's no blood vessels feeding it nutrients to fight off oxidative or reactive oxygen species. So inside the eye, you have an intense amount of antioxidants or vitamin C actually is the highest concentration of vitamin C in your body is within your eye, and it bathes around the lens and prevents it from turning into or oxidizing. But as it oxidizes, it starts to go from a clear lens into a cloudy lens. It becomes kind of like looking at fogged glass.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

And there's different types of cataracts, but most people do develop what's called an age related cataract. And it kind of looks like a yellow color. And if it goes unattended, it can even turn to a dark coffee brown color. And as it becomes opaque, you can no longer see through it. So early on in the cataract development, again, people's in their 50s, 60s, depending on their lifestyle, maybe a little bit faster if they're younger, if they're a smoker, if they drink heavily, they may develop cataracts sooner. But as somebody experiences this, they. It happens so slowly, they don't realize their vision is changing. But the subtle changes is worse. Nights, the night vision goes down. So people always complain, I can't see at night. Well, part of that could be cataracts, could be some other things that maybe we'll talk about. But then people's vision becomes fuzzy, you know, blurry vision. And then they also notice more glare issues. Right. If you have a windshield that's really dirty, you know, bugs have hit it for a few months, but you haven't actually cleaned it off. Light hits it and it scatters different directions. So it's like you can't quite see through it, but that's inside your eye. And so once vision is bad enough or somebody's symptoms, their glare quality of life goes down, then cataract surgery is a fantastic option.

[Podcast Host]

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[Dr. I Health]

And how did they do it so historically? So how they kind of discovered cataract surgery was Because I think it was World War I, it might have been World War II. But what happened was that they used to do what's called couching, where the cataract was so bad they would break the zonules that suspend the lens inside the eye. They would break it and then just push the lens back into the eye and give you really thick glasses.

[Podcast Host]

How the fuck are they breaking it?

[Dr. I Health]

Like, they would basically use a needle and go into the eye.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, God.

[Dr. I Health]

So that's. This is. That's like hundreds of years ago. And then because the lens inside the eye accounts for about 20 diopters of power, like really strong power, people would have to walk around with super thick glasses afterward.

[Podcast Host]

I haven't heard that term before. Diopter. Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

So a diopter is the. The way we measure the strength of glasses, or refractive correction. The. So really thick glasses, you know. Remember Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys?

[Podcast Host]

Oh, I thought you were going to say the Wire.

[Dr. I Health]

Oh, yes.

[Podcast Host]

He had very.

[Dr. I Health]

He had very thick glasses. Okay, so imagine everybody walking around with those type of glasses. Well, so I think. I think it was World War I. I don't remember. But it was the pilots who crashed and survived. The type of plastic they were using for the. The windshield of the air, of the planes, the plastic, some people that got lodged in their eye. And usually when you have any sort of foreign body in the body or in the eye, you have rejection to it. But they noticed, hey, this. This plastic, no, nobody's having. Their body's not rejecting it. So it kind of gave this idea like, hey, perhaps we can make a lens out of the same material and put it inside of the eye. And that would allow people to see. And so that's kind of where the idea came from. And eventually that's what they did. They. They started manufacturing implants where once the cataract gets taken out, they can implant this new plastic lens inside the eye and they can even shape it so that it accounts for your need for glasses or your visual to help with vision.

[Podcast Host]

Whoa.

[Dr. I Health]

And so they were.

[Podcast Host]

That's crazy, though, that whether it was World War I or World War II, that long ago, they were able to come up with something like that.

[Dr. I Health]

Right. And the challenge is that back then, the way to remove the actual cataract inside the eye, the only way they could do it is to dilate the eye to oblivion. So it's your pupil's humongous. And then they'd have to go in and just pull the full lens out of the eye, which. Which would Mean a large surgical incision on the eye. Really large. Like 5, 6 millimeters.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. That's not. Oh, no, no. Oh, hell no. Got fucking Mozart over there pulling my eye out. No, thanks.

[Dr. I Health]

So. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. For us over here, who can't stand thinking of surgery, I'm sitting here, like.

[Podcast Host]

You know, wringing my hands, grabbing myself, too, man.

[Dr. I Health]

So. So they would do this surgery where they'd move the lens inside the eye. They put a plastic lens inside the eye, and then we'd have to sit in the hospital for, like, a week because the surgical wound was so big, they have to let it heal. So I forget if it was. I think it was the 19 late 60s, 1970s. I forgot the name of the ophthalmologist, but he's kind of credited as being one of the best inventors for any ophthalmological procedure device. And he invented something called phaco emulsification.

[Podcast Host]

Fake emulsification.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So this is. The story goes, I think he invented a way to remove the lens inside the eye first using cryotherapy. So basically, you touch the lens, and it would instantly freeze, and then he'd lift the lens out of the eye.

[Podcast Host]

Charles Kelman there, that's your guy.

[Dr. I Health]

And so he. But the problem is that somebody else invented or they. Somebody else published that idea of using cryotherapy to remove the lens before him by, like, a week or two. Just barely beat him. And so he was frustrated, but he went to the dentist, and then at his dentist office, they were. They were cleaning his teeth, and he's like, how does that. How does that work? And they explained, oh, well, it uses ultrasound energy to really focus, to shatter the plaque off the teeth. And he. The story goes that he just stood up and left the dentist office just, like, straight up and just left, and then came back several hours later with a lens donor or a lens that they had removed from his eye at the university. And he just grabbed the tool and drilled through it. And he was kind of one of those eureka moments. And then he spent the next, I don't know, five, 10 years kind of learning. Hey, how can we design this tool so that during the exam or during the operation, they don't have to remove the full lens intact. They can shatter the lens with this ultrasound energy and basically turned it into dust.

[Podcast Host]

The thing that I keep thinking about whenever you're talking about any of these types of procedures where you're going into the eye is how soft the eye is, and the idea of, like, shattering anything in it. It feels Like, I'm picturing bad movie scenes, but, you know, it feels like it's like gonna slice something off and then you can never use it again. So why isn't that the case with a procedure like this?

[Dr. I Health]

Y. Yeah. So. Well, one, the eye. As delicate and beautiful as the eye is, it is actually pretty tough. There's certain membranes, certain tissues in the eye that are rather rigid, and they've evolved that way to preserve and protect our eyesight. And. And again, they have the engineering behind these devices and these surgical procedures have. Have gotten incredibly good. So the amount of energy they're using inside the eye to shadow the lens is very concentrated. And it's titrated to be very subtle so that it breaks off parts of the lens that needed to break without causing too much energy. But the real fascinating part of that procedure, not only do they shadow the lens, but then they have to remove it and they use it through suction. So the problem is that when he was first inventing this, he would suction out too much and other parts of the eye, the whole eye would collapse.

[Podcast Host]

Fucking Dyson ing the whole eye out like, shit. Sorry.

[Dr. I Health]

So he. They then had to invent in that same handheld tool that does the. The breaking of the lens. It's genius. They not only suction out the cloud, the chunks of the lens, the dust of the lens, but it replaces fluid inside the eye at the exact same rate as that it's suctioning out. So that way the eye.

[Podcast Host]

The fluid inside the eye.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So they have to obviously remove the lens. And there's also liquid inside the eye. We have what's called the aqueous humor, and then there's the vitreous humor. The vitreous is in the back of the eye. Kind of holds the shape of the eye. And as the vitreous, it's more of a gel. It's mostly water. It's got some type 2 collagen in it and some hyaluronic acid. But as the gel breaks down in life, you may notice floaters. People see little floating spots in their vision. That's from the gel in the side of the eye. But then in the front part of the eye, we have a fluid called the aqueous humor. It's. It's basically the blood inside the eye, but without red blood cells. It's kind of like plasma. And that's what has high vitamin C. It's got various other metabolites to help nourish the inside of the eye and hold the pressure. So while they're shattering the lens, they have to remove the particles and they're suctioning out fluid from the eye. They also have to replace the fluid of the eye so the eye doesn't collapse.

[Podcast Host]

That would, that would be helpful.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. But they invented that and they've perfected it over decades and decades. And it makes the procedure so fast, like 10, 15 minutes.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, they can finish it that quickly?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. It takes you longer to get ready for cataract surgery than it does to have the procedure. Wow. And now, of course, although it's rare, there are complications. Some people have unique health histories. So there are, unfortunately, sometimes when things just don't go the way it was planned. And so there's always issues with that, but it's very, very low rates that you see complications. And most surgeons, they've been doing it for so long. And I had the pleasure and honor of working at the VA where I got to see new resident surgeons. So they were doing their very first cataract surgeries, and I got to see their follow ups. And see, this is what it looks like when someone's first doing it and getting trained and then gradually get better over months. And then now you see surgeons who've been doing it for 10, 20 plus years. And it's just, it's like seeing like an F1 race car driver, like really top of their game. And they are just. They have a skill set. They have a training and a skill set where they. Surgeons often do have like kind of a God complex. Ego complex.

[Podcast Host]

You don't say.

[Dr. I Health]

But at the same time, if you're going to have eye surgery, who do you want doing? That's.

[Podcast Host]

I want the guy that looks at God and says, I got this.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, there is that. But I do give credit to a lot of the surgeons I work with. They're incredible people. And then they're incredible surgeons.

[Podcast Host]

I've had multiple surgeries in my life. I've done a couple full 360s on my shoulder. So the second time I went to do this, the first time it worked. And then I was good for three years. Everything was great. I dislocated my shoulder 15 times. Before that, never had a problem. And then I had a freak accident. Shoulder goes down to like where my fucking elbow is. And I had to go in and do a surgery. And this time it was my doctor's partner that had to do it because it was open surgery, not arthroscopic. And so my dad takes the day, the surgery, my dad takes me there. They get me all Set up and everything. I'm in the bed. They give me the initial, like, not knocking you out, but where you're, like, kind of loopy.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

My dad's just sitting there on the phone, and I love my doctor, Jerry Williams. He was the most confident, cocky son of a bitch you've ever met in your life. He walks into the room and, like, doesn't even look at my dad. He's, like, walking right from me. And my dad goes, oh, you the doctor. He goes, yeah, you the dad. And he's like, yeah. And my dad's like, I'll never forget. I'm, like, sitting there like this. My dad goes, so, what do you think? We gonna fix this? He's like, of course we're gonna fix it. Like, goes like this and walks over to me. I'm like, that's my guy, but that's what you want. Like, these guys are like that, but they've done it so many damn times that they get in there, it's like a fucking super bowl for them. Like, let's go. Let's get a fucking Lombardi and get out of here. It's amazing.

[Dr. I Health]

And so, yeah, there's some pros to. Cons to that, but, yeah, when push comes to shove, it's. It when you. Especially if you're operating on something like the eyes, and it's like, I don't want to lose vision usually. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And, like, it's amazing that something like that can happen so fast, too. They're doing it in 10, 15 minutes. It's like this small little thing.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. And there's no tactile feeling when they're doing that surgery either. It's all because the microscopes that they use. And now they even have kind of. Kind of almost like VR3D kind of glasses. They watch, they sit like this now while they're looking at a screen. Then they have special glasses on that give them, like, a really crazy depth 3D vision so that they can see just small millimeter movements that they're making.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. I Health]

Because that's the other thing I think I wouldn't have wanted as a. As a doctor. I'm. I'm not a cowboy, as they say in. In medicine, where I don't like to take huge risks if I feel like there's a safer alternative, less risky alternative. But they. If you're doing a surgery and you're off by a mill, by a millimeter, whoops, there's someone's blind.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. I Health]

I don't think I have my. I don't think I could take that home and be okay with myself. I care too much. So I think where I'm at as. As a clinician, taking care of patients in the clinic, helping with disease, prescribing medication, that's where I belong. And I've been really happy with it.

[Podcast Host]

I. I am. Like, every time I think about these doctors that do the surgeries, though, I'm always aware that there was a time where they were the first time doing it. Dr. Yeah. And so when you talk about, like, going to see these doctors who will do cataract for the first time, I just always want to know what the conversation's like with the patient, where the doctor goes, this is my first surgery ever. We're going to do your cataract. Like, you know what I mean? Everyone's got to start somewhere, but you have to be some patient, has to be the test dummy. And if they fuck up, like you said, by 1 millimeter, they might never see again.

[Dr. I Health]

Right? I don't know how that conversation goes. I'll have to ask some of the surgeons I work with what it was like for them. I know that they have an attending next to them the whole time, and if things are taken too long or a complication happens, then the attending doctor, who's been doing it for 10, 20 years, they'll step in. And I know what's fascinating is that when I was doing my residency, we would have Eminem meetings, mortality. What is it? Morbidity and mortality meetings. Basically, they'd review, hey, complications that happened this last month, or we had this many patients die for some reason, they would review. Okay, why did this happen? How could it be avoided? Kind of a learning experience for everybody in the department. And they brought up, like, we had this complication during surgery that no one expected. You know, things just happen. And the problem is that the. The best procedure, the alternative procedure, because right in the middle, they have to kind of pull an audible. They're like, oh, this happened. We need to switch to this other form of procedure. But when they knew the next procedure, it's like, nobody's been trained on how to do that alternative procedure because it's so outdated. It's like this. No one's done this for 20 years. So the only person that knew how to do it was the attending, thankfully. But they had this question of, like, we're in this tough spot. How do we train our new residents how to do this emergency, like, abortive procedure that is normally not taught anymore. So they had to kind of start recruiting Patients who have a blind eye who are willing to volunteer to have like, doctors kind of practice on their blonde already blind eye. And so I don't know if they're still doing that or how it's working out. But that's, that's just an interesting thing I didn't think about at that time until I was sitting there during my residency learning that I'm like, oh, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Shout out to those patients, man, you need to pay me a bag to do that. Even if I'm blad still like something that's in my body. You know what I mean?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

We're gonna practice. This is a board of procedure on you.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. And surgery in general is kind of nerve wracking. I think for anybody going through it, especially again, it's on your face. It's something that can be very personal. I think vision and eyesight is. Is extremely personal. I actually sat through my own eye surgery this last April. I had ICL implants put in.

[Podcast Host]

Icl? I don't know what that is.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, so they're called intracolmer lenses or implantable column lenses. So it's. It's a lens that. It's an alternative to Lasik for most people. I have a pretty high prescription, so I was a really excellent candidate for it. So instead of having a laser carve the surface of my eye, they take a plastic lens, kind of like a contact lens, but it's implanted inside the eye, behind the iris, behind the colored part of the eye. But it sits in front of my natural lens. So it's not cataract surgery. They're not removing anything from the eye, but they're implanting this new lens.

[Podcast Host]

And me looking at you right now, I could never tell that it's there. Right?

[Dr. I Health]

No, no. I do have some pictures, too. I can. I can share what it looks like. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Can I. Can I see that?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. And there's a couple. I have, like, videos. I did a whole YouTube video on it.

[Podcast Host]

Which one?

[Dr. I Health]

Let's. Let's pull that up.

[Podcast Host]

You remember what it was called?

[Dr. I Health]

I think it was just. I got.

[Podcast Host]

I got.

[Dr. I Health]

I got eye surgery or something like that.

[Podcast Host]

Let's see that. Did you bring the camera in there when you were going to do it?

[Dr. I Health]

I. So I hired a videographer. A friend of mine. His name is Will Stock. He actually lives here in New York.

[Podcast Host]

He went in with you?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So we flew him out there and. Yeah, he produced. He helped produce it and he edited it.

[Podcast Host]

All right, let's see where you're going to actually do it. All right, cool. Let's pump that deep. Get a little inside scoop right here. Which, by the way, we'll have your YouTube channel linked down below. We'll talk about that and how you started everything. Very impressive. How big the channel's gotten and, and all the content you're putting out while still being a doctor as well.

[Dr. I Health]

Right?

[Podcast Host]

All right, we got it.

[Dr. I Health]

Let's roll perspective first. I'll admit that, yes, I was a bit nervous to go in to have this procedure, even though I've had patients and friends who've had it, and I know the statistics, I know the success rate. I, I still, I think just having any eye surgery, if you've never had the experience before, it's a little nerve wracking. So I was a bit nervous going in. But the day of about, you know, the hour before they do pre op, they put not only dilation drops in to make your eyes, your pupils really big, but then they give you numbing drops on the eyes to make you comfortable. And then they did also give me some medication to help calm my nerves, which I think really did help me just relax and made the whole thing go a lot smoother. When they laid me down for this procedure, I was basically on my back looking up at a bunch of surgical lights. And of course, I didn't have contact lenses in or glasses on at the time, so everything was a bit out of focus and blurry. And they didn't numb my eyes. I didn't feel anything. But during that procedure, I noticed that all of the lights were sort of bending and warping, kind of like a kaleidoscope in a way. And that's because when they put the lens in my eye, it had to unfold and you would see the light passing through and again would kind of look bent and warped. I also have astigmatism in both eyes. And so they had to put a lens in the ICL4 astigmatism. And so Dr. Sharp had to rotate that lens to get it in just in the right place. And during that time, again, I also saw those lights sort of bend and warp. Now, for my procedure, it felt like it went by super fast. I think it technically only took like six minutes per eye, I think. But it didn't even feel like that. It felt more like two or three minutes went by just super quickly. And then just sitting up from the procedure, I remember getting your pupils. If you've ever had your eyes dilated before, everything is always a little bit off. But I could tell immediately that my vision was already much better and in focus. Now, after the procedure, I then was given a nice goodie bag that had.

[Podcast Host]

So, wait, you're not knocked out. So, like, what if you get an itch or something and you move?

[Dr. I Health]

I suppose. I mean, you. You can't still. You're not tied down or anything. You.

[Podcast Host]

I would want to be tied down.

[Dr. I Health]

What's nice is that again, I was given, like, valium, so I was. I was kind of flying already. Yeah, valium's nice, but my anxiety was way down. The eyes are numb, so you don'. Feel anything. I think at most you feel like, a pressure feeling. But, yeah, it goes by like, snap your fingers, like, oh, that was it. It was all over with.

[Podcast Host]

What if I told you that I found a mushroom that doesn't melt your brain or make you see God, but somehow chills you out in the best way? Luckily for you, a mushroom like this does exist. And it's called amanita muscaria, the iconic red and white mushroom you've seen in art and folklore. But instead of being psychedelic, amanita is actually very grounding. People use it to relax, soften anxiety, deepen sleep, and tap into vivid dream states. The experience itself varies quite a bit, depending on how much you take. At lower doses, it's very functional and puts you into a lucid flow state. At medium doses, it could become more jolly and sedating. And at really high doses. Well, I haven't personally gotten there yet, but thief has. And I heard it's pretty intense. Right, Thief?

[Dr. I Health]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

But most importantly here, the brand that really opened up this world for me is amantara. You've heard me talk about that many times before. Because they're the leaders in clean, ethical amanita sourcing. No synthetics, no additives, just real carefully processed amanita in a form that's super easy to work with. One day last week, I was really sore from the gym and then had to work all day and we had a shoot, and at the end of the day, I was just like, ah, I want to chill. So I took one of the blue lotus capsules and it was just enough to get me right there. Amantara offers 500 milligram capsules and gummies. I'm telling you guys, you have to try this mushroom. But there are a lot of sketchy companies out there selling counterfeit mushroom products, so I would only trust amantara. So go to www. Julian, that link is in my description below. And use code JD22 to get 22 off your first order, once again, that's amantara.com. go Julian. Link in description below. Promo code JD22.

[Dr. I Health]

But yeah, it's. I mean, still inside my head, I'm thinking, I know the statistics. It's very low risk of a complication or anything going on. But I still do some like. Like, I've also seen that.001% error issue. So I'm like, if it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen to me on a video recording for YouTube. But no, thankfully, it's. It's all. It all turned out fantastic.

[Podcast Host]

I'm glad. Imagine your videographer, like, accidentally hits the duck.

[Dr. I Health]

But, yeah, shout out to Will. He's amazing at what he does. He got his master's in. In documentary filmmaking.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, his angles were great there.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, yeah, he did very good. No, it's interesting for YouTube videos because you can't show people cutting into the eye. You can't actually saw that surgical part. It's like somehow gore adjacent. And so they. They would flag it. If I would have showed the actual procedure, they would have flagged it as being not suitable for. For advertisers. And if that gets like that, then the reach of those videos get diminished. So we had to be. Be like, okay, I need to use animations or something like that.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I think we can use our imaginations. That's. That. That was good enough right there.

[Dr. I Health]

There.

[Podcast Host]

But that's. That's wild because, like, you're the eye doctor and also, like, you understand because you have your own vision problems as well. And you were saying you always wanted to be an eye doctor growing up. Was that because you had glasses and you want to learn more about it or.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So it's kind of. Kind of twofold. One, I had glasses when I was six or seven years old, and so they were pretty thick. And I was kind of a nerdy, lonely kid at home playing video games, reading books, watching movies. And then in seventh grade, my mom's like, like, you need to get out of the house. I need you to pick a sport. And so I'm like, I'm 13. I'm going to do the manly thing. I'm going to play football. Playing tackle football with glasses is really difficult. So my mother wore contact lenses. She brought me in to see her optometrist. I got fit for contacts, and it just changed my life because at that time, not only. And I credit it, like, the contact lenses gave me freedom. It allowed me to play sports. Playing sports helped me make friends. That combined with just like the, that self confidence that you get from not having to rely on glasses and again, making friends, being more social. The most important thing happened at a 13 year old in junior high. Girls started paying attention to me.

[Podcast Host]

There you go.

[Dr. I Health]

And so every time I would see my dentist, I'm like, that guy sucks. Makes my gums bleed. You know, I don't like this. It feels weird. But I'd see my eye doctor. I'm like, this is like black magic. This is so cool. And I just thought, but like the fascination of how the contacts were rotating on my eye and everything. So in high school and people are like, what are you going to do? What are you going to be? What are you going to go to college for? I was like, I don't know, but I like that guy. Maybe I could do that. And so I said it as kind of my North Star and with that open mind, like, maybe I'll find something different in college. But just followed that path and felt more deeply in love with it as time went on.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, it comes across. That's cool that you also like, it's like from scratching your own itch as well. Like you had a problem, you saw how it improved, you saw who helped you improve it. And you're like, you know, you know like when you're like four or five and everyone's like, I want to be a firefighter, I want to be a police officer, all those things. In some ways, like you're a little older, but you're like, I want to be that guy. Yeah, fix my eyes.

[Dr. I Health]

And I think I was always fascinated with eyeballs too. I even as a kid, like, you've got posters and stuff here in the studio. I had like a black light in my room at 10 years old with a big eyeball black light poster. And I always had something like that. And that was way before I ever thought about being my doctor. I'm just like, oh, wow. Like there's like these subtle things that I did have. I don't know. I don't know if that actually influenced me or not, but it was something it might have. I later thought, I'm like, huh, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

The, the eyes are, are probably my favorite part about us as humans because they say it's the windows to the soul. And I think it's the truest thing ever in what I do in, in my job. Literally, like I'm looking into people's eyes and sizing them up and trying to understand. But even, even when I was making content, man, like when I was editing at the beginning, I would notice so much more personal connection before I even put a video out. When I was making the video where I could see more of someone's eyes, whether it was the speaker or the B roll I was using, if the B roll was back here versus if the B roll was here, I felt more of a connection here because of them.

[Dr. I Health]

It's true. So there is something. So like you mentioned the eyes of the window to the soul, right? What, what's even. What blows my mind. And I love thinking about this because the eyes are actually the window to like your health. Cuz so even though you're looking into my pupils and it's dark, right, it's black, you can't see inside the eye right now, but it is optically clear. And so if there was enough light, you would not just see my eye, you would see my retina in the back of the eye and you'd be actually looking at my brain. Because the retina is an extension of your brain.

[Podcast Host]

I could see all the way the brain.

[Dr. I Health]

So the retinal tissue in the back of the eye is an extension of your brain.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. I Health]

It is part of your central nervous system. So one of my colleagues brilliantly said during a lecture one time that the eye is the only internal organ that is exposed to the outside world. So that's one of the beauty things about being an eye doctor. That's why it's so important to see one. Even if someone feels like their vision is fine, because it's the only spot where we can just easily, without invading the body, without drawing blood or anything. We can just look and see if the blood vessels are getting damaged from high blood pressure, diabetes. We can see if there's an autoimmune issue, if you have anemia, if there's swelling or elevated levels of cerebral spinal fluid. People's eye movements start going a, you know, all different, different directions. If there's a brain tumor, if they have dementia, if they've had brain injury of some kind, we can detect that just by, just by looking, by looking at the eyes. And do you remember? Because you and I, I think are pretty close to the same age. But do you remember the old wind up cameras that we grew up with?

[Podcast Host]

Where you like the Kodak thing? Yeah, the old Kodak ones like Walgreens or whatever.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like they don't exist in it really anymore, but you would have them developed and people would have red eye. Do you remember those in old photos?

[Podcast Host]

Yes, yes, yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

So that they tried, didn't they try.

[Podcast Host]

To redo that with, like, an Instagram.

[Dr. I Health]

Filter a couple years ago maybe, where.

[Podcast Host]

It was like, they'd say, like, 98 on it.

[Dr. I Health]

IPhone2.

[Podcast Host]

You could do it. Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

All right, so the. The red eye. The reason we'd get red eyes, because the flash of the camera would hit the back of your eye, and then the blood would cause the blood that's flowing. The back of your eye reflects red. And so you're actually picking up the reflection of the light hitting the retina and bouncing back. And that's why the. Why people would have red eye. And so that's. That's kind of, again, the genius of how beautiful the eyes are is that it really is if right now, if I look directly into your eye and just use my imagination, I'm actually looking at your brain. And that's how we are connecting as, like, individuals.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. That adds a whole second layer to it as well. I didn't realize the retina is literally like a part of the brain matter. So if I. Maybe this would be helpful. Joe, can we pull up like, a. I don't know, like a diagram of, like, the anatomy of an eye? Yeah, if that's cool. Because then you could explain this and people could also see what you're explaining. So the eye is obviously a ball, and it's connected by vessels back here. So the. You're saying the.

[Dr. I Health]

Look at the top left one up there.

[Podcast Host]

Top left. Perfect. So you're saying that the retina extends all the way to the back where I'm looking at those vessels.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, yeah. So the. Very far back to the right of the screen there, you see that yellow line? Yes, that. So that's the optic nerve. And so the. All the information from the brain is the light information that you collect with the eye picks it up like a satellite dish, and then it all has to be sent through that cord back to the brain. So all of the. Kind of the. Where all the blood vessels are, that's actually a tissue. It's very thin. It's like wet tissue paper almost. It's so thin. But you pick that. That. That's all of your cones, your rods, and then all of the supportive structures and your ganglion cells, which. There's over a million ganglion cells, but those all bundle together. And that's that cord of the optic nerve heading to the brain.

[Podcast Host]

And then I'm looking at. When you were describing the procedure you got where they. Which took like, six minutes on each eye or something like that. Where they put in.

[Dr. I Health]

They put the ICL inside My eye.

[Podcast Host]

Right. So where approximately would that have gone?

[Dr. I Health]

So right where we have that, the arrowhead there. So right in front of the lens. Right in front of there. Exactly right where it's at. That's where that lens sits behind the colored part, the iris, and then in front of the lens.

[Podcast Host]

So where the. Where the cornea is and the farthest exterior part of the structure, is that the softest part of the eye, like the most sensitive?

[Dr. I Health]

I mean, it's definitely the most sensitive because the most nerve endings on your body actually are concentrated right there in that corneal tissue. Because if you've ever had a lash in your eye or scratched your eye, it's painful. You can feel it. And that's just because the eye is so delicate. You need to protect the eye. So that's why you have so many nerve endings. But the cornea is actually pretty strong. It's tough to say what. What would be the most fragile? I imagine, you know, a retina surgeon would be like, well, the retina is the most fragile, but, you know, just on the exterior of the eye, I mean, the conjunctiva, the clear membrane on the surface of the eye, is probably the most fragile.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, right at the.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, that's. That's the clear part of the eye that covers the white part of the eye. So when you get.

[Podcast Host]

That's what I was thinking. Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

When you get pink eye or an infection of some kind, which we call conjunctivitis, that's the medical term. That's just an infection of that. That. That membrane. And so that's probably the most delicate. I would say it's easy to damage it, but it's also quick to heal.

[Podcast Host]

Now, when you were talking about cataracts, because now we actually have the. The graph up here. Where would. Where would that manifest? Just to review that for people, like, where would. What part would you see it?

[Dr. I Health]

So the. The clear thing that's labeled as the lens. Right. The big. Kind of whitish. It's kind of. It's actually about the shape and size of an M and M candy. So you can imagine that.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow.

[Dr. I Health]

So that lens, again, is clear when you're born. And then if you develop a cataract, that lens starts to become opaque, kind of a cloudy, either white or yellow color eventually. Like I've done mission trips to third world countries and things like that. And people who've never had access to an eye doctor, they're like 70 years old, and their. Their lens is darker than your coffee. Wow. So it's. And those People can't see through that.

[Podcast Host]

Is there, is there like such thing as you don't catch a cataract early enough that you can never fix it and you go blind? Or is it always fixable with the surgical procedures we now have?

[Dr. I Health]

No, cataracts are pretty much always something can be done. In fact, sometimes it's better to do it early than later. But you know, some kids are born with cataracts and if it gets missed, then they may not get the, the information, the light information getting to the back of the eye. And so that part of the brain that helps them see through that left eye or right eye, that part of the brain may never develop the ability to like appreciate good vision. And we call that amblyopia. And some kids get that because one eye turns the wrong way or one eye is way stronger than the other. They can develop it to those reasons too do but deprivation amblyopia where they just the eyes essentially covered the entire time or there's a again they have a cataract that gets missed. Yeah. Then, then that part of the brain just never develops. It's like being super right handed and that like if imagine a kid was born without a left arm.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

The part of the brain that would develop to coordinate finesse with that left arm, the brain just says hey, you know what? This, I don't need to use this. I'm going to use it for something else. And so there's a critical period in the first kind of seven to eight years of life where the brain is more neuroplastic and learns faster. And so if we catch a kid early enough with cataracts, they can do cataract surgery. And then usually the brain can at least appreciate better vision if we get cataract.

[Podcast Host]

So it can build. Okay, actually that makes sense because one of the things I was thinking about not necessarily would just be cataracts. I'm sure it's all different things. But you'll see these videos on social media were like a baby, maybe like a year old or two. You know, I'm talking about a year or two old who is wearing like some big glasses and they're basically like blind. But they just have come out of a surgery where whatever was wrong with their vision got fixed. And then they take off the glasses and they can suddenly see their mom.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

For the first time. And it's like very emotional and you know, they'll laugh as well. Like those are the coolest videos. But I would imagine it's also because they're it's what you're saying. They're catching whatever it is early, and now their brain actually can develop the ability to.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, they. They appreciate it right away.

[Podcast Host]

Hey, guys, if you haven't already subscribed, please hit that subscribe button. It's a huge, huge help. Thank you.

[Dr. I Health]

And those are always very emotional videos. It's like you said. And the reason people often ask, they're like, how do they figure out what power the glasses need to be? Because the kid can't say, oh, that's better one or two. And we actually use that same principle that I mentioned before of the red eye of light hitting the retina. So we do a procedure called retinoscopy, which, in school, we have to do it thousands of times. And we were actually tested on it for our. To get our licensure. But you have to look at the eye with a little flashlight and how the light, as you scan across the eye, hits the retina and bounces back. So the movement, the reflection will move differently based if a kid is farsighted or if they're nearsighted. And we can measure it by putting different lenses in front of their eyes.

[Podcast Host]

Eye.

[Dr. I Health]

So once we neutralize the movement, that's essentially what someone's glasses need to be.

[Podcast Host]

It gives the answer.

[Dr. I Health]

And for an adult, for, like, licensure procedures, you basically need to get somebody to, like, 20, 30 or better, which would be like, legal driving. So really, when people come in, if you don't want to answer better, one or two, I can just determine what your glasses pretty, pretty close to should be, and I can just go from there.

[Podcast Host]

Now, for people out there who don't have glasses or contacts especially, so they may be less familiar or get mixed up with the terms. When you're defining nearsightedness and farsightedness, what are the. What are the separate symptoms of those two?

[Dr. I Health]

Right. So nearsightedness, that just means you can see it near. So you pick up your phone, you can see nice and sharp, but you glance up, you look in the distance, and you're like, I can't see the road sign.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Dr. I Health]

Right. So everything in the distance is fuzzy. The medical term for that is called myopia, farsightedness, which I don't love the term farsightedness because I think it's confusing. But the medical term is called hyperopia or hypermetropia. And this basically means your eye is smaller or weak in a way. Like, you can see things far away sometimes, but usually up close, things are a little bit more Challenging to see, and you need to engage your eye muscles to focus.

[Podcast Host]

Like when people kind of go like this.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. And usually when people have to hold things further away and they can't see up close, that's often because they're over the age of 45. And they also have pressed Biopia because that's the confusing thing. When somebody is farsighted and they're young, they still have the ability to accommodate or use their eye muscles to flex that lens inside the eye to see up close. And so they can get by until that lens hardens or for some reason they can't focus up close. Like maybe they had a head injury or something and they lost that muscle control. Then all of a sudden they can't see up close.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

And that's always a frustrating thing for people when they turn 45 or something like that. They're like, I never used to need glasses and. And now they're trying to get used to life.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, absolutely. It changes. And it's like. It's one of those things, you know, you just kind of take for granted. You wake up every day, you can see, and then like slowly, and then all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute, why, why can't I see that? And I think about that a lot because I've been blessed with very good vision in my life. But like everyone else, you're going to get older at some point and certain things are maybe going to fade in their ability to. To be as. As good or accurate at seeing as they are now. So, you know, we're going to get into the blue light stuff and some of the devices and things around us. But outside of that, what are, I don't know, some good eye health tips that people can do on a daily basis to try to work the muscle of their eye, if you will.

[Dr. I Health]

Oh, sure, yeah. So I think just in general routine life, most people are getting plenty of kind of eye exercises in a way. In the field of eye care, there is a whole subsection called vision therapy. And there's some really good evidence for a few different eye conditions, like where people have hard time moving their eye muscles or they have accommodative insufficiency where they can't flex that muscle inside the eye. So, so with that, one of the most classic ones that doctors talk about is called pencil pushups, which is basically just taking a pen or a pencil, looking at the tip of it, and then slowly keeping it in focus, keeping it one, not double, but bringing it closer and closer and to the point where it starts to fuzz a little bit, push it back just a little bit more and then try to pull it in closer to see if you can challenge yourself to clear it up. And so you're challenging the muscle inside the eye to engage a little bit more and have better control. And then you just relax it. Look far in the distance and you can do repetitions of that. So it, if you are consistent with it, just like with any other exercise, right. If you hit the gym. Yeah, you go, you go lift the gym 1. You lift weights once. You can't be like oh look, I did it once. Why am I do not have biceps. You have to keep going, you have to keep doing it. So they use these actually they use a lot of different. But there's a lot more types of exercises that are prescribed and used in forms of vision therapy in ways they can challenge it. But that's used a lot for people who've had head injury again like tbi. Kids who've had developmental issues with their eye muscles. Maybe pre or post eye surgery. It's kind of like having physical therapy, right. If they do physical therapy before they have like knee surgery, you're more likely to heal faster. And so they're starting to use that a lot more. And I think most people don't need to do it it. But if you're really like I want to avoid needing reading glasses till I'm 55. If you did that on a regular basis, you might learn to engage the muscles a little bit better. One thing I do like to emphasize is it's not that you're building stronger muscles inside the eye because the ciliary body muscle inside the eye that you're using to focus is not like skeletal muscle, it is smooth muscle. So you cannot hypertrophy that muscle. Kind of like your heart, like you're.

[Podcast Host]

Not building tissue on it.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, it's not getting bigger. Yeah, it'd actually be terrible if it did. If it got bigger, you'd basically induce glaucoma. But the, the smooth muscle, when you're doing those exercises, you're actually improving the brain communication to those muscles for like fine tune engagement.

[Podcast Host]

Well, that's actually, that's right on cue because I wanted to ask about the relationship with the brain and the eyes because everything as far as I know that we pret much been talking about today is related to physical deformities that happen in the eye that then cause you to not be able to see. But it's not related to something you just referenced which is like tbi, for example, there's a neurological deformation that then has some sort of effect on how you're able to see afterwards. So just maybe at the beginning, to make it simple for people, what part of the brain is responsible for us being able to use the eyeball to see and to start part.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So honestly, every lobe of the brain does have some role in your movements of the eye and how you fixate and control, like steady focusing on the. On. On an object to being able to look left, look right, to look up, look down. All the different eye muscles have some different connection to different lobes of the brain. And so that's. That's the challenge with brain and head injury, is that that there often is some deficit that happens. It often does heal over the course on its own within six months for a lot of people, thankfully. But there's many people who have deficits for several months or it goes longstanding. The two most common is accommodative insufficiency, where, again, they have a hard time focusing up close and seeing things like their phone, or they have convergence insufficiency, which was where they still have the muscle capability, coordination. You know, if you cover one eye to focus up close, but using both eyes at the same time becomes difficult because when you focus on a near object like your phone, you're not just engaging the muscle to keep it clear, but you're trying to keep the eyes turned in to keep it single. And so then people start to be like, I can see up close for like two seconds, and then I see double. And so thankfully, with proper training, they can. And rehab, they can get that improving and much better.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you'll hear about like a. Even like a stroke victim, one eye suddenly won't work right. And. And maybe the whole left side of their body doesn't work and it extends to their eye as well. So that would have to do with what you were talking about, where every part of the brain is technically a part of the process. So if you shut down some of them, it might just shut down the whole machine.

[Dr. I Health]

Right. And then there's different lobes in the back of the brain, mostly in the visual cortex, whether it's a temporal lobe, parietal lobe, if they say, have a stroke or an injury in that area, that will affect your visual field. And so people may not even be aware of it, because sometimes people will have vision loss. They're like, I'm aware of it. I can see in the top right of my vision, it's gone. But there are People who've had strokes or injury who aren't aware of that they've lost vision up there, they feel like they can still see it. And so they're that person who, as they're walking down the hallway, keep running into a door or keep running into the wall, and they don't realize their vision's gone. And so that's another challenge. And again, we have specialists in the field of eye care who specialize in neuro optometry, or they specialize in some form of vision or developmental optometry where they not only kind of evaluate and diagnose, hey, what's going on with the brain, but then they, they try to prescribe, even whether it be forms of rehab or they'll prescribe special prisms to reorient their vision in a certain direction so that they're. They're utilizing the still functional part of their vision or try to rehab their, Their lifestyle so that they're not. Not at risk of falling.

[Podcast Host]

How does the prisms thing work?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, so, so prisms kind of like. Remember the old. What's it, Pink Floyd? The, the famous Pink Floyd one with the prism with the rainbow lights? So that. So, yeah, prisms do scatter light a little bit, but what they do is they can direct light. So if you have an eye that turns too far inward, too far outward. Yeah, that's, that's the classic one I'm thinking of. So it'll. So you can see how the light goes in one direction and then it bends and sh. Shifts and goes a different angle. So if you, if you have an eyeball that turns left, right, up or down too far, and there's a misalignment. Now, for a lot of people, their eye muscles compensate for this, but if their eye muscles don't and they're challenged, they have double vision or they're having too much eye strain, then some forms of prism can correct that. So even though the eyes turned in, they're still seeing straight ahead. They're not fighting these eye movements. And sometimes we'll prescribe small amounts to sometimes really large amounts. It depends on how big the, the, the eye turn. Maybe how does.

[Podcast Host]

It's just making me think of that because you're talking about like the motion of the eyes. But how does like a lazy eye happen? Are you, Is that always something you're born with or can you develop that as well?

[Dr. I Health]

So it oftentimes is something that kids are just born with. You know, that's the way kind of God made them. Sometimes it's it's sec. Sometimes it is secondary to the fact that they have an uncorrected need for things like glasses. So for an example, it actually happens quite frequently. Little kids will be born really farsighted. So no, most kids are born slightly farsighted, like four or five diopters. And then as they go through the first few years of life that, that plus power. Their eyes are really small. The eyes go through emmetropinization, so the eye actually gets a little bit longer and they get closer to hitting zero. Not needing glasses. And that's a normal process. But some kids are born so far sighted that they learn as a young kid that they can just flex their eye muscles really strong and they can power through that farsightedness. But the problem is that when you use the muscle inside the eye, it is neurologically tethered to the muscles on the outside of the eye to turn inward. And so for anybody who's watching on the cameras, like when you try to focus up, close your eyes again and both turn inward. So what happens is that these little kids, they end up turning their eyes like this and then they just prioritize one eye. Cause the brain doesn't want to exert more energy than it needs to. So one eye turns in all the way, the other eye is looking straight ahead and so it looks like oh well, the eye's lazy, it's turning in. Well actually they just need glasses. And as soon as you give them glasses and they don't need to use those muscles, they go straight again.

[Podcast Host]

So they don't. The body doesn't adjust to that and train it permanently, unfortunately to be that way.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, thankfully in that case. But the problem is that if they're left like that for too long as a young kid, then the eye that's turned in their brain learns to mute it and ignore it. And then that part of the brain starts to develop what we call amblyopia because it's not using it right. So then it never develops as strong of an appreciation to see like 20, 20, 20 vision.

[Podcast Host]

Can glasses like with. If you have that and it does develop like a long term ability where you're actually one eye is in and the other eyes out. Can glasses also be prescribed to change how that looks sometimes? Right, Yeah. I mean I got one friend, he's got like one eye hunt and one eye fish and he throws on glasses and he looks straight as an arrow.

[Dr. I Health]

So thankfully there are sometimes when that does work with prism glasses or again some forms of vision therapy can be prescribed to help get things back into alignment and coordination improves. But if it's a really large angle where the eyes deviated so far to the side, then oftentimes surgical procedures is going to be the best bet. And it actually is really helpful not just for the vision correction, but even just for cosmetic reasons because they, they have found that, you know, people who do have an eye that's turning the wrong way, we, we don't mean to like give this judgment to them, but people do automatically sort of judge them and assume that they're stupid or that there's something wrong with them or they're not as attractive. And so they, those individuals are less likely to get hired for jobs. They're less likely to get into college. They're less likely, they. And it's. So there is a cosmetic benefit. Not just a cosmetic benefit, but like, I would say almost a psychological lifestyle benefit to having, having that procedure.

[Podcast Host]

Absolutely. And like it, it's a shame that like, that's a reality. But as humans, we are wired for symmetry in everything. So when you see something that's like asymmetrical, there's a, there's like a evolutionary function that says like, oh, that's wrong.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Or something. It's got nothing to do with someone's neurological ability, obviously. But you know, there's like just that, like prejudicial judgment that does come in for sure.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. And so there, I know a lot of other doctors who, when they see a kid who, you know, it's like, oh, the vision's not going to improve with the surgery, but it's like, we should just get this done now when they're 10 or 12, because it's going to open them so many more doors in life and it's gonna, it's gonna help them suffer, avoid suffering from other just kind of lifestyle, you know, making friends again, those sort of opportunities.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Even like with you, you didn't have the physical aspect of it, but like you couldn't, you couldn't see that well. And then suddenly you're able to see with your glasses. You can play sports now while the contact lenses has made you able to play football. And then like your whole life, you start, girls start talking to you, your whole life improves. I mean, for a 13, 14 year old, that's a big deal.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

During those years, to be able to kind of be given that second lease, you know what I mean?

[Dr. I Health]

And especially for school, you know, academic performance is enhanced so much more. So that's why some states here in the US like, it's it's like you have to see an eye doctor before you go into kindergarten because kids who are being missed by school screenings and other things, because kids aren't going to be like, hey, I can't see. That's all they know. They've. They've known it their whole life. So they don't know what good vision is.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

So I think it's really important for parents to just be aware that, you know, you can't wait for your kids to speak up and say they can't see something. They have to. You have to bring them in, even if they're not complaining, just to make sure the eyes are healthy, that we're not missing anything, and that we potentially catch diseases and things like that early.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

Especially now because there's a lot of interest on myopia, which is nearsightedness, because myopia, we used to think of it as, oh, just your vision's getting worse, you need stronger glasses. That was all it was. But with myopia, the eyes are actually growing longer. So it's not just that your eye needs stronger glasses, it's that the eyeball itself has extended backwards toward the brain by about 1 millimeter for every three diopters. And so for myself, I was almost six diopters. So my eye is essentially 2 millimeters longer than somebody who doesn't require any form of correction. Now, it doesn't sound like what's 2 millimeters, but that 2 millimeters is the stretching of the tissue. And that extra strain and stretch increases your risk for cataracts, it increases your risk for glaucoma, increases your risk for retinal detachments, where the retina just pulls off the back of the eye, all potentially vision loss, blinding conditions, and then dramatically increases your risk for what's called myopic maculopathy, which is basically the retina in the back of the eye starts to degenerate. And because of all these reasons, that's why it's. We've taken a lot of extra steps to, to figure out, okay, lifestyle wise and treatment wise, what can we do to slow down these kids from becoming so nearsighted? Because if we can slow down the nearsightedness and reduce their risk of having all these diseases, not only do we prevent vision loss and blindness over their lifetime, but we decrease the expense and all of the other kind of negative effects that come with it, for sure. And Here in the US children, about 40% of kids are nearsighted. Now, it used to only be about 20%. Is that so, yeah, we're going to get in. So this is, I think, is a great trajectory into phones and things like that. But part of it is kids spending a lot more time indoors. So it's not just, oh, I'm on the screen, but it's doing near activities in general. So obviously kids, way before phones came out, kids were becoming more and more near sighted at stronger amounts. And that's because of reading and the amount of times we spend indoors. We're not outside playing soccer and hanging.

[Podcast Host]

Out in the field like that.

[Dr. I Health]

Right? Yeah, we're not. We're not like how we used to develop as human beings. We spend a lot more time indoors. We're in our comfort zone with all the air conditioning and heating. And so part of it's being indoors, part of its reading and just doing near activities, which includes a lot of time on phones. And there's some other factors that haven't been fully identified. Certainly genetics plays a role too. But as kids spend more time indoors and they have the genetics for it, they are more likely to have a faster rate of this eyeball expanding and basically growing longer. And so now we measure for axial length a lot of times in many clinics they have devices to measure how long it is and then even predict using AI based on family genetics, time spent indoors, academic stressors, how nearsighted they likely could be by the time their eye stops growing. But now we have devices, we either have prescription glasses now that were just FDA approved, they've actually been available in other countries like Canada for like five, six years. That can slow down near sightedness development.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow. So it can actually stop the. Whoa.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, it can slow it down by about 50% if the kids wear it non stop for 12 hours a day. There's other ones where contact lenses, both soft lenses and hard lenses, which I think are genius, called orthokeratology. So most contact lenses, people are told, don't sleep in them. Right. Because your chance for infection goes up dramatically if you sleep in contact lenses. But there's a contact lens that's specifically designed for kids or anybody, even adults, to sleep in them. And when you're sleeping in them, it's kind of like wearing braces for your teeth. Teeth. It changes and molds the shape of the eye so that when you wake up the next morning you can see 2020 and you take out the contacts and you don't wear them during the day and you can still see 2020. And then that night you put them back in and then you just. It keeps remolding and holding the shape of the eye. And so that's an alternative to Lasik for people who maybe aren't candidates for lasik, but they find that, that that process also slows down the rate of near sightedness development. And so that's sometimes used. There's eye drops like atropine eye drops that are used. They're not FDA approved yet, but that's been going, undergoing a lot of research. So some doctors prescribe it off label and then there's even some investigations into red light therapy in Asia that, that may be a way to slow down myopia too.

[Podcast Host]

Wait, so how are they using red light to do that?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, so there's different forms of red light therapies. This one specifically is called repeated low level light red light therapy. And so they use a specific wavelength, around 650 nanometers of light. That's the current device that's being tested. And they do it for three minutes in the morning, three minutes in the afternoon. Five days a week.

[Podcast Host]

Eyes open.

[Dr. I Health]

Like eyes open. It's actually more like, it's like a tabletop device and it's a, it's like looking to a laser pointer.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.

[Dr. I Health]

And so they have shown in several studies and this is all again happening in East Asia because the, the rate of myopia development in east asia is like 90% of the population. Again here in the US it's like 40% and steadily increasing. They expect it to be 50% of the world population by 2050.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

But in again in East Asia it's.

[Podcast Host]

Like 90% WeChat man.

[Dr. I Health]

But they find that the kids who are treated in this, and they've been doing these studies for like year long, the kids who are on it have a reduced risk of myopia advancement. And even kids who don't have nearsightedness yet, it prevents some kids from developing.

[Podcast Host]

Near sightness, but that's not, that's also not damaging their eyes in other ways.

[Dr. I Health]

So that's the caveat right now. And that's why even, especially here in the US they're like backing up from it because there are sadly case reports where kids have had reduced vision and damage, loss of cones, the cone cell density inside the back of the eye has diminished. And then they've even been proven that some of these devices simply are breaching the safety levels that they're supposed to be safeguarding against. Yeah, enough so that China actually changed their laser category for these devices from a class two to a class Three.

[Podcast Host]

What is, what does that mean?

[Dr. I Health]

It's just a safety category of like exposure to the light density to like how powerful it is. So there needs to be a lot more research on those devices before anybody, before I recommend anybody have their kids stare at red light. But, but that could be a part of the equation that we do know that kids who spend more time outdoors are less likely to develop nearsightedness. So we have to question, is it because they're just not indoors and they're not having that stimulus of like focus and you're in an indoor environment or is it because they are getting more vitamin D from the sun or is because they are getting red and near infrared light from being outdoors too?

[Podcast Host]

Well, I mean not to be captain obvious here, but what if it's just a combination of all of it?

[Dr. I Health]

You know what I mean?

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. I Health]

You got it on the, that that's really what it is. We know it's the combination of all those things. So they, they have imp in some countries, like I think Indonesia, they've recommended, hey, all kids have to spend at least two hours a day out playing outside in the sunlight. And so once they started implementing that, the rates of nearest nearsightedness development for kids have also gone down.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. I Health]

And so you know, these are usually still small studies so there still needs to be a lot more done. But so I always encourage even to, to parents when their kids aren't nearsighted. I'm like encourage them to take breaks when they're spending a lot of time on new devices or studying school. But then get them outside, you know, you want them to spend a little more time outside just from. There's something about that.

[Podcast Host]

You know, I, I was telling you I've never had vision problems before in my life, which I'm very grateful for. However, I did notice the first three and a half years when I was building this thing, I was at my parents house, they lived back in the woods and I, my studio and my office were the same exact thing. So it was a blacked out studio like this with fluorescent lights. Not as nice as this one, but actually way worse. Right in your face. And so now you see, you saw my place out here. Like where I work, there's natural light everywhere. I go outside all the time. But I was like banged up during those three and a half years too health wise. So I was inside all the time. Time. And like I never had the effect of like oh, I can't read some or I can't see that sign. But I had What I would call like eye fatigue. Yeah, all the time. And I noticed maybe about, probably about a year after moving up here, because I don't. When I'm recording in here, I'm in here, but, you know, I'm not in here. Besides that, I'm outside a lot. I go for walks all the time. I noticed like that eye fatigue kind of thing, like, almost like haziness is totally gone. And I think, you know, it's pretty obvious why.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So there, there is a, something that's not, I don't think it's discussed very much, but there is something called proximal accommodation. And so again, accommodation is the process of flexing that muscle inside the eye. And so when you are indoors, anything that's less than 20ft away, because 20ft beyond that is considered optical infinity for the human eye, you are technically using your eye muscles just a little bit to focus on a near object. So even right now looking at you and you're only like, what, five feet away? I know I'm using my muscles just a little bit. Versus if I try to imagine I'm looking at the Empire State Building super far away, I can relax my muscles in my eyes. Yeah. But, yeah, there we go. Yeah, but even that, I'm still using my accommodation just a little bit to even see that wall that's, you know, maybe 10, 12ft away. Yeah. And so all day long you're in a small indoor environment, you're using those muscles a little bit. Now as an adult, your eyes have largely stopped growing. And so you're not likely to develop nearsightedness now, but for a young kid whose body's still growing and developing, they may have an increased likelihood of their eye wanting to stay in that state. And the eye responds by growing longer and so that they don't have to use those muscles as strong.

[Podcast Host]

So my, like, what I described as like eye fatigue would be more like shock to the system in a way, because I'm not out there in that kind of environment all the time. But my eye hasn't changed because I was already an adult and it had grown to its size.

[Dr. I Health]

Right. So essentially what you were doing is going to the gym and lifting up a two pound weight off the dumbbell rack and just holding it there at halfway contracted all day long for several days at a time. Time. And you can do it. It's a lightweight, no problem. But you eventually feel some fatigue. Oh, yeah, right. So then you go outside and you put that weight down.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

And that's, that's that's the eye strain that people are often experiencing multiplied by the fact that when we're on screens, we don't blink as often and we don't blink as completely. Your eyes tend to not close all the way when you're staring at a screen. We're like, as, as a species, we tend to like hyper fixate and it's, it's like we're, our attention span is, is way more like grabbed on the screens than it is if we're just reading like a casual book.

[Podcast Host]

Why is that?

[Dr. I Health]

I don't think they fully understand it yet. They don't know if it's because the light, is it because of the kind of the depth of it, is it? So there is something there they haven't fully understood, but they know that part of it is the, the amount of focus or the, the attention that we're giving to it. The. Because with books, if it's just a leisure book like you just, you know, reading Lord of the Rings or something like that, we tend to have more closer to normal blink rates. But when we're studying like chemistry or calculus or something like that, and you're really focused on it, then our blink rates often again diminish and you again don't blink as much.

[Podcast Host]

Have they studied that comparison like you're talking about phones versus books in that way. Have they studied phones versus Kindles when you're reading a book or something that's actually a screen with a light behind it, right?

[Dr. I Health]

They have. And there is differences. They do know that depending on the device used, usually people don't hyper fix fixate as much on the Kindles versus like a normal iPad or other type of tablet. There is something really nice about that kind of cool contrast, that kind of cool gray color that Kindles have. I do really like that it's kind of softer. So there is some benefit to that versus the harsh like bright screen boosted contrast look. But still, I do believe still just regular paperback is. People are usually more leisure with a classic paperback.

[Podcast Host]

To jump back for one second, I had this question but we got off it. You know, what are you, are we talking about red light therapy all the time? Like I use it on my hair and seems to work like doctors like that, but it's used for so many different things. What is it about the red light itself scientifically that makes it such this like potential elixir of health?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So I know, I've heard some of your previous guests talk about mitochondria. Right. And really that's, you know, we kind of laugh for a second. We're like, everybody's using this as like a buzzword now. But that, that's essentially kind of where it falls down onto. Now in the eye care space there is red light which is around 630, up to like 670nm of light. But they, they find that devices that also use near infrared light. So closer to 850nm and sometimes even a little bit less than that, it's kind of a yellow orange light. 590nm of light also have benefits and they don't fully understand exactly how it's working, but it does when the light energy, so that's the thing, it's wavelength of light has one role, but then also the amount of energy given to a tissue will stimulate cells within the, within the tissue like the mitochondria, which produces ATP. It is the, you know, fifth grade energy of the, the powerhouse of the cell. But it, it energizes, it allows it to make more energy, but then it also changes some protein productions within the nucleus of the cell. So it kind of for cells that are like aging and dying, they're getting tired, they're not making proteins efficiently. By giving this light energy, it reopens their energy production and helps it, it live a little bit longer at a higher efficiency capacity. That's, that's kind of the way I.

[Podcast Host]

Think it's like an energizer. It's like the energizer. Yeah, like a battery pack.

[Dr. I Health]

And, and so the, they have shown at least for the eyes. Now if we think about just the eyes because I'm not a specialist in, in other forms of health because they've been studying red light since the 60s and they're trying to better understand it. I have a whole lecture on this for.

[Podcast Host]

It wasn't part of MK Ultra, was it?

[Dr. I Health]

I don't know what that is. What is MK Ultra?

[Podcast Host]

You know what, good for you. Keep going, don't worry about it.

[Dr. I Health]

So right now in the field of eye care, they're studying red light therapy for not just myopia like we mentioned earlier, but they've been studying it for dry eye along with other forms of anterior segment disease, like chalazia, styes, things like that. But they're also studying it for macular degeneration. In fact that it's been FDA approved. One device has been FDA approved for the treatment of Mac degeneration. It's been used in Europe for a bit longer, but that uses not just red light, but it uses near infrared light and some yellow orange light. And what's again what I like to emphasize for people because I think a lot of people hearing this and I've done some videos on it, they think I'm just going to go online, I'm going to go to Amazon, I'm going to buy this device and I'm just going to stare at it and it's going to help me see better. No, no, no, no. The, the challenge is that it's, there is a curve to it where if you don't get enough of the right energy, you won't have the benefits of the cells being activated. But you also can overshoot it. If you have too much application, then you're like those kids in the myopia study who had damage to the retina.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. I Health]

And so there is like this, a sweet spot that you need to hit. And unfortunately from all the research I've thread there, they don't seem to have a clear cut answer yet of where that lies. There are some protocols with some devices that have been tested and tested and tested and those protocols with that specific device using that specific wavelength, they've seemed to gotten close to where they see positive benefits. But even them, they're like, you can't use this every day. You have to, you know, you can only do this three times a week for three weeks and then you have to take a six month break, break. And so they're there. There is a chance that people could overdo something.

[Podcast Host]

Right. So it's very much in development. They know there's something there. It's just a matter of like actually perfecting and getting more research.

[Dr. I Health]

And people will ask, can't I just go outside? Because the sunlight has red light, near infrared light. And you certainly can to some extent. There was a study in the 80s and actually another doctor Mark Bullimore sent me this one because he saw my lecture and it was from the 80s and they studied he. Yeah, specifically around 600 nanometers of light. If you close your eyes, sunlight, you see that orange glow that is actually 600 nanometers of light plus penetrating through your eyelids.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. I Health]

And so there, there is some potential benefits of just being outside. But again, same thing. There's so much variability. What, what time of the year is it? What's the cloud cover like? You know, what part of the world are you living in? Near the equator? Are you near the North Pole? All of those variables. So we haven't quite figured out where, where the sweet spot is. They have the benefits, but there might Be something to it. And certainly we have devices in the eye clinics now that have scientific validity and protocols that are showing positive benefits for things like dry eye for styes on the eyelid.

[Podcast Host]

What are some of those devices?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, so a couple of the brands, MD Elite is one that has some red light. Another one is optometric aesthetics. They sell a similar one. The Velita light system is the one that's been FDA approved. The big company called Elkon just bought it. The, the one for the pediatric myopia studies. I don't, I don't remember off the top of my head what the name of that is, but so doctors have access to these devices that have more protocols that are, I would deem are, are more safe for people just buying stuff online. It's. Yeah, I wish there's a couple of devices that are cleared like in Canada. Yeah. You get all sorts of different images and things that come up up in Canada. There is one called the Aruna Light which you can buy. It's cleared for marketing. People can buy it online. I have two of them. I've sort of tested them. The challenge that I have is while it's based off of research that it may be positive benefit, the, the one thing that have, has kept me from really, and this is the disclaimer, is that that they don't have any specific clinical studies using that device.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

And so that is like. So I'm kind of testing it out on myself. But I also have no benchmark of way to say that it's actually having any benefit other than the fact that it feels good. So it may be.

[Podcast Host]

So just placebo.

[Dr. I Health]

It could be very much be placebo. And so that's a, that's a big thing for me when it comes to posting stuff online. I try to be very clear about where the science is and where it's kind of speculation.

[Podcast Host]

That's important. That's important these days. There's a lot of noise out there.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. You know, but back what you said, I think earlier you kind of said like what are things people can do to help their eyes.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. You were given like the pencil drill.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. Yeah, there's that. You know, the, the better things for the health of the eye. Sunglasses still. If It's a high UV light day between 10 and 4pm in the day, still good idea to wear sunglasses or wear a wide brim hat.

[Podcast Host]

At the very least polarized.

[Dr. I Health]

That's totally up to you. For glare protection, if you're bothered by glare, if you get headaches, if you're Going to be on the water. I think polarized, polarized glasses are amazing. I have some videos on those. But it really cuts down the glare. The UV light is just going to slow down photo aging of the skin. The eyelids are the most thinnest skin on the body. Right. So that'll help diminish any of the wrinkles and eye bags from forming and things like that. But also it's going to diminish sunlight damage to the surface of the eye. It'll slow down some level of cataract development. So there's benefits to wearing sunglasses. The other big health thing is eating really healthy. And even if you want to take some supplements, I'm a big fan of some of the research into some supplements for the eye.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, I want to talk about this. Can I just go to the bathroom real fast?

[Dr. I Health]

Oh, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Do it real quick. And then we'll get into. We're going to go through dietary things and supplements as well. Yeah, I want to get into all that right back.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. And we still have to hit blue light at some point.

[Podcast Host]

All right, we're back. My. Whenever I record in the morning, my bladder's so bad.

[Dr. I Health]

So all that coffee, man.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, it's not, it's not even that. It's like something about like working out in the morning, drinking a lot of water, and it's just like firing over time, you know, need to stay hydrated. That's right. That's right. But we were saying right before the break how important diet is for your eyesight. And we're going to get into supplements. But what, what, what should people be working into their diet?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So the two biggest things would be green leafy vegetables and then oily fish at the very least. So the back of the eye, the retina is, and again, an extension of your brain. It's one of the most highly metabolic tissues in the entire body. It is constantly bombarded by light energy. And so it's constantly having to basically reset or regenerate photoreceptors to constantly take this bombardment of energy. And there are several diseases, especially aging diseases, where they've shown in many studies that people who eat a diet that contains green few vegetables, oily fish, nuts and seeds, they have less likelihood of developing those diseases. And if they develop the diseases, they don't develop them to a severe enough degree. It slows down. There was a study from just a few years ago in the journal Clinical American Journal of Clinical Clinical Medicine that did show that people who. This was study. This was a study on people with Macular degeneration. Specifically, it was like 8, 000 people. And they studied them over the course of like eight years and they found that the people who ate at least just 2 servings of green leafy vegetables a week, which is like nothing.

[Podcast Host]

That's literally nothing.

[Dr. I Health]

It's like I put spinach on my burger, I put spinach. I ate like one salad a week. Just something like that. They automatically had like a 24% reduction in, in developing macular degeneration just from that. Just from that. People who had oily fish twice a week had about a 21% reduction in developing macro generation. And then synergistically, if they had both of those, it was about a 41% reduction.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, what about if you. I'm jumping the gun here on the supplements, but what if you don't really eat a lot of fish, but you supplement with like omega 3 fatty acids or F oils?

[Dr. I Health]

So it's not as clear. So they, they've been trying to figure that out because the retina in the back of the eye needs DHA Omega 3. About 50 to 60% of the photo receptor lipids in the back of the eye is all DHA omega 3. The problem is that DHA so one all the supplement studies, because they've done major ones with omega 3, thinking, hey, there's evidence, maybe if we just supplement omega 3, we'll have this protective effect. So it comes down to dosage, right? Is are those studies didn't show significant. This is like for the doctors out there who are like listening in. I'm specifically referencing the AREDS2 studies. The AREDS2 studies did not use a very high concentration of omega 3s. And so there is some doctors who are like, you just simply didn't use enough. Maybe, maybe that was true. The other potential is the type of the type of Omega 3 that they supplemented with. And what I've been really fascinated with lately is that it, it very well could be the form of Omega 3 that was taken because it turns out specifically like DHA Omega 3s. Sorry, I'm getting.

[Podcast Host]

No, no, this is fine.

[Dr. I Health]

Keep going. So there is, there's a receptor in your brain and, and any sort of neural tissue called MFSD2A. And this is a transporter that helps move D8 forms of DHA Omega 3 across the blood brain barrier. And same for the blood retinal barrier. And they only discovered this about 10 years ago.

[Podcast Host]

When you say move it across the blood brain barrier, what, what does that mean in English?

[Dr. I Health]

Well, normally, so your Brain is kind of like a preserved tissue. Like it's very special. So not all, all metabolites and things flowing through your blood system will, will get into the brain. Okay. It's very selective about what allows it in there. And so even if you take, if you take different medications and things like that, they won't necessarily cross the blood brain barrier. Like older, like Benadryl, you know, you get really tired and sleepy. That's because it passes through the blood brain barrier and it causes your whole system to kind of like become bob down and tired. So the newer versions of like antihistamines, they don't cross the blood brain barrier so they don't make a sleepy. So that's a big thing with pharmacology. And even when it comes to omega 3s, your, your body does make omega 3s that get to the brain, but it's not very efficient from, from eating fish and things like that. But there is a form of omega 3 based on the type of triglyceride that you're getting in that they found this transporter has a very high efficiency of bringing that through the blood brain barrier and getting into your neural tissue tissue. And so they've been studying it a lot in mice right now and trying to see if that helps with Alzheimer's. But also they've found that the rate of retinopathy bleeding in the back of the eye from things like macro generation or diabetes significantly diminished. When these rodents are, are given this type of DHA specifically. There are some forms now on the market of this type of what's called lpc, lysophosphatidylcholine, dha. No human trials that I've seen yet. I'll admit I'm experimenting like a biohacker is on myself. I have no way to make objective claims about it. But so that's, that is something that I think may be the next thing we'll see in research that may have a strong benefit for, specifically for retinal and brain health is these types of DHA. So the issue with supplements of Omega 3s is that when you take just normal fish oil supplements, whether it be a triglyceride form or ethyl ester form, because they're, they're different. You don't get the type of isoform that this special receptor pulls in.

[Podcast Host]

An isoform.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's just the term I'm using to describe it because it depends where the DHA is attached on the triglyceride backbone like triglycerides and glyceride. So a fat with three, three different molecules attached. And if the dha, because it could have hydroxyl group attached to the first position, it could have a fatty acid like a saturated fat attached to one of them. And then it could have the dha depending is the DHA attached to the first position, the second position, to the third position position will change how your body absorbs it in the intestine and how your body uses it when it's floating through the body. And if it's in the second position, it, your body can metabolize it to either go into the first position or in the third position. If it goes to the third position, that's great because then that receptor will let it pass through the brain better.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

But all other forms of omega 3 supplements, they're all in the first position. And so that could be one of the reasons why when people eat diet forms fish in the wild, because the fish in the wild have more of that natural producing second position. That may be one of the reasons why the research that people who eat one of the fish have protective effects where people who just take the supplements, they don't seem, we don't see those same effects in that research.

[Podcast Host]

What if you have someone who, because you said it's like two servings a week of leafy greens and you know, two servings servings of fish, which as we said that's a low bar. What if you have someone who just eats a lot of leafy greens like every single day, maybe they don't eat a lot of fish or the other way around, maybe are they getting the same kind of effects that the person who eats the two servings each a week is getting?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So I think people who just want to eat a lot of leafy greens. Amazing. Keep doing that and, and I can get into, we'll go into supplements of other things on that too if they're not getting any Omega 3s. So I'll, I'll admit I, I wasn't truly a vegan skin, but I did a heavy plant based diet for several years. And largely because of a lot of the research that I read specifically around the brain and the retina, I still ate meat, but just not a whole, whole lot of it.

[Podcast Host]

So meat was a negative effect for the brain and retina?

[Dr. I Health]

Not specifically. It was more of just like I sort of. So my story is that I had a lot of gut issues and then I saw a lot of disease in the eye clinic at the VA when I was doing my residency, 99% of all the guys who came through were overweight, they had a stroke, they had erectile dysfunction, they were diabetic, they had high blood pressure, cholesterol issues, all these things except for like five, there's like five or six guys that entire year that came in that were like in their 80s, mentally clear, physically fit it, no medications, no issues.

[Podcast Host]

Like porn stars.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. And I was like, exactly. And I was like, but you have to actually they were, they had their wives there and everything. They all looked young and they're still like in their 70s, 80s. And I would ask them like, what's your secret? Right? Everybody else here is sick and dying. What are you guys doing? They all say diet, exercise, every single one. And it didn't clicked for me until I got out of the VA because I thought, oh, this was just the V. All this disease is just because I'm seeing a bunch of, you know, Vietnam vets who got exposed to Agent Orange or something like that. That's why they have all these diseases. But then I started seeing just regular patients at the local clinic and I was still seeing all the disease. And then I was interested in like, okay, I need to understand diet better. Because in school they don't really teach much for diet nutrition in medical school they don't. And so I was like, like let me start at least when I you're trained that hey, when you see a patient who's diabetic, you'd say, hey, you need to heart follow a heart healthy diet. Follow, listen to your eye doctor, listen to your family doctor, take your medications, follow a heart healthy diet, and we'll see you back in six months or 12 months. And I thought I was doing good, but I never really understood what a heart healthy diet was. So I started digging into the research and asking other PhDs and other MDs about like, okay, well what, what can I do to reduce my risk of heart disease? So I found that, oh that, you know, I, I, I thought, okay, I found some people who are claiming that, you know, if you eat more fruits and vegetables it can be more protective for your heart specifically. And so I thought, you know what, it's not going to kill me to try a plant based or more vegan diet. I tried a true vegan diet for three months and my gut did get better. Better. I'd had less GI issues, my skin got better. I found as I did more research around omega 3s, I'm like, I need to eat more fish. So I went back to that. But the long story Short is I eventually did Omega 3 testing on myself. I did blood tests, actually did a YouTube video on it. I did blood tests, and just from diet alone, I was not getting enough omega 3s. My omega 3 index was only like 4.3 or 4.5, and you want it to be between 8 and 12% percent. And so I was like, okay, I'm not getting enough. And I was only eating fish, you know, a few times a week, maybe not. Not twice a week. Or maybe the quality that I was eating was. Wasn't enough or wasn't. Wasn't very good. So I did start taking fish oil supplements, and I tested my blood three, four months later, and thankfully I was in the 9% range, so.

[Podcast Host]

So it really did help.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, it did really help me. So. So that's at least kind of my story of. Kind of how I found. I still eat a lot of. A lot of vegetables. I try to eat kind of an ancestral Mediterranean diet is what I like to say, because it's less processed food. Right. I think everybody who's ever been on your show is probably saying the same thing. Less processed. Less processed.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, it's. It's. The awakening for that now is very refreshing in society because it's like. So it doesn't surprise me at all when you're talking about some of the veterans you would see coming in. And, you know, the ones who. Who seem to be doing well are literally the ones who are like, yeah, I just exercise and my diet's pretty good. I'm eating natural foods. Like, yeah, at the end of the day, night. I really believe 95 of our problems are quite literally caused by either not exercising or really a combination of what the. You're putting in your mouth. You know, that's. That's a lot of the battle too.

[Dr. I Health]

And I think there is. There's more and more evidence that's coming out. Even in the eye care field. There's a lot of new research in the gut microbiome even affecting the eyes. And so that's. That's a whole other fascinating area. But.

[Podcast Host]

Well, they actually. Can we go into that for a second?

[Dr. I Health]

Sure, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And we are coming to blue light, people. Don't worry. We're getting there. There's just a lot of interesting here. But the, the other medical awakening, if you will, about the second brain in the body being the gut and how much that causes. I'm saying not literally, but figuratively, how much. So many of your downstream health problems are actually caused by what's going on in here. Is something that's really changing a lot of people's opinions on how to, you know, attack a problem. But you mentioned it yourself, you had some of your own gut problems and started solving that, and then the downstream effects into your health completely changed. So, you know, I would imagine we're making a lot of progress there, and we're still like, kind of just scraping the surface of what we know about what the gut can do to the body. Is that fair to say?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, 100. You know, it's only been like maybe eight to 10 years that they started. Started having the capability to better look and understand at all the different organisms in our. In our gut, so that they're starting to understand more of it. I am not a gastroenterologist, but I've been really fascinated. So I've been reading.

[Podcast Host]

You are today.

[Dr. I Health]

Let's go. But I study a lot, at least when it pertains to the eye. The research has been published around eye health and various eye diseases and their. And how they're looking at the gut microbiome. So I read a lot of that. I've done, again, a few videos on it. So as far as we've known for a long time that there is some connection between the gut and the eyes. And I say that because there's some eye conditions that are directly related. So there is generalized inflammation in the eye that we call a uveitis. And there are some people, when they have a history of gastro. Gastrointestinal upset, they have chronic diarrhea, they have Crohn's disease, disease, things like that, they are more likely to get this significant inflammation inside the eye. So their eyes red. It's painful. They get like a dull, achy pain. They come in, their vision's fuzzy, and I can see white blood cells floating inside the eye, kind of looking like a snow globe. Like you shook up a snow globe, you can see white blood cells floating around. And so some people, it's because they have inflammation in their gut and somehow it's causing inflammation in their eye. So we've known that for some time. There's another condition called Gardner syndrome, where they'll actually have pigment in the back of both eyes. And if we see pigment in back of one eye, we're like, okay, not a big deal. But if we catch the pigment in the retina on both eyes, then that's a high association with Gardner syndrome. And they have a. We have to send them to get colonoscopy because they're really high chance of developing, like, colon cancer. So it's again, we've known that there's some connection with the gut in the eye for a long time and now they've been studying and finding, hey, when people have this gut dysbiosis, they have certain strains of microbes in their, in their gut that have been thrown off. They're more likely to have autoimmune related dry eye issues, they're more likely to have inflammation in the retina from central cirrus, they may not absorb other nutrients in their gut like taking supplements and they're at higher risk of developing macular degeneration. Diabetes is advanced and diabetic retinopathy specifically is advanced worse. There's one study on mice that was really fascinating where they took diabetic mice and bice are not humans, but they took diabetic mice and non diabetic mice and what they did is they took a gut transplant, they took the fecal transplant from the diabetic mice and the fecal transplant from the healthy mice and they switched the two. Basically they force fed like a poop pill to these mice and what happened is that they seated their gut and the, the, the healthy mice started developing diabetic retinopathy or bleeding in their retina in the back of the eye. For the diabetic, the diabetic mice that had retinopathy, their retinopathy started to improve and go away.

[Podcast Host]

Just cuz they ate each other's essentially.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. And so again mice are not humans. But it, it also is a key to kind of the story. Like there is something with the metabolites from the food we eat and how our gut is digesting it. The metabolites that are produced by the microbes in our gut, they affect the inflammatory response throughout the whole body. And so there, I think, I think there is a lot to it. And so I focus on fiber eating plenty of fiber throughout my day. And I would love to have a conversation with a gastroenterologist about the different types of fiber fiber because people are like, oh, I take metamucil one type of fiber and there's soluble fiber, there's insoluble fiber, there's fermentable fiber and non fermentable fermentable fiber. And so I think there's still a lot more to understand.

[Podcast Host]

But you know what, I should know way more about that because I do look at fiber, very macro, 30,000 foot in the air level, like oh, fiber. But I'm a big avocados guy, for example, which has a lot of fiber. Does it have the types of fiber that are all those different ones, or is it one specifically only?

[Dr. I Health]

I, I personally don't have all those answers. Again, I, I'm, I'm hoping to have a gastroenterologist on my own podcast. Yeah, to, to figure that out. I will say the nice thing about avocados, because this is kind of a segue back into.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, so avocado. Sorry, Deep just pulled this up. Avocados contain both soluble and insoluble fiber.

[Dr. I Health]

Good. So a nice thing about avocado, along with pistachios, along with the green leafy vegetables, is that they contain what is called lutein and zeaxanthin. You look at me like you've never heard this before.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I haven't.

[Dr. I Health]

So this is the, the genius behind the green leafy vegetables. So if you think, why is it that green leafy vegetables are so protective for the eye? Well, they have high concentrations of what are called xanthophyll carotenoids. I know, I'm just throwing out these crazy terms.

[Podcast Host]

Right? I love it. It's great.

[Dr. I Health]

So xanthophyll carotenoid carotenoids, there's over 600, almost 700 in nature. We only eat about 50. And of those 50, we eat two deposit directly in the eye. Okay, technically three, but the vast majority of it's two. And that's lutein and zeaxanthin. And this goes back to blue light in some way. So we'll get there. So lutein, zeaxanthin, they have protective roles inside the eye, both for really, for three things. One is that it works as an anti inflammatory, two, as an antioxidant. So if there's any oxidative stress from high energy light or any inflammatory process from disease, or again, high energy, that's protective. And then the third part is that actually is a yellow substance. It's what makes avocados and pistachios kind of a green yellow color. And when it deposits inside the eye, it filters high energy blue light. So your body has this natural. It's known all this time that when you eat these vegetables and other foodstuffs that have this xanthophyll carotenoid, it deposits directly to the eye. And at high concentrations in the area that is going to be receiving the most dense of high energy light and it shields it.

[Podcast Host]

Whoa.

[Dr. I Health]

And the scary thing is again, most people don't eat enough fruits and veggies. And so we don't. The, the vast majority of the population only gets about 1-2mg of lutein a day.

[Podcast Host]

I'm getting a lot more than that.

[Dr. I Health]

And you should be getting somewhere between any. Depending on the. The publication, somewhere between 10 to 30 milligrams a day. Day.

[Podcast Host]

I'm pretty like listening to you talk. I'm pretty pumped about my diet right now. I eat the same exact lunch every single day. I. I do like two grilled chicken breasts, a full bowl of broccoli, a plate of brown rice, an apple, an avocado, a protein shake, couple pieces of dark chocolate, 85% and then a banana.

[Dr. I Health]

Making me hungry.

[Podcast Host]

Man, I'm loaded.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, it's great. And, and so that's so lutein zeaxanthin. And they are protective and as you get more in your body. But if we had one of our devices, we can measure what's called macular pigment optical density or MPOD testing. And so this measures the amount of pigment deposited in the back of the eye. And so the more lutein, the more zeaxanthin you get in your diet, the more pigment you get, the more protective it is. And we see less likelihood of aging eye diseases in the individuals who have higher amounts of that pigment.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. I Health]

And so unfortunately, the vast majority of people come in, if we do MPOD testing, they're at like 0.2, 0.3 for MPOD testing. And you want to be at 0.5 or greater, but you can improve to.

[Podcast Host]

That if you make changes.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. And so I always will support diet first. Right. Eat. Try to eat whole healthy foods first. And then for people who are just honestly like, I'm not gonna eat that much leafy greens, they know, they just don't like it or, you know, they, they just think even digestion that gives them upset stomach or something. Like some people can't handle broccoli.

[Podcast Host]

Hit that AG one.

[Dr. I Health]

No, I wouldn't go there. I can't, I can't. I don't know actually any of their clinical studies, but the. They, they kind of have a bad reputation now, don't they? Here and there. Some people really love it.

[Podcast Host]

They've never, I've never been sponsored by them before, so I don't know much about them. But it. I would love to know in the comments if you have a bad experience on that one.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, I've tried various green shake supplements, stuff like that. And they taste good. Usually I think they have spirulina in them. It's supposed to be good, but the. There are supplements and so I care is one of the only because there's some doctors out there, especially on social media who are very anti supplement. And I get that because it has a bad reputation because there are, there's not really the best legal oversight of verifying that supplements are actually one safe two that they're actually effective. There's a lot of of bad players.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, there's a lot of in something.

[Dr. I Health]

There's a lot of.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

And I could talk about my own issues with, with AI people making fake videos of me, deep fakes to try and sell vitamins I would never endorse. But so in the field of eye care, we're we because of what are called the ARED studies that I referenced before. If somebody has an intermediate stage of macular degeneration, it is standard of care for us to recommend or at least discuss starting a supplement for the eye. Because those studies showed that for the people with that disease, you could slow down that disease by about 25% over the course of five years. And so there are benefits in that specific case to taking those supplements now with lutein zeaxanthin. And those supplements contain lutein Cxantine. Anthony they've done a lot more studies on the function of your vision, not just reducing eye disease development, but if you want to see better, you want to have better contrast, right? As any as an artist, you want to see colors more in depth, right? Or not even an artist, you're somebody who just appreciates the beauty of nature. You want to enjoy your life to the highest degree. You can boost your contrast in your vision. You can reduce glare at night time while you're driving. You can have better visual memory for kids development for elderly taking lutein and zeaxanthin. If again, if you're not getting it through diet, you can take a supplement. And they've shown this with supplementation alone that you can have these benefits. And so a lot of professional athletes, like baseball players will take supplements with Lutein zeaxanthin because their vision is that much sharper. If you can react that quickly, quicker, that much quicker. And then they've even just this last year, 2024, Dr. Stringham and Dr. Nolan, they're two doctors. I know they did a research study using a lutein based supplement that people who took that had reduced levels of oxidized lipoproteins, which means so various lipoproteins that are involved in atherosclerosis development. So leading toward plaque development meant heart attack, stroke.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. I Health]

They showed that people who took those supplements had significantly reduced levels of these basically inflammatory markers in the blood that are associated with atherosclerosis development.

[Podcast Host]

God damn. Imagine what's going to happen now as we are combining the power of artificial intelligence to do these studies and things. I mean, you're imagining a lot more than me. You're in the space, you're, you're in medicine. But you know, I don't like to get ahead of myself and get over excited about like, oh my God, we're going to solve every problem ever. But like, it's hard not to be excited what we're going to see in the next 10 to 15 years, whether we're talking about this or cancer or you, you name it, where you guys are basically going to be able to attach like a nitro turbocharger to any type of research you do. And almost like, you know, not to use the term, but let's use the term like biohack the bodies, you know, all of our bodies to be able to work for ourselves rather than working against it like we've done for so long.

[Dr. I Health]

Right. I hope that that's how it ends up getting used again. There's a lot of garbage out there. You can find research studies, support anything you want. Right? Yeah, so. So there is, there's going to be this growth period where we got to figure out what's one, how the AI is working, can it be trusted? It has to always have some form of human review verification. But they are using like AI robots now to do cataract surgery. They're using it certainly to. I, I personally don't use it too much in regular patient care, but I know doctors who are using it at least to document their charts.

[Podcast Host]

Because you walk in, doc, my eyes are. All right, hold on. Chachi Beat.

[Dr. I Health]

Well, it's, it's usually not chat like that.

[Podcast Host]

I know you're not. I'm just messing with you. Right.

[Dr. I Health]

But like they'd be recording everything we say during an exam rather than depending on me typing everything in. It's just listening to everything we say and it's documenting word for word and then organizing it so that it makes it easier for me legally. It's charting everything that's being said or done. And, and it's like it's going to make us more efficient. And then from the evaluation standpoint, the eye care specifically is already way more advanced than a lot of other professions because we image so many things. Like we take photos of the back of your eye. So there's already decades of photos of forms of diabetes or forms of glaucoma that have already been annotated by doctors that they can just feed into these AI systems. And the AI is now getting, Getting better at detecting bleeding in the back of the eye and knowing what the next protocol is than humans are. So it's going to get to that point we're almost going to. I hate to put ourselves out of a job in a way, because now we'll just have this machine tell you exactly. Hey, this is what's likely going on. Here's probably the next best steps. And you know, but there's always the question of legality, like what happens if it's wrong, who's at fault?

[Podcast Host]

Right. I think there's also. And again, we don't know this world until we're in it. But there's. From a. From the perspective of just like a human going for help, there's going to be a huge aspect of someone who can take all the power of AI and the data and actually be an expert in understanding, putting that all together to make a personalized call for the patient sitting in front of them. I think stuff like, you know, we always talk about these jobs like cooks and gardeners and stuff that are going to be like the last to go because of the way the motion works to be able to actually do these things. But I think jobs like doctors, doctors as well, like, there's always going to be a need for something like that. It'll. It'll develop, it'll evolve side by side in a way, I think.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, I think especially from the legal standpoint, it's going to have to have some oversight. But we're going to. Doctors are going to end up being kind of like software engineers in a way. We're just going to be sitting behind a computer and evaluating and then being the communicator, because that's where for as awesome as technology is going to, the value. I think I forgot who said it, but as the world becomes more dominated by AI, the value of human connection is going to become even more important.

[Podcast Host]

Agreed.

[Dr. I Health]

And I think that's even why podcasts are. Have grown to be so amazing, is because we value. We miss this communication and this human connection. And so I think it's like, yeah, you can get an eye in 20 years from now. You can get an eye exam done by. By this computer robot. But if you really want to be heard by a real human being, you want to have a conversation.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Dr. I Health]

You want, you want that human touch, you're gonna, you're gonna pay more for that.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Yeah, It's. It is gonna be a brave new world. Though one last question on diet and then we're gonna go full blown into blue light.

[Dr. I Health]

Let's do it.

[Podcast Host]

Is there any related to the eyes? Is there any data to suggest like intermittent fasting is something with, with cellular regeneration that helps. I've been intermittent faster for the last nine years. It's helped me in a lot of other ways in my life. But you know, does it assist the eyes at all?

[Dr. I Health]

There is some evidence that there's benefits to it. It's usually not direct evidence. So I did a video on this. So I actually researched a little bit because one of my best friends, one of my best friends, he also fasting changed his life. He did, Did. He's experimented with like, you know, 10 day fasts and he's experimented with you know, just intermittent 10 days. He's done a lot. He went a bit low extreme into it. It helped him a lot, especially with weight loss and things like that. But doing, you know, like 12, you know, he basically would eat one meal a day or he'd go a few days fasting. So. So I was always interested because he had such positive benefits. I tried a little bit myself and then I was like, okay, well what is there anything to this specifically for the eyes? It's always. And you're that same way. I can tell you kind of bring this genuine curiosity. I want to figure this out. So I apply that to a lot of my videos too. I'm like, well, what is going on? So a lot of the research is based on people fasting for like Ramadan.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Dr. I Health]

But they do find some benefits that during fasting state, the eye pressure may go down just a little bit. Bit. It may not be clinically significant, but it may go down a little bit. That may be protective for glaucoma. There are people who report improvements with their dry eye. With it, nothing. Again, super clinically meaningful. But there are hypotheses that the autophagy. I'm sure you've heard that term before, where the body, the bodies are always is trying to clean up dead cells and make itself more efficient starts it.

[Podcast Host]

I, I think the optimal time where it like really starts kicking in. I want to say I'm not looking at it right now would be like the 12 to 14 hour mark is when that really ramps up.

[Dr. I Health]

Right. And there's different ways to do intermittent fasting. And so there's like some people who know intermittent fast for 12 hours or you only eat during kind of a four or eight hour window during the day. There's different ways to do it. Right. But the. They do say that when you are doing fasting, your body does go into this autophagy state where it's kind of heightened. And so there is kind of this idea that if you are intermittent fasting, this may help all these different parts of your body, but it may also help with regeneration or cleaning up cells within the back of the eye, which, again, in the retina is one of those highly metabolic tissues. So it may have a protective effect. I also think for people just losing weight, we know that. That for sure. Yeah, that's going to help with a lot of other things, especially sensitivities to diabetes. As long.

[Podcast Host]

As long as you're doing things in a healthy manner. You know, like there's people who will do like crash diet, kind of like fasting, where they're like, all right, I'll fast two days at a time and do this on repeat for like 60 days. And they lose 50 pounds. And then, you know, they get off it and they put it all back on. Like, as long as you're doing it in like a healthy, natural way. Like, my way is simple. Like, I just don't have breakfast. I haven't had that in years. I eat in about, you know, a six, seven hour window every day. Feel great, it's repeatable, easy on the weekends. If I want to go out and have a good fucking time, I do, you know, that's it.

[Dr. I Health]

So I've been largely kind of in that same boat for a long time. Except a few years ago I started weightlifting. And if you're gonna start to try to, like, bulk up, you need a ton of calories. And it was like, like it was like a homework assignment. So. So I did start eating breakfast just so I could get those extra calories in. And then I injured my shoulders and I had to kind of like. Then I couldn't lift as much, so I had to drop back down. But it's something I want to try to get back into the. You're looking good. Thanks.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I'm trying to hold the biceps going the.

[Dr. I Health]

So, yeah, intermittent fasting, there may be something to it. We don't have the most ridiculous studies to support it. But I, I think if it's done safely, if it's done to manage diet and somewhat weight control, I say all power to you.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

There are certainly specialists and books out there who go way more into it. But as far as protection for the eye, there's at least some evidence to support it may be protective against some diseases.

[Podcast Host]

Good to know. I Gotta look at that more. Yeah, as well. That was another one of those things. Like I started doing it by accident, long story, like nine years ago. And then a few, I didn't really look, look at all the benefits of it until like I was a few years in and I was like, whoa. Like this is, this is actually like maybe how we're meant to be. You know, just eating on two meals a day.

[Dr. I Health]

There is one other kind of interesting side note and that this came from my friend. Again. He brought up to me, he's like, when I'm fasting and I've hit like a day or two, he's like, my vision is better, my eyesight is clear. And there's two components that I, I can hypothesize. One is that mental like. So there's a mental clarity component where his attention, his focus is enhanced. And that might just be a subjective and feeling that his vision is more in focus. But then there's this other part where it could be a blood sugar change that is in fact helping his vision improve. And that's because as people's blood sugar is out of control, let's say somebody is, is pre diabetic or is diabetic. As more glucose is in your bloodstream, the lens inside the eye can swell. And when it swells, the lens changes shape and the power of the eye changes. And so when people are severely diabetic and they come in, they have their eye exam, we're like, wow, your powers have shifted a lot. And then they get put on medication and then it drops down the lens, swelling goes away. And now, oh, now they don't need a strong glasses anymore. Anymore.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. I Health]

So. So there could be two things component to it. But the mental clarity is always fascinating to me for how many people. It's not just him. I've a lot of other people online claim that like when they're fasting, do you feel that or.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, there's a weird window there. Like I, I did, I'm gonna try to do it once a year now where I do a 72 hour fast to like clear the system. Because there's some good science that, that the optimization of autophagy that happens when you do that, like ketosis is really good. I did one of those in June. What was strange is I kept my workout schedule the same. I don't know if you should do that, but I was like 38 hours in and I remember when I'd been at like 24, so I started it like a night and then so 24 hours later, like, at night, I felt, like, low energy. But then when I woke up that next morning at, you know, 30 some hours or something like that, I felt good and clear. And I went in and did my, like, full deadlift day. And I was moving. It was very, very strange. So there were some weird energy bursts. But then I would say when I woke up the third day, I was like, we're pushing this. Like, it's gonna be tough getting to 72. And. And it was.

[Dr. I Health]

I think there. There might be something to be said. And again, I. I don't. I don't study this incredibly, but just my own thought is that if you're kind of in this state where you're three days in, your body's recognizing, I'm kind of in. I need to find food. I'm starving. And so there's that survival instinct of, like, becoming hyperfocused. I also need to expend more energy, maybe in a sympathetic tone, to be like, I need to find and hunt because I need to survive. So maybe there's something there. I don't know. I'll have to. It's another thing. If I have more time, maybe I'll. I'll dig into it.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, we'll talk about it on a future podcast.

[Dr. I Health]

There we go.

[Podcast Host]

But this thing right here. Yeah, I've been getting at it all day. In 2007, iPhone comes out. By 2011, it's widely, widely adopted. By 2015, it's almost completely adopted. And obviously Google Android, same kind of issue right here and now. Today, it's ubiquitous with every single thing we do, everywhere we go. Our whole life is in this thing. And just evolutionarily speaking, human beings did not evolve over the last 6,000 years, or however long you want to say. We've been around to look at a screen like this and read in small font, you know, here or here, and scroll at all times with our eyesight. So what is, you know, from your medical perspective, what are the main issues you have seen develop over, say, even the last five years or something like that that you believe directly tied to. Let's start with just blue light, and then we'll work our way to the phone itself.

[Dr. I Health]

Okay, so just blue light. So the vast majority of blue light isn't actually doing anything. And so that's. That's a big issue that people get confused about. Yes, blue light will affect your sleep cycle, but it's not just blue light. It's actually all light light. So there is a receptor in the back of the eye that they didn't know about till about 10, 15 years ago, called an IPRGC, an intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cell. And it doesn't communicate eyesight or vision to you to be able to see. It simply is a receptor to pick up light energy and tell the brain, is there light up there? And evolutionary wise word, light come from the sun. And so there is a. Those receptors are very sensitive to blue light, but it is still sensitive to other wavelengths of light. So if you, the whole point is that, you know, you wake up in the morning, you see sun, and that tells your brain, these receptors pick that up, like, hey, the sun is out. Shut down the melatonin. We want you to be awake, awake, sun goes down. Or imagine we're in a world where we don't have artificial light, sun goes down. Then those receptors aren't getting that light signal and say, okay, it's time to slow down, time to go to bed. You release melatonin, you get sleepy, you have a better night's sleep. Now the problem is that we're now surrounded by artificial light everywhere. And so we, we get this extra light signal signal to, hey, it's still light out. So we're kind of delaying our melatonin later and later, and our sleep quality goes down. A lot of the issues with modern technology, whether it be TV screens, computer screens, and actually just LED lights in a lot of the places, they're more energy efficient now, but they emit higher wavelengths of blue light than older forms of lighting. So older, you know, this does. Oh, yeah. Compared to old, you know, the older yellow light bulbs, you know, maybe we grew up with, or even just, you know, candlelight, way more on the yellow spectrum.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. I Health]

Warmer colors, they, they still will trigger the, those receptors in the eye, but not as intensely as the blue light will. And so, so that, that is one factor that will affect your sleep cycle. Now, the blue light glasses that are out there, there, if they are a darker orange color of a blue light glasses, they will help slow down or reduce the amount of light hitting those receptors. And they have shown in studies that those type of dark orange glasses do help with establishing a better melatonin production compared to the people who are just staring at an iPad before bed. Now, is it clinically, clinically meaningful? That's the question I don't really have an answer to because there are people who claim anecdotally, hey, I just, I sleep better and I wear these orange glasses at nighttime. Great, that's something to keep trying. If you feel it helps you. But if you're still staying up at night, still scrolling your screen, you're still surrounded by lights. There is still light coming from the side of the glasses. The regular light, just the, the dopamine surge you get from scrolling social media that may also be affecting your sleep cycle.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

So this is where I would love to have a sleep specialist come in and answer kind of what they see or what they've studied on the effect of. There's just device use on the effect of sleep.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, that would be a cool podcast. You would like a sleep expert in here as well.

[Dr. I Health]

Because the, the reality is that most of the blue light from screens is such a low energy, it's not going to make a clinically meaningful impact. Interesting to the health of the eye or necessarily the, the sleep cycle. It will to some extent.

[Podcast Host]

Does it make any difference then at all that like, I, like, I haven't had blue light on this phone in three years.

[Dr. I Health]

I have you turned on the.

[Podcast Host]

Turned off.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, the yellow. It kind of. It makes it the screen a little bit more of a yellow color.

[Podcast Host]

Right. So like if I have to go check a video before it goes out, I check it on the computer. Yeah, because you shut up so I can see it.

[Dr. I Health]

Because it's the color correction.

[Podcast Host]

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

So turning. They've shown also in those. That research that just turning it to that yellow mode also is like 90% effective at negating the blue light diminishment of your melatonin.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Dr. I Health]

So if you just turn that on, you probably don't need those blue light glasses. Unless again, you're just super sensitive and you still have lights on and things like that. So the best practice is to shut off the device, switch to a paperback book at night, have yellow toned lights in the evening. Not the bright light, bright white lights. The other thing to keep in mind is that that the light coming from a device, the amount of blue light you get depends on how close it is to your face.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Dr. I Health]

So it's something called the inverse square law. So basically, if you just double the distance, you've reduced that amount by four times. So the effect of most blue light glasses on the melatonin effect is just this.

[Podcast Host]

Are we. This is getting a little in the weeds, but I don't know how much you're able to even measure this. But with kids who are now growing up with the phone in their hand and everything, are we seeing an average distance to the face a lot closer for kids than it is Adults, actually, it's.

[Dr. I Health]

Well, one, kids do hold things closer to their face, but also adults do. I mean, even if people try to be like, I'm gonna hold it out here, right. If you watch them long enough, it'll gradually get closer and closer. And they've shown that in research studies. Most, you know, they recommend, you know, about 2ft away or what like the Harmon distance is what it's called, the distance from your elbow to your hand and should be kind of equal distance from your eyes. But if you start there, it does gradually get closer and closer to about 5 inches away from the face. That's what people tend to do. Right. Again, the feeling of eye strain from phone use is compounded by the fact that you are having to use your eye muscles and you're holding that five pound weight all day long, two pound. The closer you get, you're increasing the weight. Right. It's like I'm holding it at five pounds right here versus two pounds out here. And then the blink rate. So a lot of eye strain people experience is just their eyes are dry because they're not blinking enough and they're not blinking as completely. And so you got to kind of get a combination of all of that. And then people are like, I feel all this eye strain. I need the blue light glasses. Well, there's been no significant, no, like, meaningful clinical studies showing that blue light glasses do in fact reduce the feeling of eye strain.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And the thing that you're. That's really coming across is, yes, there's still a difference between blue light and less blue light. Like you were giving the example of like old candles or old light. But what I'm getting is that it's just, you know, I'm going to put a percentage on it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but maybe like 90% of it is really just light in general. And we are just really discriminating the blue light because. Because that's what's on most people's phones. And we're associating the problem all as 1, 100%. So that's, that's a myth in a way.

[Dr. I Health]

Very much. I think it's been. I mean, there is a sliver of truth to it, and that's how most myths start. Right. The sliver of truth is that there is a receptor in the eye that is sensitive to blue light and it does affect our sleep cycles. But the, the vast majority of the story is just that we're picking that as the bad guy when it's actually just the fact that we're on these devices and we're not blinking enough and we're on them all the time. So that, that's the big part of that story.

[Podcast Host]

What are you seeing like now? If we talked more generally just about the phones, we just went through the distance from the face and you've talked about the dry eye syndrome and not blinking as much. But like from, I don't know, from like a ubiquitous addiction standpoint to technology. That's foreign. You know, it's not. You're not looking outdoors or something like that. You're just kind of chilling here. What are, what are the main symptoms you're seeing come into your practice? Let's start with like kids in general.

[Dr. I Health]

Well, most kids, I mean, if it's related to screens, it is either they can't see in the distance now or it's, it's a feeling they can. Their eyes are strained or they use that, you know, my eyes hurt, right? I'm getting headaches. And oftentimes it is because, you know, I'll ask them, how much time did you spend? Your phone. And they're like, not that long. And then mom's like, whatever. You're on there like all day long and they open up the, the amount of hours, whatever it tells you, it's like you're on there 13 plus hours a day. So that was even a bigger issue during COVID it. That, that was, that was definitely a big thing. So. So kids will. Are spending a lot of time on those devices and they're getting eye strain, they're getting headaches. Their, their risk for myopia again is, is going up because they're indoors staring at these phones all day, day. And then some kids do come in and their vision in the distance is reduced. And it could be because they've developed nearsightedness and they need glasses, but a lot of times it's because they have what's called an accommodative spasm.

[Podcast Host]

Accommodative spasm.

[Dr. I Health]

So the muscle. So like if you've had like a Charlie horse or a muscle spasm or contracts, the muscles inside the eye can get locked in that position too. So they, they should be able to see in the distance just fine, but their muscles are locked into this plane up close dose. And so if you take away the phone or if we can sometimes in the eye clinic, we can give them medication that will paralyze that muscle inside the eye and it'll relax and let go. And all of a sudden they can see again.

[Podcast Host]

Almost like A Valium, in a way.

[Dr. I Health]

But not at all. Not at all. But it is. So that. That's the other issue we see a lot of times with. With younger individuals, but even adults, because we'll have. Have. This happens every week. There's a. Some person who's like, I started a new job. I've been there for three, four months, and it's all on the computer, and I'm getting eye strain, headaches, dryness, all these different things. I just, I tried the blue light glasses and they didn't really do anything. Like, every doctor hears that, like three, four times a day. And there are, There is benefit to. You can get computer glasses that have some power to reduce the. The focus, that lift of eye strain. You can put down that. That weight, and that can help. The. The other issue that people aren't talking about is the fact that we have too many screens. Like two. Like over here. Think if we have one computer screen, we do have one laptop, but a lot of people have two. Yeah. You sit in front of two, three monitors at a time. Yeah. And when you're in front of those monitors, you're not just using your eyes to look left and right. You actually are moving your neck constantly left and right all day long. Even if you keep your head still and you shift your eyes to the far sides, your neck muscle does engage. And you can do this. You can actually take your hands and put them in the back of your head like this like that. But like kind of splay out your fingers like that. Push pretty. I have to push pretty hard to feel it on me. But if you keep your head straight and feel right at the base of the skull, behind where the ears are, just face toward me. But then just shift your eyes far left and as far right.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, you can feel the muscle move.

[Dr. I Health]

Did you feel that? Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Holy shit.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It tenses up. And so your eyes are priming your neck to move in that direction. So if you're just looking left and right all day on your computer, your muscles are constantly like, I'm. I'm going, I'm going, I'm going, I'm going. So people come in with a lot of not just headache, but eye strain, but sore muscles, tight neck.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, that's so interesting.

[Dr. I Health]

And so they're getting cervicogenic issues that are related to not just the neck, but the pain and the tension of the. The. What did you call that? Servo. Cervicogenic. Yeah, it's. It's servo. Cogenic issues. I'm Not a. A supreme specialist in it. My. My girlfriend actually is. She knows way more about it than I do.

[Podcast Host]

What is she. Is she a doctor as well?

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, so she is also an eye doctor, but she specializes in neuro, optometry, tbi, brain injury rehab. So I knew a little bit about it when I went to school, and then my residency I did a little bit bit, but I never really specialized in it. And she is at the top of her field, and I'm constantly learning from her. And she works in a specialty multidisciplinary section, multidisciplinary clinic with a physiatrist. And then she's got OT and PT in the same clinic. So obviously someone gets in a bad car accident and now they have double vision or they have all these strain issues from TBI or can't focus, they can't function, and they have neck pain, whiplash injury, and so they have to end up seeing all these specialists for several months. And she helps them rehab.

[Podcast Host]

Wow, that's awesome. That's so specialized, too.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. And so she gives a lot of lectures around the country and internationally on these subjects. And so I've sat through her lectures and learned a little bit from her.

[Podcast Host]

This is making a little sense to me too, because, like, I always have, like, stingers in my neck and back now. I lift six days a week, so I've always just kind of assumed it's because I'm pushing my body. But I wonder if some of that is emanating from the fact that I've spent the last six years coming up on six years of my life moving. I mean, you saw my setup moving screen to screen all the time. Because, like, even when I'm not on this, I am in front of the screens. I built this thing editing. Like, I still do a lot of that.

[Dr. I Health]

And props to you for doing so much of yourself and building up such an incredible platform.

[Podcast Host]

Thank you, thank you, thank you. YouTube.

[Dr. I Health]

I know it's a lot of work.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah. But that could be. That definitely could be related because, like, it's just something. It'll happen. Like. Like, I'm dealing with it right now every three, four months. I'm like, ah, there's that stinger. And I can't think of when I did it. I'm like, I didn't do a lift wrong. I didn't feel something weird after a lift. It just kind of like, dropped up.

[Dr. I Health]

There might be something to again, your posture, your repetitive movements. Um, and so now I'm. I'm trying. I've been trying to work on my posture and my. Kind of my ergonomics at work and then setting a timer so I have frequent breaks to get up and do something different.

[Podcast Host]

Get these chairs.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, these ones start. Yeah, I'm gonna have to look into that.

[Podcast Host]

They're literally called. I. I think it's like. I forget the name of the company. It's a Swiss company, I want to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

What.

[Podcast Host]

What's it?

[Dr. I Health]

Hag?

[Podcast Host]

Is it just hag, but there it's. It's, like, called the ergonomic chair. Because of what. Because of what it makes your elbows do and everything and lean back like this. Danny Jones showed me this and made me order them. I don't regret it. It's good stuff. Yeah. The hag. Capisco.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. It is comfortable. I'll give it that. Like, to sit in here, I. I feel pretty engaged. And my. What I like even better, honestly, for me, is my lower back and hips aren't hurting. Hurting. They don't feel tight. Because a lot of chairs that I've had, even the one that I use at home, which is like an ergonomic chair, I still get really tight hips.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

And I don't know what's kind of unique about this. It's just like the slopage or something. It's. It works well for me.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. That's. That's another thing people should be integrating, not just necessarily for eyes and all that, but for your posture, because everything's downstream from each other, obviously. But, like, the whole standing desk thing, I think, is. Is huge. I. I think that's. I see more and more people using it. I keep one out there with a couple screens, like on the island. You know that we're not meant to sit under fluorescent lights all day like this in front of a. In front of three screens and with our back arch like this. Like, you can't tell me that's not affecting everything.

[Dr. I Health]

Right. And taking breaks is really important. And this is something the eye care field has. Has repeated over and over and over again. I'm sure people have probably heard at Some point the 202020 rule. Ever heard of that?

[Podcast Host]

Maybe. Did Cal Newport invent that?

[Dr. I Health]

It's totally made up. I don't know who made it up. I know that an eye care professional made it up basically for, like, a news sort of thing. There's, like, a rule of thumb. Good. Good habit. It's not actually based on real science. In fact, they did a study in 2023 to challenge it to see if it had a minute, clinically meaningful benefit and it didn't. It meant that every 20 minutes you should take a 20 second break looking 20ft away.

[Podcast Host]

Away. Oh no, that is not what I was thinking of. Okay, 20 second break looking 20ft away.

[Dr. I Health]

Right. And that was to relieve eye strain from seeing on the computer or phone all day. But what they found is that 20 seconds of a break is not enough. You need to go longer. It needs to be closer to at least two minutes or a minute and a half. And I try to go to five minutes. I adopted the Pomodoro technique. Some biohackers talk about it a lot. Lot. But it does, it helps. There, there are clinical studies showing that people who work for 25 minutes. Intention. It's like I'm going to sit down with intention to work for 20, 25 minutes and then I'm going to intentionally take a five minute break doing something else, not thinking about what I was working on. I'm going to get up, I'm gonna go get water, use the restroom, go step outside of my balcony, enjoy the fresh air, you know, check my mail, take a chance, do practice some golf swings or something. So it's like a mental break. It's a physical break. You're getting up, getting some movement in and then dive intentionally back into your work. And it actually, if there's at least one study that shows people have better productivity, they're more efficient because they're intentionally setting those brakes. And so I've been adopting that. I have a timer on my desk that I use a little circle thing. It's, it's a dodecagon for me. But there's, there's many different products online.

[Podcast Host]

Got one of those. It actually is a nice little protect productivity hack.

[Dr. I Health]

So. And I think that's also good for the eyes. Like you're, you're letting go of that weight for at least a few minutes, giving your eyes that little bit of a break. You're hopefully blinking a little bit more normal. And so, so that's another thing people can kind of, kind of take away.

[Podcast Host]

What is a normal blink rate you should have like per minute in normally.

[Dr. I Health]

In conversation it's somewhere around 20 times a minute on average. But when you're on the screen, it drops on to four to five. Four to five a minute.

[Podcast Host]

Whoa, that's like a 500% decrease.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, there's, there's, studies will report different amounts, but that's where it's around, it's around four to five times a minute. While you're staring at the screen again, we're just, we're hyper focused.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Dr. I Health]

And kind of like a sniper, when they're focusing, they don't want to blink. Yeah, that's how I think about it. They are. You're hyper focused and you don't want to, you don't want to lose sight of what you're looking at. And then we notice again, people's eyelids don't come down all the time the way. And so your, your eyelid will come down just to cover the pupil. So your brain thinks that you blinked, but you actually didn't fully close. And so the tear film isn't spreading evenly across the surface. And your oil glands that release oil from the eyelid to help stabilize the tears, those oils aren't releasing as much. And so there is at least a theory. It's not as strong of evidence right now, but there's a theory that because our eyelids aren't closing all the way, the oil glands aren't pulling, pumping, and these oil glands are becoming clogged. They're not being used, so they're dying off. And so we do tend to see not just older adults who spend a lot of their career on a computer, have bad functioning oil glands, but then even teenagers are starting to have dry eye disease and these glands dying off. And we think it's because of the heavy screen usage again, I mean, one.

[Podcast Host]

Plus one equals two on that one. That feels.

[Dr. I Health]

Again, I always have to point out that the research right now is not as. We don't have as robust research to confirm that. It's more of a theory. But there's a lot of dry eye specialists who, who at least anecdotally report, yeah, we think this is tied to it.

[Podcast Host]

Are you see like in that vein, are you seeing already evolutionary changes, whether that's physically or just like, like use wise with the eyes. That has been happening over the past 10, 20 years as a result of us being more, way more digitized.

[Dr. I Health]

So I personally haven't seen that. It's also tough because evolution takes many, many generations. But I know some pediatric specialists have been discussing a phenomenon where they've noticed that kids who do have exposure to tablets, iPads, and they spend a lot of time up close. Usually when you focus up close on an object, you not only converge your eyes, your eyes have to turn in right to keep it single, your muscle inside has to flex and focus. But then your pupil also is tethered to this. And usually when you're up close, your pupils get smaller and they're noticing for these kids who spend a lot of time up close, their pupils aren't getting smaller anymore. More somehow there's been a disconnection in neurologically that these three components, this triad between the pupil, the accommodative muscles, the ciliary body, and your medial erecti with, with conversion, should all be tied together now. The pupils are relaxing and the pupils are getting larger, so they have, like, dilated pupils while they're looking up close. And we're not entirely sure, like, what the benefit of this would be or what the ramifications may be down the road. But I've had some pediatric specialists report that they're seeing a lot more of this now that they've never seen before.

[Podcast Host]

And that may be in some way, like, especially with the kids that have the tablet in their hand right after birth or, you know, a year or two after birth, like, we might end up seeing kids literally born with that as a result of.

[Dr. I Health]

I'm not sure if it's gonna pass. I. I personally don't think it, you know, like, genetically that's gonna pass down. Okay. But I think this is. We're going into kind of like, you know, this is totally like imagination thinking what's going to happen in the future. I do have thoughts of how our autonomic nervous system, system is influenced by device use and by being in this constant state of like, dopamine. I need to, I need to be entertained. I need to be in wow mode.

[Podcast Host]

Autonomic nervous system.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So your fight or flight type of response. Right. And if you're being hunted by a bear, it's like you do either run away, do you freeze or do you fight back? Right. And so when you're in sympathetic tone, you're. You're, you're going to fight, fight, you're. You're going to do those sort of responses. And usually in sympathetic tone, your pupil gets larger. And when you like to see something like. That's why a lot of. Have you ever had a, a professional poker player on or anything like that?

[Podcast Host]

Not on the podcast, no. But I played a lot of poker growing up.

[Dr. I Health]

And people do what, they wear sunglasses while they're playing poker. Why do they do that?

[Podcast Host]

Because their eyes dilate and they get excited.

[Dr. I Health]

Exactly. And so when people are excited all the time, their pupils, they're getting the sympathetic response to pupils to dilate. And so I wonder if another issue with our, our bodies, hormone regulation, is being thrown off because we're kind of being put into this constant state of alarm, this constant state of like I need to be paying attention, I need to be stressed out or cautious. Is this having an effect on our cortisol? Is it affecting our stress levels and, and deeper? Is it affecting our central nervous system to some degree and, and is that changing us as, as a species? Again, this is, I, I'm not a specialist in Sarah. This is just kind of my fun thoughts where my brain goes late at night.

[Podcast Host]

You have to think about it. And again it, like you said, it's going to take decades to even really put that, that type of takeaway together because you have to see it develop over generations. But there's a valid question. Just because the curve of how we're changing our day to day life has never moved as fast as it's moving right now.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Podcast Host]

Do you have, I don't know, like guidelines that you give parents for their kids or even for the parents by the way, because everyone's addicted to phones, about how much they should be using their phones or what they should try to limit in their life to try to prevent some problems?

[Dr. I Health]

Well, I know the, the like, the American Academy of like Pediatrics, they do have like guidelines for young kids on like they shouldn't be on screens or for certain age groups like avoid screens. If they are on screens, it's only for FaceTime. And if they're on a screen just only for educational purposes at like an hour a day, they have certain guidelines up to like the age of six. I personally just tell again the same thing. Let's get outside side take breaks every third, 25, 30 minutes from you know, near, near device stuff. Those are usually kind of the recommendations that I, that I give.

[Podcast Host]

You don't have kids yet, right?

[Dr. I Health]

No, no.

[Podcast Host]

Have you thought about when you have kids, like what your, what your recommendations as a father are going to be?

[Dr. I Health]

If I ever had kids, and I don't think I probably will, but if I did have kids, I would probably try to keep them away from phones and devices other than for educational purposes until they're kind of required because a lot of like kindergartens now are giving kids like iPads, you know, so it's like you're not going to keep them away from it. They have to learn and adapt and evolve and learn those skills too. But I would definitely try to put a limitation on it. I think as a young kid I got way too sucked into video games. Games right, as like an addictive thing. And my parents growing up at least like, hey, you get one hour a day. You got to finish all of your Chores, you can't do more than that. They did a good job until I was probably 14. And then they're like, he's mature enough. And I just played non stop. So I think there is a good. I wish I would have spent more time playing outside. I wish I would have been more adventurous to be like, hey, let's go try, go golf. Hey, let's go try biking. Hey, let's. I think as a, as a parent, I would try to encourage like a weekly adventure like, hey, this weekend as a family, we're going to try something new that we've never done. Just to show kids that it's okay to try something new and be bad at something.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. I Health]

Because you're having fun, you're exploring life. I think that's something that maybe I didn't get as a young kid. We had kind of a family routine of we went bowling and we'd go to the same restaurants and, and I felt like as I got into college and I had more freedom, I was like, oh my God, there's so many things I can do and try. And it's like, gosh, I wish I would have had more of those experiences at a younger age. And so that's, that's outside the box.

[Podcast Host]

I like that.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. So that's, I think just getting out of the house and learning those life skills, that's okay to suck at something at first. Yeah. But it's also great to just have those experiences and enjoy life. And I mean, how are you supposed to know that, you know, you're, you're going to like to play a certain sport unless you just try it 100%.

[Podcast Host]

I also think it's going to be interesting to see the kids that have been born since 2021 and are continuing to, you know, come onto the earth who are not, were not affected by the stoppage of code Covid to see how they develop and what their relationship with inside versus outside is as they grow up. You know what I mean? Because a lot of people didn't matter what age you were, whether you were 5 years old or 13 years old. There was a, a stoppage in life that happened with COVID Everyone went indoors, things went to the screens. They, they went from like ubiquitous to everything.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

You know, it like a whole different, different level after when, when Covet happens such that for all ages. But I'm focusing on the kids here and who were in development years. The expectations of where you spend your day and how you spend your time completely changed. And so now even if these Kids that are being born since then are being born into a world of all screens and everything around them. Are they not going to be jaded by the idea of like, oh, I got used to the comfort of being inside when I was forced to be there, versus are they going to be more thinking, you know, I want to go see what's out there. I want to explore, I want to do new fun things that's going to be interesting to watch.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah. I think we do tend to fall into our own comfort zones.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. I Health]

There's a tendency of like, hey, well, I'm safe at home, I'm comfortable, it's warm. I don't have to get out of my bed. I don't stay in my pajamas. There, there are a lot of us who, who fall into that trap. And so there may be some, some, some direction people go there. Right. Otherwise. Yeah. My hope is that people at least learn to adventure and realize, hey, this isn't the best. We. It's good to get sunlight. It's good to get out of the house a little bit. Air quality is better outside usually than being stuck inside all the time. We know that from research studies on. On kids that their rates of myopia skyrocketed up because they were inside all day. I've talked to a lot of teachers, both in optometry schools and even a of lot like a lot of my patients are their teachers. Right. They come in to have their eyes checked and, and they're all like, kids are different now after Covid. Like, they think differently, they act differently, they learn differently, and who knows how it's going to change now with AI, Right.

[Podcast Host]

That's a whole another ball game right there for sure.

[Dr. I Health]

How is that going to change our skills, our learning, our critical thinking? Because, you know, we, we've spent the last, what, 20 years just googling everything. Right. You just, oh, I don't know what that is. Let me Google it. Well, now it's V2. Yeah. Now it's. Now you just get, you Google it, but, you know, you get an AI answer served to you, which sometimes isn't always correct. So on Google. Yeah, tell me about it. Yeah. So how. I don't know. There's. There's certainly a lot of teachers talking about that of like, how do you know if someone's using AI? They can sometimes tell. But how's it affecting our critical thinking?

[Podcast Host]

First?

[Dr. I Health]

Sure. In our, our investigative skills and our questioning. Right. If you, if you're raised in a world where you don't have to question anything Then you just, maybe you're more obedient. Maybe you're. I don't know. I don't know how that's going to, again, echo down the future.

[Podcast Host]

Well, I like the way you think, Doc, and, and I like how you're not a doomer about stuff too. Like you're a realist and you're looking at practical applications in addition to the medical ones when that's necessary. But, you know, we need more voices like that too, because it is easy to get scared of a lot of or just have fear about a lot of the things that are coming out that are foreign to what we've known for humanity. But I do like to think that we've always been able to, you know, use new technology over time to progress and get to a better spot. Human history has proven we've done that over and over again, even when we have growing pains. And I'd like to think that some of the stuff we're going through now, as it may pertain to using the phone too much, is causing some problems, but, you know, might just be a growing pain that we, no pun intended, grow into dealing with better in society. So where there's. There were some amazing tips you gave today about, you know, different ways that we can help our eye health and help our overall health as well. Like, your scope and knowledge is, is really impressive. But people can follow your YouTube channel.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Down below, you're putting out content all the time over there, which is so cool because you got your practice, you're doing this and, and you're educating the masses. And we're gonna have to talk again, my man.

[Dr. I Health]

Yeah, happy to. Thank you. Yeah, People can always find me on, not only on YouTube under Dr. I Health, I'm on all the different social channels. Right. Instagram and TikTok. And then we're starting our own Dr. Ielts podcast that's been launching here very soon. So we're doing deep dive interviews but with a lot of experts, not just in the field of eye care, but in other areas around medicine and in health and trying to get real answers about red light, what's really going on for the people, people who are engineering and designing that and trying to better understand, bring on surgeons in the specialty of, of like doing eye surgery and asking them, like, what's with suicides and Lasik? Like what's going on with that? And trying to understand to deeper complexities. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Love it. All right, well, we'll have it all linked down below. And also they got the Collab feature on YouTube now, so we can put it so that people can literally just click right below this video. And we're going to have your channel right there, so make sure you go over and subscribe. But thanks for dropping a lot of knowledge today.

[Dr. I Health]

Oh, thank you. This is cool.

[Podcast Host]

All right, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me.

[Dr. I Health]

Peace.

[Podcast Host]

Thank you guys for checking out this clip. If you haven't already subscribed, please subscribe and hit the like button on this video. It is a huge, huge help. And if you'd like to check out this clip's full podcast episode, that link is in the description below or right here. And finally, you can follow me on Instagram and X by using the links in my description below.