I’m Answering Your Questions

I received some great questions during this Facebook Live, and I wanted to share them with you. We cover everything from floaters and flashing lights to balancing vitamins and ensuring their absorption. Enjoy the show. If you want more, sign up for my newsletter at: www.drsamberne.com. SUMMARY KEYWORDS eye, vitreous, retina, trauma, important, vitamin, msm, people, creates, eyelids, problem, reasons, floaters, migraines, photoreceptors, improve, circulation, zeaxanthin, flashing, add Hello, everyone. It’s Dr. Sam, I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. This is a show that offers cutting-edge information on how to improve your vision and overall wellness through holistic methods. I so appreciate you spending part of your day with me. If you have questions, you can send them to [email protected]. Now to the latest EyeClarity episode. Hey, everybody. Good evening. It's Dr. Sam. And I'd like to welcome you to another Facebook Live. So if you want to ask your questions now you can type them in. Excuse me. So it's great to be here. I hope everybody is having a really good summer. And I hope you're getting to travel a little bit, things, getting back to normal, seeing some family, friends, and so on. So tonight, I want to take a few questions. I've got several of them here from different social media sites. So if you have a question, please type it in and I'll do my best to answer. So the first question I received was a follower on Instagram, regarding flashes and floaters. And so I want to go into some of the causes of flashing lights and segue into floaters. It seems to be the most common question that I get that people seem really, really well, how can I say frustrated when they start getting floaters. But you know, in terms of flashing lights, this is a very, very interesting phenomenon. And it can be serious, but also it can be pretty benign. So there are five reasons why somebody might get eye flashes. Number one, it has to do with that dreaded condition called posterior vitreous detachment. And so I'm going to give you a little anatomy lesson here we have the eye, and we have the back part of the eye, the two thirds posterior part of the eye in the back is called the vitreous gel, the gel sac. And this particular gel SAC is made up of protein and water, we could say collagen, and as we age that vitreous sac can either enlarge itself or it can shrink. Now the reasons why we get a change in our integrity of our vitreous gel sack has to do very simply with the fact that we are either suffering a lack of oxygenation in the eyes, or hydration. You know, the if we talk about it in terms of mitochondria, you know, mitochondria are the energy cells that appear in the body, but there's a very high concentration of mitochondria in the retina in the eye itself. And so, if the mitochondria are not getting the proper nutrients, this begins to lower their production of ATP, and ATP is important for getting rid of metabolic waste. So, what happens in our vitreous gel, as it begins to change its size, it starts to pull away from the retina. So it starts tugging on the retina and the retina is a sea of micro capillaries and photoreceptors. So the thing about it is that when our vitreous changes, and it starts pulling away from the retina, this is one of the reasons why we develop flashing lights. Now in addition to the flashing lights, we can also get floaters which are part of the vitreous and either the collagen breaks off and flakes off. And this creates those specs and flex and, you know, spider like substances that we see. And of course when light hits those and creates a shadow on the retina, it drives people you know up the wall because our eye doctors are just saying, you know,