Eyecare Experts

Episode 11 – Eyewear Brands & Exams

Dr. Gene Terrezza and Dr. Troy Bell welcomed back practice General Manager Kat Boyden for Episode #11 – Eyewear Brands & Exams. In this latest episode, our experts highlight eyewear brands from our locations and discuss the importance of getting your annual eye exam. Don’t forget to let us know how we’re doing by liking, commenting and subscribing to Eyecare Experts wherever you get your podcasts!

Duration:: 20m
Broadcast on:: 28 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome back, Dr. Bell, Dr. Trezza, and cats with us again, our general manager. Today's topic, I wear brands. And National Eye Exam Month is coming up. So we want to talk a little bit about why you should get an eye exam. Why don't we just start with that? That's all the way in on why someone should get an eye exam annually in general. Because society has gone from 58% visual to 78% visual. And there's some drawbacks in that. But the fact is, it is 78% and only 22% audio and tactile. Now, what that means is that if you're going to keep up with society and the technological revolution that we are in the midst of, you're going to need your eyes more than ever. And you only get the one set. So taking care of them is even more important than taking care of if you were only allowed to have one car. You get its service regularly and take care of it. And this is the same principle, except you really do only get one set of eyes. So that's why it's important to do, and particularly as you get older, when your other senses start to decrease. And the visual becomes even more important. Well, I know we've talked about this before, and that's the great thing, I think, about our practices. Someone comes in and they say, hey, it's a little blurry. I can't see. Oftentimes, I think everyone assumes, hey, it's the glasses. The prescriptions changed. But if you don't do a complete comprehensive eye exam and look at everything, how would you know for sure? Certainly, we're going to check that prescription, whether it's glasses or contacts. But we're also going to dilate patients. We're going to look in the eye. Maybe it's the blood sugar. Maybe this patient's diabetic. Maybe it's cataracts. Maybe they've got corneal edema. Maybe they've got macrodema. There's so many levels and parts of the eye that if you don't take them all into account and look at all of them, I don't know how you can accurately monitor a patient, check a patient's health, and kind of look at the long term, ocular, and eye-related issues. And that's something we've always done. And I like that about us is because, yes, we do the simple things, but we also do the tougher things. We have OCTs, we have visual fields for all these conditions like diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, hypertensive retinopathy, plaquenal, hydroxychloroquine. There's a lot of conditions out there. A lot of medications nowadays that we certainly want to monitor and make sure they don't lead to ocular toxicity or issues. And as a unit, we do those things. Well, I think the term eye exam is bandied about much too loosely. So people that say they give eye exams, for instance, free eye exams and then prices for glasses and other accoutrements are very inaccurate in their advertising because they're assuming you're getting the full eye exam. And if you didn't have the equipment to do it, then by definition, you wouldn't do it because you don't have it there. Well, speaking of that, I had a patient that I saw Friday last week that when I could mention any names that went in, it was a virtual eye exam and just didn't feel comfortable with it, didn't feel like they were getting the attention. We're able to speak directly with the doctor in front of them and ask them questions of, hey, why is the left eye worse than the right eye with my son, things like that? So they came into us so we could address those things, talk about it, go into details, and talk directly about the issues. Yep. Not everybody needs a jiffy loot. They need a transmission check. Gradiator check, engine check, and everything else, correct. So I was going to just add on to that. One of the things when I work a patient up in an eye exam in a room before the doctor sees a patient, they always ask like, wow, you're asking a lot of questions. And I always-- I apologize. I'm like, I'm so sorry, but this is part of our comprehensive eye exam. So a lot of patients don't realize, why do I need to know all this medical history? Why do you care? Why do you think? And he talked a little bit about it. Medication side effects can affect your vision. So that's part of the reason why we want to know. We want to know if you're hypertensive, if you're diabetic. Because what a lot of people forget is there's blood vessels behind your eyes. And when we say retinopathy, that means you've got bleeding in the back of your eyes. So I know we use the term retinopathy a lot. And so for in layman's term, it pretty much means you're bleeding in the back of the eyes. So that's why we always ask if you're hypertensive or diabetic, just because we're checking the blood vessels behind your eyes a little more careful. We also want to know about if you have family history of glaucoma or macular degeneration and things like that. Because those are plays in the genetics. It's hereditary. Early detection is key, as we've all mentioned before. So we know, not only are the texts just checking the vision, they are getting a full comprehensive history. Your health history, your medical history, your family history, and things like that. Because all those things, I feel, play a big part in how the doctor diagnoses you as far as your eye exam goes. So when I tell patients that eye exams take about 45 minutes to an hour, they're like, oh, it's not 45 minutes or an hour of me waiting. Not really. It's 45 minutes to an hour because we do such a thorough check. We take measurements. We have all the latest equipment for taking measurements like I said, pictures, scans, and things like that to give you a full comprehensive eye exam. So it will take about 45 minutes to an hour because of all that. I'm a big believer in the more information, the more scans, the more tests, the more you have, the better you can diagnose, treat, and assess the condition. So I would never discourage from doing more tests and figuring out what we need to help this patient out. So in this age of short attention spans and quick answers, people like high blood vision. So it must be this. It doesn't must be this. It could be 15 things. You don't know. But you have to check all those little avenues out, even if a lot of times you don't get anything. But sometimes you will, and you only get the one set of eyes. OK. And the other thing I get a little bit of pushing back is Medicaid. We always ask patients what medications you're on. And some patients have a list, a long list of medications. But the reason we ask that is because if we have to prescribe what's safe for glaucoma, for instance, certain medications may interfere with other medications you're on. Do you have COPD? Do you have bronchitis? Do you have problems breathing? These are things we need to know before we prescribe a medication for you that systemically could have an issue with you. So those are another reasons we ask all those questions to figure out before at the end, before we access your condition and figure out how to treat you, we want to know this and figure out, hey, maybe this medication is better for you, and maybe this medication is better for that patient. So that helps steer us in that direction. Yeah, and it's almost every-- so if somebody has a severe kidney disease or they're on dialysis and they have an infection and you have to what they call titrate, that is adjust the level of that medication for that person circulatory system so you don't further botch up to kidney and cause a toxicity that will put them in a deeper hole because of an eye infection. And even nowadays, certain medications that we've-- since I graduated school and now, we've all kind of learned, especially primary care, as far as adjusting dosage of medication based on sex, based on weight. So we don't see as much ochrotoxicity as we once did on some of these medications. So over the years, things have involved. The information's gotten better and we've learned how to better treat and better manage these patients. But also, there's new medications coming out, for sure. Yep. Well, part of getting a comprehensive eye exam is dilation. We get pushed back on dilation all the time. That's the thing, when nobody should be dilated. Just we understand the side effects. It's going to make your vision blurry for the next-- your up close vision blurry for the next couple hours. Just make sure I sensitive to sunlight. But keep in mind, this is something that's done typically once a year. This takes an hour of your time. I feel like that hour of your time is super crucial. It's important for the doctors to even see the back of your eyes. So you want to talk a little bit more about how dilation works? So you miss-- there were days when hardly anybody got dilated. And the doctors do it differently also. When a patient comes and sees me, I'm warning you now. 98% get dilated. That number will either stay at that level or increase. Because I don't miss things when I do that. And when I look a patient in the eye and say, listen, this system looks good to me, then I know for sure as best I can that that system is in good shape. Well, dilation in general, let's talk about the people back part of the eye as a certain circle. But if we dilate and make that larger, certainly it's easier for us to see into the eye, especially the back of the eye, but also allows us a larger area to kind of see everything. And so that's key because, especially with patients with cataracts, if we can only see that portion of the lens versus seeing the whole lens, there's different cataracts that affect the lens differently. To be able to accurately assess that, we need to see the whole lens. And looking in the back of the eye, maybe this patient has a retinal hole. Maybe they have lattice degeneration. Maybe they have retinopathy that's out in the periphery of the retina that you could not pick up or see unless you dilated that patient. So dilation is key. We have a lot of photos. We have a lot of tests, a lot of scans, and all those things help us. But it still doesn't take the place of dilating the patient. In the state of Florida, where we practice, that's included in an annual eye exam is dilating the patient. And certainly we prefer to do that because we've known and we've learned through the years, it has helped us to pick up things that we may not have picked up if we didn't dilate the patient. So if you were looking through a peep hole for various reasons which we won't go into, then if you look through the small keyhole, you would get a view of what was going on in the next room. If you saw it a hole that was 10 times larger than that, let's say four inches in diameter, then you would see a much better view of what's going on in that other room. And your whole perspective changes on it. And that's happened to me a lot of times where I've looked in, I said, oh, this thing's good. And yet the patient gets dilated and, oh my, look at this. And I never would have seen it because I wasn't looking for it. Once you know what to look for, if the patient's hypertensive and you're looking at their blood vessels, you've already gotten the key to what the answer to the question is so you know what to look for. But if they have a hidden condition that you didn't know to test for, that's a different bird. So you have to look around and hunt for that, not knowing that they may have it. And I was, as far as dilating, as far as the effects for the patient, if you're nearsighted, most often it really just makes your near blurry after the dilation. It doesn't really hurt your distance much. It'll make you light sensitive, but we'll get you some shades and when you leave to kind of help you if it's a sunny day. Now, if you're very foresighted, it does affect the distance a little bit, but still it predominantly affects the near. So for those patients who are worried, maybe get somebody to drive you for that annual exam, come with someone. If you've had to dilate it before in the past and it didn't bother you, it's probably not going to bother you this time. But certainly we want to dilate you and we want to look in the back of the eyes and check everything out. And if you come in and you say, I'm not going to do this today, certainly most of our doctors will see you on another day at another time and not charge you a second visit. Just have it be part of the first so that we can dilate you at that time when it's more convenient for you. In clinic, we run into that a lot. You made your appointment in the middle of a work day and you're like, I got to go back to work, I can't get dilated today and we will be more than happy to schedule you to come back, get dilated, let the doctor see the back of your eyes. Put you in the slit lamp with all those magnifiers and bright lights and let's take a look at it back of the eyes. Because the ten years that I've been with you guys, it's just like so many times we've had patients that are like, they were diabetic, they have high blood pressure, they've had a stroke, they've had all kinds of things that we were able to diagnose in office but we wouldn't have been able to have we not dilated and looked in the back of the eyes. So I feel like it's super important to get your eyes dilated for that reason and you definitely will not get that out of a online eye exam for sure. The last thing I would say is a lot of patients say, hey, everything's good, I'm not having any problems, I don't need to be dilated but you know, a lot of things, especially glaucoma we've talked about in the past, you don't even know you have glaucoma until late stage. So a lot of these things we pick up in the eyes, you wouldn't know, you wouldn't have complaints, you wouldn't say, hey, this is bothering me, my is hurting. So, you know, sometimes, you know, people with a stroke, you can feel it, you have signs leading up to that. With the eyes, a lot of these conditions, you will not be able to know until it gets mid to late stage and we don't want you to ever get to that point. Yeah, you can't assume that just because you don't have a symptom, that you're in good shape. That just means you don't have a symptom but you could be in deep water and not know it as Troy's saying. Well, let's switch over, we're going to talk about eyewear brands, you want to take it or what do we think? We'll talk a little bit about eyewear brands. So we have five locations in the panhandle and we carry a wide variety of brands, you know, glasses, sunglasses, and things like that. But I also want to let people know, you know, we have package deals of frame and lenses starting at $89 and that's very competitive with online retailers. But however, you know, our list of brands that we carry is going to be on our website, you're going to go to www.terrazaoptical.com, you're going to click on the location and you can go list all the brands. I will showcase, you know, Palafox office is our largest optical so it has all the high end brands so anybody that likes luxury premium, definitely I would take us, you know, take a gander, take a look. I mean, any high end type brand that's out there, we probably have the frame line there. I did bring a couple samples to just kind of show you guys today. One of the brands that we are showcasing is going to be Bajillo Sunglasses and so Bajillo Sunglasses are made by the creators of Costa Del Mar. Living in Florida, Panhandle, Costa has kind of overtook our market, essentially, in this area. But the owners have branched off or the creators have branched off and they started their own line. So the cool thing about Bajillo is that they have two price points, which makes it easy. You don't have to guess. Their first price point is 209. So 209 is going to be your polarized with anti-glare but in polycarbonate lens material. Their other price point is going to be 259 and that's going to be their glass. So a lot of our patients that are used to Costa Del Mar, they like the glass lens. These are just as comparable. Their years are just as good and at the 259 price point. The next thing I wanted to show you is Rayban Meta. So Rayban Meta are your smart glasses. So we all know about smart watches. Now they've come out with smart glasses. So they come in sunglasses or in clear. They are built in with a 12 megapixel camera in there. You can record your calls. You can send text messages. Just like anything that you can with your smart watch. You can do it with these glasses. What's super popular with our patients in this area is we get a lot of doctors, physicians that get these glasses. We get plumbers that get these glasses because a plumber, for example, their hands are tied up in tools and pipes and things like that. So a lot of our plumbers like using these glasses because they can answer text messages. They can record something. They can schedule something. They need a part or something. So they can actually just tap the side and they will record what part are they looking at. So that way later on, they can be like, oh, I need this part for this job. A lot of our physicians in the area like to use these smart glasses because then a lot of doctors, they don't scribe their chart when they're in the room with the patient. They're spending the time talking to patients. So a lot of times they like to use the smart glasses to record their exam and things like that. So that way they can go ahead and scribe the chart and later. I'm a little curious, though. I'm not sure how they do in poker rooms yet in the casinos. But other than that, yeah. So these are the latest technology. These are Bahio and Ray Van Meta are at our downtown Palafox location. Well, I would say this and I get this quite a bit. We currently have five locations. And we're all on the same chart, same EMR chart. So a lot of times I'll see the patient, maybe you and I see the patient in one office. But they may say, hey, I need safety glasses or, hey, I'm looking for these specific Ray Van sunglasses and we'll go downtown to Palafox or elsewhere to purchase. So you can have your eye exam in one location and you can certainly take that prescription or we can, it's on your record electronically. We can pull it up at the other office. So we're all interconnected. So I don't want a patient to ever feel. Or they may say, hey, I will see you at Palafox or here forever and I've moved over here and I want to transfer over here to this location because it's more convenient. So we're all on the same system and we try to make that as easy a transition as we can. The five offices have five different groups of frames that are selected for that area demographically by the companies that we deal with. So we take their recommendations. So Milton's frames, for instance, for males, age 35 and above is very different from Foley's. And so when you go there, some types may appeal to you more than others. And if you don't want to put yourself in that slot, then visit all five locations and knock yourself out. And I would say ask, if you're at a location and there's a specific frame that you're looking for, ask the optician and say, hey, do you guys carry this frame? Does one of the other offices carry that frame? Sometimes patients don't realize that we make an order, they say, I like this frame, but maybe it's too small or maybe it's not in the color that I want. And we can oftentimes order that frame in a different color or larger size. So I always ask and say, hey, this is the one I'm interested in, but this one doesn't quite fit me. Or maybe the temples aren't long enough. So I always ask. But thanks again, time goes too quick. We appreciate you guys joining the podcast. Again, I think you can have for joining in good information on all the frames and going through that with us. We appreciate y'all listening and like it and commenting. Stay tuned for future episodes. Thank you. Stay well. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)