Now, in this blog post, I will be talking about atropine, its possible amazing benefits for dealing with eye floaters and why we as eye care professionals just aren’t talking about it.
I keep things simple, atropine is a product and eye drop that is used by eye care professionals for a range of different purposes. The effect of atropine on the eyes is twofold, it helps to dilate your pupils so it makes your pupils bigger, but it also relaxes focus, so that way it can be used as a means of getting an individual’s focus fixed and stops their focus just wondering all around and its common use would be typically on children to be able to do eye examinations we want their focus to be relaxed and not wondering because this might affect the prescription that is determined for their eyes.
Now, other uses of atropine can be in therapies such as myopia control, this is often used by specialist clinics to try and reduce the rate of a child getting short-sighted over time.
When it comes to the use case of atropine for eye floaters, it’s a use case that makes a lot of sense and there’s a lot of people that report that it has helped them and help their mental health and their quality of life because the floaters simply disappear for the effective period of the atropine eye drops.
So why does Atropine work?
Well, essentially, if you watched any of my previous videos explaining what eye floaters are or indeed anybody else’s videos on eye floaters, you’ll understand that the floaters that you see in your eyes are not the collagen fibroids themselves that are floating inside the vitreous, but it’s more the shadow that is cast of these fibroids onto the retina.
When your pupils are dilated with atropine, what that does is to flood the eye with lots of light and effectively then the shadows disappear. Now, an analogy of why and how this works is, for example, if you are in a poorly lit room or a dark room and you’ve got a penlight and you go around shining the light of objects, the objects come into view, but you get a lot of shadows in the room as well. Now, if you put on a bright light in the room and illuminate the entire room, the shadows will simply disappear and it’s all to do with the direction of the light that’s coming in.
In smaller pupils, the light comes from more of a unique direction, so comes from straight on whereas in larger pupils you get lots more light coming in from a broader range of angles and this illuminates and eliminates the shadows. So it appears that this does work and has a huge amount of benefit for people who can get hold of atropine. So, that then leads to the question of why aren’t optometrists offering this to people? Why aren’t many ophthalmologists offering it to people?
In the case of the UK optometrist, I can’t speak necessarily for the jurisdiction of other optometrists around the world and the scope of what medications that they can prescribe but in our case, our use of products like this is very very limited. This is a prescription-only medication and we can use it for our use for diagnostic uses, but we cannot supply this product to our patients.
So that means if you want to get hold of atropine for your eye floaters, you’re going to need to go and see an ophthalmologist and if you go to see an ophthalmologist, the reality is that for most ophthalmologists, it’s the use case of atropine for floaters is a novel use of the product, so they will feel that it’s kind of stepping outside the bounds of their experience and possibly what they want to take responsibility for.
So, this then really creates a situation where if you are out there trying to get a hold of atropine, you may find that actually, you’re hitting a brick wall in terms of options to be able to get it for the use of floaters.
Now, the other issue is that if you can find an ophthalmologist that can subscribe and willing to subscribe atropine to you for the use of dilating your pupils over a period to deal with your floaters, then it’s going to be difficult to get atropine in an effective product and an effective formulation that you can use safely. What I mean by this is that, atropine is often available in doses of 0.5 or 1%.
Now, this is way too strong for anybody who wants to use it for the use case of floaters, it’s going to make your vision blurred, is going to flood your eyes with way too much light and it’s just wouldn’t be useful, for that reason alone many ophthalmologists and knowing that they can’t get it in a week enough concentration, may not want to prescribe this product for use for floaters.
However, if you can’t get it, then the reality is that atropine is very very low dosages similar to doses that will be used for children to deal with myopia and myopic control is perfectly reasonable safe for people to use for severe cases of eye floaters seems to be effective anyway for many people.
Now, one of the reasons I did this post was on the request of a reader on the blog post and they also pointed out that the floater doctor YouTube channel also did a video on this. I’ve been able to watch that video and interestingly enough, the floater doctor has started a new service where he’s doing telemedicine calls for people and being able to get available for people this atropine in the required and concentration after consultation with them. So that might be something that you might want to look into and perhaps look into the floater doctor’s video on this, I will leave a link to that below so you can check that out.
I’m not sure how he’s covered for kind of international shipments of this kind of prescription-only medication outside of his country of jurisdiction. However, this telemedicine service by the floater doctor certainly seems like a viable thing that you can consider. So I’ll leave a link to that video below, and you can feel free to check that out and perhaps contact him as well if that interests you.
Hopefully, that gives you a bit of insight about the options you might have here but, I think the reality is that for many people could be an option that can help you, particularly if you feel that there is nothing else that you have as a way of solution and your mental health is causing you a problem and things like that. So it could be an easy and effective remedy but certainly, the long term kind of use implication of it is something that you have to consider and discuss with your ophthalmologist.
Thank you guys so much for reading, I’ll be very interested in your comments leave me a comment in the comments section below.
- Is this something that you would consider?
- Have you ever done it before?
- Do you know anybody who used atropine?
- What are their results been?
I’d be interested to read your thoughts on that. Until next time I look forward to catching you guys then, take care.
=== Recommended videos ===
#1 Start with my floater video playlist if you are new to understanding eye floaters: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO…
#2 The floater Doctor YouTube Atropine telemedicine video: https://youtu.be/0vlfpbrA3zM
