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cover of episode Knock Knock Eye: United Health Group CEO Stepped Down. The Stock Fell. My Mood Improved.

Knock Knock Eye: United Health Group CEO Stepped Down. The Stock Fell. My Mood Improved.

2025/5/22
logo of podcast Knock Knock, Hi! with the Glaucomfleckens

Knock Knock, Hi! with the Glaucomfleckens

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Dr. Glaucomflecken: 我对UnitedHealth Group股价下跌感到非常高兴,因为我认为他们是一家不道德的公司。他们的CEO在公司动荡时期辞职,这让我更加高兴。我认为他们通过垂直整合控制了医疗保健的各个方面,包括医生、保险和医疗场所,这导致了利益冲突。他们还通过药房福利管理从中获利,并涉嫌进行医疗保险欺诈。我认为他们是最恶劣的保险公司,我希望看到他们继续遭受业务上的痛苦。我希望未来的改革能够解决所有这些问题,特别是药房福利管理机构的问题。我经常在社交媒体上看到人们只关注制药公司,而不提及药房福利管理机构,这让我感到非常恼火。我认为人们需要了解药房福利管理机构的问题。

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This chapter analyzes the reasons behind UnitedHealth Group's recent stock decline, focusing on ethical controversies such as vertical integration, kickbacks, Medicare fraud, and the use of AI to deny claims. The speaker expresses satisfaction with the company's struggles and highlights the unethical practices of other major health insurance companies.
  • UnitedHealth Group's stock is down 20%
  • CEO Andrew Witte stepped down amidst turmoil
  • The company faces accusations of Medicare fraud and is under FTC investigation
  • Ethical concerns include vertical integration, kickbacks, and AI-driven claim denials

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Hello, everybody. Welcome to Knock Knock Eye with me, your host, Dr. Glockenflecken, your one-stop shop for all things eyeball related. So we've got a great eyeball agenda for you today. I'm going to do something a little bit differently. I decided that I'm going to

back up, back out a little bit from the kind of the nitty gritty eyeball. We're going to still get into some nitty gritty eyeball stuff, but what I thought I'd do is take a part of the eye and I'll do this every so often. If people like this, I'll just, I'll just keep doing every part of the eye. I'll take a part of the eye. That's very important. By the way, every part of the eye is extremely important, but I'll just do a deep dive on that particular part of the eye, the anatomy, tell you everything about

You need to know about that particular part of your eyeball. Today will be the cornea. So that's what we're going to do. We'll get into...

anatomy, the physiology, how it relates to things like LASIK or PRK, certain diseases, just kind of just everything you need to know and even some things that you don't need to know. But it'll be fun. I promise. I absolutely promise you that. But before we get to the eyeballs, I'm going to open here with some sad news. I am so sorry to announce that

UnitedHealth Group's share price is down like 20%. It's so sad. It's just, you know, it's something you just, it makes you feel a little bit sick to your stomach when you hear of such an upstanding ethical company falling on hard times like this. I just, I found out that Andrew Witte, the CEO of UnitedHealth Group,

One of the, like the, I don't know, five largest companies in the world or something. I don't know. Or in the U S at least, um, is stepping down for personal reasons. We don't know why.

But he steps down amidst quite a bit of turmoil with his company. And I honestly could not be happier to see them struggling like this. Struggling is a relative term. It means different to them than to us, I'm sure. But again, UnitedHealth Group is the big one. That's the big umbrella corporation for everything underneath it, including UnitedHealth Care.

So it's an even bigger behemoth than UnitedHealthcare itself, but it's all the same organization, all the same corporations.

And so let's just let's talk about maybe just a little bit about how UnitedHealthcare, how UnitedHealth Group got into the situation they're in where all of a sudden their share price is is is plummeting, which is not a thing that matters to like 99 percent of the population. But it does matter to UnitedHealth Group.

And so if it bothers them, well, then I'll be happy about it. How about that? All right, so here we go. Let's just go through it.

Uh, so what's been happening that's kind of hurting this company? Uh, well, it's just, first of all, people are fed up. People are pissed off, uh, some to the point where they start shooting people. Uh, and, and it's, it's, but the reason is obviously everything that I've talked about over the years, uh, and the way they have built and structured their organization with, with vertical integration. So, uh,

It's just in case you've lost track of what they own and operate. So first of all, they own, they're the largest employer of physicians in the U.S. They're obviously one of, if not the largest health insurance company. So they own the patients, right? So they dictate where patients get their care and what kind of care the patients can get. So they own the patients, they own the doctors, right?

They are starting to dabble in ownership of hospitals and nursing homes and outpatient surgery centers. All the brick and mortar places where you, and obviously like private practices, all the brick and mortar places where you get your health care are slowly being absorbed and owned by UnitedHealthcare, UnitedHealth Group. I'm going to say though, just assume I'm talking about the same thing when I say both of those.

They own pharmacy benefit managers, which, as we know, they go to pharmaceutical companies and negotiate lower prices on medications that they are supposed to pass on those savings to their customers. But instead, they pocket those as rebates or kickbacks. Legal, legal kickbacks. It's totally legal for them to do that. It's another problem altogether.

So they're the middleman, the ultimate middleman between the patients and pharmacies and the pharmaceutical company. So they can do all kinds of shenanigans between the two. Oh, by the way, they own their own pharmacies. And so they can set the formularies. They can decide what drugs are going to be covered by their own health plan.

based on what kind of a kickback they get from the pharmaceutical company. Like we're talking, we're talking conflicts of interest everywhere, everywhere. And so I've listed almost every part of the, like the healthcare system pathway. Oh, and also by the way, they own Medicare advantage plans. So they're getting, they're getting government dollars to then use that to offer basically private insurance plans to

through Medicare dollars to seniors. So they've got their hands in absolutely everything. They just, they don't make their own drugs. I'm sure they would if they could. They are not a pharmaceutical company. That's like the only thing I can think of that they don't actually like own. And maybe they do. I'm just not aware of it. I don't know.

So anyway, that's, that's the, that's the setup for, for their, like, uh, the recent mild little downfall that they're experiencing. Uh, and so what's gone wrong from, from that, from that starting point? Uh, well, first of all, they, their CEO was, was killed.

Um, you know, the, the morality of that, you can decide on that, what you want. I've talked ad nauseum about that. I won't relitigate that, but, uh, it, it's, it's, it undoubtedly had an effect on their PR on their, uh, um, uh, their, their share price, if that matters to you. Uh, and they're just, their public standing in the healthcare industry took a hit when their CEO was murdered.

They're also, it was uncovered that they are committing Medicare fraud by

Whenever they get those Medicare dollars and provide their Medicare Advantage plans, it's been found out that they, or this is alleged, okay, but chances are it's actually happening, where they are inflating diagnostic codes. They're upcoding certain of their customers, their charts, their claims to be able to get more money from government than they otherwise normally would get.

If a physician did that, because we can build Medicare directly, we don't have, you know, for those patients, we don't have to go through insurance. But if we committed Medicare fraud like that, where we upcoded, where we billed for services that we didn't actually do, we would get fined an extraordinary amount. We would lose our license. And then if it's bad enough, we might go to jail.

So that tells you the severity of that kind of action. So they're committing Medicare fraud more than likely, allegedly. Let's see other things. I have my list here. Yeah, they're being investigated by the FTC. Oh, they own Change Healthcare.

which processes half of all medical claims, which as we all know, had a huge spyware malware attack that has, has hurt financially millions of people out there. And it's just the list. It just, it just keeps going like all these, they're, they're the subject of, of all kinds of bills and advocacy efforts to try to undo the

A lot of the damaging things they do, like using AI to deny claims, which 90% of those claims that are denied are fraudulent denials, right? There's no reason for them to be denied.

It just, it doesn't end. And we could spend the whole time talking about it, which I'm not going to do because you guys are probably maybe tired of hearing me talk about UnitedHealthcare. But excuse me if I revel a little bit in the pain that they're suffering from a business standpoint. And I hope it continues. And then we can, because they are the worst. Like, it really is.

Like they're all bad. Like the private health insurance companies, the big ones, Cigna, Aetna, Blue Cross, they all do shady shit. UnitedHealthcare is just the most aggressive in the shady shit that they do. So many of the terrible stories of things that are happening, the stories that I hear from people are mostly UnitedHealthcare, but the other ones are not blameless.

Cigna was who I had whenever I had my cardiac arrest back in 2020. I was given about $20,000 worth of surprise bills that Cigna refused to pay for because the ambulance took me to an in-network hospital, but the doctors that took care of me in the hospital were out of network.

And so I had to spend nine months fighting that awful, painful experience. Uh, and so, and now with the no surprises act, that probably wouldn't have happened. Thank goodness. Uh, but, uh,

It just shows you all the companies are doing different things. Blue Cross, they were the ones that decided to try to fly under the radar and ration anesthesia care to their customers. Say, oh, well, this surgery should only take you 90 minutes, so we're only going to give you 90 minutes worth.

If the surgery takes two hours, then the rest of it's going to be out of pocket. We're not going to cover that. Like, what is that? What is like, you're going to ration out the Sivo fluorine for people. This is stupid. So, and that was, that was blue cross. So they're all doing stuff, but United healthcare is just a much easier punching bag because they do it more often and more nefariously, I think, than the other ones. But any reforms that we get, I'm hoping will,

will certainly address all of them, particularly PBM reform. And this is the last thing I'm going to mention because it just came up.

Every so often I'm scrolling on social media. I try to stay off of X because it just makes me feel bad. I don't like the people there. I don't like, I don't see anybody I like, I follow. It's just, I get forced into like reading thoughts from all these people with blue checks. I didn't pay for my blue check, by the way. It was foisted upon me in case it matters to you. But I don't spend a lot of time there, but I can't,

I get so tired of seeing these public government employees. This time it was Marty Makary, the FDA head, who was doing an interview. Everybody's talking about lowering drug prices, and they always, always just focus on pharmaceutical companies. Yes, pharmaceutical companies are not blameless in the astronomical prices of our medications. They certainly should share some of the blame here.

But anytime you have someone like that, a public figure who's talking about lowering drug prices and they don't mention pharmacy benefit managers like OptumRx owned by UnitedHealthcare or Express Scripts or what's the other one? Anyway, they're all the same. Anytime they don't mention those, the pharmacy benefit managers, I know that they're not serious about

about lowering drug prices. I know they're not serious about it because that's like the first thing you got to do is just get rid of that. That alone, I think will certainly lower drug prices. They're just not serious about it.

And I think part of it is because that's like, uh, uh, it's, uh, just mentioning pharmaceutical companies fighting up back against pharmaceutical pharma, big pharma. That is just like a whistle to, to, to your base, to anybody that says, Oh, look, they're doing such a good job because they're fighting back against big pharma.

We've been trained to think big pharma is the end all be all. Like if we can just get control of big pharma, we're going to be fine. Yeah. Big pharma is a problem, but it's by far not the only problem. There's another huge problem and that's the insurance companies. That's the pharmacy benefit managers. So it irritates me whenever I see people talking about lowering drug prices and they just totally don't mention pharmacy benefit managers. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe they have in

investors. Maybe they have, they get contributions. Maybe, I don't know, but they know they exist. Maybe it's just because they know that the public doesn't know what pharmacy benefit managers are, so they're just not even going to mention them. But that's part of the problem. We need the public to know about pharmacy benefit managers. Oh, it just irritates me. And I just saw this on social media right before I started filming, which is why I'm worked up about it. All right, that's it. Let's take a break. We're going to come back and get into eyeball stuff.

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It's so helpful. And so let me tell you about Pearson Rabbits. All right, tell me. This is great. So this is a physician-focused, physician-founded company founded by Dr. Stephanie Pearson, a former OBGYN, and Scott Rabbits, who's an insurance expert. They understand the unique needs of physicians and can help physicians improve.

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R-A-V-I-T-Z dot com slash knock knock to get more information on life insurance for physicians. All right, here we go. Enough about health insurance companies. I've devoted enough of my life to talking and thinking about UnitedHealthcare. Let's talk about the cornea. How about that?

Let's do the cornea. So deep dive into the cornea. I'll tell you everything that you should know about your cornea. All right, so we're going to start basic. The cornea is that front part of the eye. It's that transparent covering that covers your iris. It's right in front of your pupil. It's the first thing, when you look at someone's eyes, when you look at their pupil, the first thing your eyes, your line of sight hits is the cornea. All right?

It is the biggest refracting power of the eye. So your eye is refracting light. If your eye didn't refract light, we'd all be like count finger vision, hand motion vision, more than likely. We wouldn't be able to see anything. But because our eyes refract the light, we can take the light that comes into our eye and we can bend it. We can bend it to our will.

And, and, uh, and it, and allow that light to land perfectly on the fovea. That's our, that's the whole goal of that, the certain parts of the eye. Well, the cornea is the biggest refractor. It bends light the most, but it's a fixed amount of refraction. It can't change shape. Your lens is also a refractor of light in the eye. It can change shape.

depending on whether or not you're accommodating. You're squeezing your accommodative muscles. You're trying to see up close or further. You're trying to relax the accommodation to see further away. The cornea, it doesn't have the ability to move. Certain diseases can change the shape of your cornea, which can then cause your refractive power to change. And by extension, your glasses prescription or your contact prescription. But in general,

Assuming nothing else happens, your cornea is static. It doesn't change. So

The cornea is made up of five layers. I told you, we're going to get into it, like literally into the cornea. I'm going to transport you into this transparent part of the eye. So why does it need to be transparent, first of all? Well, because you've got to see through it. This is part of the reason why I personally think cornea, because to be a cornea specialist, usually you do your ophthalmology residency and then you do an additional year, one year of just seeing cornea stuff.

and like ocular surface stuff. But it's got to be clear so that you can see through it. When bad things happen to the cornea, when diseases happen, the cornea becomes cloudy.

it turns various shades of white, which in my mind makes it very difficult. And so I was not a big fan of the cornea. Also, ocular surface disease can get kind of gross. You get these soupy ulcers in the cornea and you get bacterial conjunctivitis and bacterial keratitis. And I don't like it. I don't like it. I like clean things, clean things like the lens, like the cataracts. All right, so five layers.

You got your corneal epithelium, all right? This is the very front part of the cornea. And the cornea is extremely, there's an extreme amount of nerve endings. There's a ton of nerve endings. It's one of the most nerve-ending, dense parts of the body, all right? Has a huge concentration of nerve endings. So when you have a scratch on your eye, if you ever have been diagnosed with a corneal abrasion,

What that means is you lost some of your corneal epithelium, that top layer of cells on your eye. They've been scratched off. Today, I saw a patient with a corneal abrasion because their kid hit them in the eye with a toy dinosaur. I think it was a stegosaurus. You can imagine how rough that was for him. And so I was able to see like right there on the cornea, you know, there was some of those cells were lost.

And it's very painful because you have so many nerve endings. It's extremely painful. The good news is that that epithelium regrows very, very quickly. All right. So you'll be fine. It just might take a while. You might have a day or so of pretty painful and you're not going to have a good time, but you'll, you'll get better. It'll be okay. So that's the corneal epithelium. It's composed of about six layers of cells. So it's a pretty thin layer. Okay.

Below that, you have basically the basement membrane of the corneal epithelium. It's called Bowman's layer. It's what the epithelium sits on. You don't want to damage the Bowman's layer because that's when you can start getting scarring of the cornea, but it's also very thin.

Below that, you have the meat of the cornea, what we call the corneal meat. No, we don't. We call it the corneal stroma. This is the thick middle layer. This is the part of the cornea you need to be completely translucent. You don't need the whole thing to be translucent, but you don't want any fluid to get into the stroma, into the big middle part of the cornea.

Below the stroma, now we're getting closer to the inside of the eye, you have two layers. The corneal endothelium, so the epithelium was the top layer. The endothelium is the innermost layer, as well as the basement membrane that the endothelium sits right on top of, which is decimase membrane.

Now, the corneal endothelium is extremely important because it has a pumping function. The cells of the corneal endothelium, they help keep fluid from entering the cornea. It pumps everything out, keeps that cornea nice and dehydrated. Really, really important. So all these layers together, they make up the thickness of the cornea, which is about half a millimeter.

Very thin, half a millimeter, 500 microns. I don't know what the thickness of a piece of paper is, but it's probably about that, right? I imagine like a normal piece of paper. Maybe that's even thinner than a cornea. I don't know. But anyway,

Half a millimeter, very thin. And this is also, this gets into LASIK too. So those of you who are like, oh, maybe do I want to get LASIK? But then you hear of people, they go and they get evaluated for LASIK. Not everybody can get LASIK folks or PRK because LASIK,

What LASIK is, is you're removing corneal tissue. You're ablating it using a laser in order to reshape the cornea. It's like taking a long board, piece of wood, and you're reshaping it into something else. You got to take away some of the wood from that board to turn it into something else. That's what you're doing with the cornea. You're removing some of that corneal tissue. But because the cornea is only 500 microns thick,

If you remove too much of it, you will destabilize that cornea, just like a plank of wood. You remove too much of the wood, it could break too easily, or it could just change shape spontaneously. It won't keep its shape. You need the cornea to keep its shape. We already talked about that. Cornea is supposed to be static. You don't want it changing shape. So if your corneas are naturally a little bit thinner,

which happens when you're highly myopic. So those of you who are like a minus nine, minus 10, minus 11, you're really nearsighted. You have, chances are you have thinner corneas. And if they're too thin, let's say they get down to 400 microns, 450 microns, you know, normal corneal thickness is like 550, 540. If they get really thin, then there's not enough corneal tissue for us to remove corneas.

without destabilizing the cornea. Right? So you might hear some of your doctors say, oh, your corneas are too thin. We can't do it. That's because

If we did it, then your cornea would be too unstable. And that can lead you down a road of long-term issues with your cornea that are just make refractive surgery not worth it. So that's the whole, your corneas are too thin for refractive. I can't do it. I don't qualify. Usually people say they don't qualify. That's the reason. It's because they're so nearsighted that it makes their cornea a little bit thinner than average and you just don't have enough tissue to remove.

All right, let's talk about how the cornea exactly stays so translucent. Because, you know, all human tissue, you have to get oxygen to the tissue somehow. But the cornea is translucent. It has no blood vessels. Because that's usually how tissues in your body, every tissue, every cell, it gets oxygen. Typically, I wouldn't say every cell, but usually what happens is you get blood vessels that go into the tissue and

and bring oxygen, bring nutrients, bring all the things that allows your body, your tissue and your body to stay alive. But there's no blood vessels in the cornea. How does it get the nutrition that it needs? Well, guess what? This is one of the coolest things about the cornea. It gets it through tears.

and aqueous fluid. So on the outside, your body makes a bunch of tears. That's why tearing, tears are so important because the tears have all these growth factors, all these nerve factors. It has oxygen dissolved in the tears and those tears will diffuse into that cornea meat, the stroma. It diffuses into the stroma and provides oxygen to all those cells that make up your cornea.

So you get it, number one, through the tear film. That's what we call the tear film. So the tears will diffuse and all this good stuff in the tears will diffuse into the cornea. You also get nutrients from the other side, the aqueous humor on the inside. So the aqueous humor, a slightly different type of fluid that has a different chemical makeup, but it can also, it also,

comes in. Also, you can get neurotrophins, so neurotrophic growth factors from all those nerves that you have in the cornea. The nerves, it's so cool. You can see we have certain imaging studies where we can actually visualize the nerves and

in the cornea and there's so many of them. Fortunately, they're so small that they don't actually, you can see some of the nerves, some of the bigger ones on exam, like with a microscope, with a slit lamp, I can see the corneal nerves, but they're translucent. They're so light that it's not like you're looking through something that causes blurriness. But you also get nerve growth factors from the corneal nerves that are throughout the cornea, as we've already discussed.

So really cool. You get it from the tears and from the aqueous humor. All right. So moving on corneas, we've talked about how it gets its nutrients, how it stays clear. What happens if you take away too much of it? Um,

Clinical significance, things that go wrong with the cornea. Well, we already talked about abrasions. That's a big thing. You can have, I'm not going to go into certain types of dystrophy, which is basically where you have some kind of genetic decomposition, genetic disposition, I'll say, toward that causes decompensation of a certain layer of the cornea. So you can have corneal dystrophies that affect the stroma, remember, the corneal meat. You can have dystrophies that affect

the decimase membrane, which would be Fuchs dystrophy. Some of you may have Fuchs dystrophy. It's a very, very common disease that we treat with corneal transplant. Other diseases that affect, you can have something that affects the surface, the epithelium or Bowman's layer. Epithelium would be what we call basement membrane dystrophy, where the epithelium actually doesn't

doesn't sit quite right on its basement membrane, on Bowman's layer. And so it can get really irregular. You can have these, you can actually have spontaneous corneal erosions, which is as fun as it sounds, where you wake up and because you have this disease, this basement membrane dystrophy, your corneal epithelium isn't strong and like firmly adhered to its basement membrane. And so you wake up and your eyelids rip off the surface layer of your cornea.

Very uncomfortable. People don't like this disease. And so we got to do things. Actually, one way we'll treat that is we'll take them to the operating room and we will actually resurface. We do what we call superficial keratectomy. We take a little crescent blade and we just wipe off

We just remove basically the entire corneal epithelium and we buff the surface or the basement membrane and allow healthy epithelium to heal in over the top of it. Sometimes we'll do little stromal micropunctures. We'll just do little, just basically little scar, tiny little scars that allow that epithelium to heal on top of the cornea more firmly.

So yeah, dystrophies can affect every single step, every single layer of the cornea is really a bitch to try to, to, to learn all of those dystrophies. There's so many of them. And it's like, I still have nightmares trying to think. And so that's one of those things. It's like it's on the same spectrum, I would say as like learning steps of the Krebs cycle or no, no, actually we'll say learning the lysosomal storage diseases.

They're all, some of them are very similar, but they have different like modes of inheritance. And they have eponyms that you never remember. And, you know, so it's just, it's a mess. Easily something you could just kind of look up in a book instead of memorizing it. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll come back and we'll talk about some different treatments that we do for the cornea.

Hey, Kristen. Yeah. I've been, you know, grossing you out about these Demodex mites, although I'm not sure why they look like adorable. Well, these are cute, but it's the real ones that kind of freaked me out a little bit. Yeah, but I have some new facts to share with you about Demodex. Oh, great. All right. These mites have likely lived with us for millions of years. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Does that make you feel better? No. Like they're passed down through close contact, especially between mothers and babies. Oh, wow. Such a special gift for our daughters. They're born, they live, they crawl around, and then they die on your eyelids and in your lash follicles. Their entire life cycle lasts about two to three weeks, all spent on your eyelids. Well, thank you for that. This isn't helping, is it? No. How do I get rid of them? Well, it's...

It's fun to gross you out, but we do have all of these. It's really common, but there is a prescription I drop to help with these now. Okay. That probably excites you. That makes me feel better. Any way to get rid of them, right? That's right. All right. Sign me up. Visit Mites Love Lids to learn more about demodex blepharitis, which is the disease that these little guys cause. Sure. Again, that's M-I-T-E-S Lids.

Love Lids, L-O-V-E-L-I-D-S.com to learn more about Demodex and Demodex blepharitis and how you can get rid of it. All right, before we get into like a little bit about treatment, one last thing is like infection. How do you get an infection of the cornea? Well, the epithelium, that surface layer, it acts as a barrier.

It exits a barrier from microbes, from harmful things, right? You need that corneal epithelium. Well, if something were to happen, like, I don't know, let's say you start sleeping in your contacts and your eyes don't like not

Your eyes don't like constantly having a barrier that prevents oxygen, that prevents nutrients from your tear film from getting in there. Or maybe you get some dirt or something, makeup, something that gets trapped underneath your contact lens.

And it just has to stay there for several days, a month before you finally decide to change your contact lenses. Well, when those things happen, it can cause damage to the corneal epithelium. And if you in any way lose a little part of that layer of your cornea, then it's much easier for

bacteria to get into the cornea and start growing and causing damage. And that's what happens. So you get a little disruption of that corneal epithelium. The bug gets in there and just grows and grows until you come in, you see your ophthalmologist and they scold you for sleeping in your contacts. And you're like, oh, I'm sorry, I'll never do it again, even though you know you're going to do it again. And then we give you antibiotics that over the course of a couple of weeks will slowly

dissolve and kill off that bacterial infection. But in the meantime, you got to stay out of your contacts for like two or three weeks. Anyway, that's how infections occur and they can be really, really problematic depending on what the bacteria is, what it is we're dealing with.

All right, sir, we talked about a little bit about refractive surgery, so I won't go into details. I have prior episodes where I go really into depth about LASIK or PRK, which is basically LASIK, except you're not creating a flap. So it's a slightly different way of doing refractive surgery. And actually, PRK is a way for people who are a little bit more nearsighted, who have less corneal tissue, to still get refractive surgery. Because if you're not creating a flap...

then you just have more cornea to deal with because the flap itself is about 120, 140 microns. So you have to remove that amount. You can't take that amount into consideration when you're deciding how much corneal tissue you're going to remove during LASIK. So it just reduces your margin a little bit, LASIK does, that PRK doesn't. It's just PRK is more painful.

Other procedures, the biggest one is transplants. We've come such a long way with corneal transplant surgery. It's really incredible what they can do. Before, I'm talking like 30, 40 years ago, the only type of transplant we could do is the full thickness, all five of those layers, all 540 microns. We'd have to just replace all of it. But over the years, we have slowly...

figured out techniques to transplant smaller and smaller amounts of corneal tissue. And now we can do what's called a decimase membrane transplant.

transplant, a DMEC, where all we're doing is we just remove the endothelium and the decimase membrane, the very inside part of the cornea, very thin tissue. We just remove that and replace it with a donor and leave all the rest of it. So those patients that have endothelial dystrophies, like Fuchs dystrophy,

We just need to replace that broken layer. We don't have to replace the whole cornea. Much faster recovery and patients do great. And I think in the future, the future of corneal transplant is going to be just like injecting cells.

Just, just make a tiny little, you know, put a little needle in the anterior chamber of the eye. You put this, put the cells in there and they just, they do their magic and they go to where they need to go. And they're going to be biosimilar to you. They're going to be like your own genetic material. So even there's already a very low risk of, of rejection with corneal transplants, but it'll be even less because it's your own tissue. That's, that's where I, I, I suspect it's eventually going to go.

fascinating things going on in the world of cornea. But I will stop there. Take some of the stuff I've told you and go impress your friends. Go impress your ophthalmology colleagues. Or maybe there's an ophthalmologist that you're trying to get with. Maybe you've got a little crush on an ophthalmologist. You want to just be like, hey, I heard about those decimase membranes.

What do you think about that? Oh, yeah. What do you do? Any? Oh, so you do a decimate membrane endothelial keratoplasty. Oh, tell me about that. Oh, man, you're so in. You're so in. It's just, you know, there's nothing. Nothing physicians love talking about more than their own jobs. So.

Sounds like an awesome person to want to date, doesn't it? Anyway, we're great. Ophthalmologists are great. So thank you all for listening. This was cornea. I'm not going to talk about cornea for a long time now, all right? But if you like this, all right, tell me what other part of the eye. We could do optic nerve. We could just do vitreous humor. We could do the retina. We could do the lens. That's my favorite. How about ciliary body?

extraocular muscles. I don't know. I could just tell you all, everything you need to know about the trochlea. That would be a short, that'd be a pretty short, uh, short episode. Anyway, uh, let me know. Send me an email. Knock, knock high at human-content.com. God,

I can't believe I forgot that. With any emails. Also, you can leave a comment on our YouTube channel at Glockenfleckens. I didn't get to any comments today. I apologize. Next episode, I'll try to do better. But I do look at those comments. So please keep those coming. I love seeing those. We're gaining a little bit of traction with the YouTube channel. Love seeing that. So please follow, subscribe, whatever you call it.

it and leave some comments. Tell me what you think of the podcast. I'm always trying to make this thing better for all of you. So thank you. Our executive producers are Aaron Cordy, Rob Goldman, and Shanti Brooke. Editor and engineer is Jason Pertizzo. Our music is by Omer Binzvi. I am Dr. Glockenflecken. We will see you next time, everyone. Bye. Knock, knock. Goodbye. You're with Dr. Binzvi.