Friday Q&A: Eye Floaters

Q: I have several students who have “eye floaters.” They are wondering if there is anything they can do for them.

A: First off, how many of you out there reading this have ever had an “eye floater”?  I’ll bet loads! Even though they are considered an age-related eye phenomenon, I had one long ago, perhaps in my twenties or thirties. But before I get too far ahead of myself, let me define what we are talking about here.

According to the Mayo clinic, eye floaters are spots in your vision. Eye floaters may look like black or gray specks, strings or cobwebs that drift about when you move your eyes. And typically, when you go to look at the floater, it will frustratingly move out of your field of vision. The gall! But, usually, this common condition is more annoying than threatening to your health.

Eye floaters, again via our friends in Minnesota, are considered a result of age-related changes that occur as the jelly-like substance (vitreous) inside your eyes becomes more liquid. When this happens, microscopic fibers within the vitreous tend to clump together and can cast tiny shadows on your retina, which you may see as eye floaters.

Usually, this is not a sign that you have to worry about or that portends dangerous changes to your vision. However, there are several worrisome additional symptoms that you need to watch out for, as they could indicate a more serious problem called retinal tear, which can lead to retinal detachment (not the desirable vairagya kind we aim for in yoga!) that can lead to loss of vision. So, if you notice a sudden increase in the number of eye floaters, contact an eye specialist immediately—especially if you also see flashes of light or lose your peripheral vision. These can be symptoms of an emergency that requires prompt attention. To re-iterate: usually a couple of eye floaters are not of any immediate concern, although if you have not had an eye exam in a while, it might be a good time to see your ophthalmologist or optometrist. Go immediately if any of these show up, too:  many more eye floaters than usual; a sudden onset of new floaters; flashes of light; darkness on the sides of your vision (peripheral vision loss). 

In addition to age changes already mentioned and the more serious tear to the back of the eye, occasionally floaters can be a result of inflammation on the back of the eye or bleeding into the center of the eye. These would likely cause more symptoms than just a floater, and you’d likely feel compelled to see you eye doctor soon than later.

If you’ve never had an eye floater, but now that you’ve read about them you’ll be worrying about them (this used to happen to me all the time in med school—I’d read about some deadly illness for the first time and start to imagine I was getting symptoms of the condition!), here are the risk factors for developing them:

•    age over 50 (yikes!  I’m in trouble again!)
•    nearsightedness (got this one, too!)
•    eye trauma
•    complications from cataract surgery
•    diabetic retinopathy
•    inflammation in the eye

In order to rule out the bad eye situations, your eye doc will do a full eye exam, including dilating your pupils with drops so he/she can get a clear look at the inside and back of your eye. Surgery is typically reserved, for situations of retinal tear or detachment. There are some experimental procedures using lasers to zap floaters if the floaters are really big and annoying to you. But these are still considered experimental.

In most cases, no treatment is recommended. You are simply asked to get used to the floaters and try to ignore them. Now, if they are kinda annoying for you, you could try applying your yogic skills of observation, attention and focus to the floaters, and incorporate them into your present reality, which according to yogic philosophy, is always changing. That means these guys could actually start to disappear, and you will be aware of it when it happens.

A quick look at the many websites that claim that yoga can help resolve eye floaters tend to recommend a balanced practice of standing poses, seated poses, supine and prone poses, with both forward bends, backbends and twists, but tend to strongly swear off inversions. Pranayamas recommended include Skull Brightening, Alternate Nostril and Solar Pranayama, inhaling on right nostril, exhaling out of left.  One site recommended Trataka, or gazing practices, using a candle, your shoulder or the tip of your nose for your focus. However, I could find no research on the benefit or risk of any yoga tools for eye floaters.

I suspect that a gentle yoga practice, with its likely benefit of stress reduction, would be a helpful way of addressing this condition if it is creating more stress in your daily life. And I, too, would suggest that you use caution with inverted poses in case an increase in pressure in the head and eyes might worsen or precipitate floaters. No definitive research is available to prove or disprove this idea, but you can monitor your own symptoms by doing gentle inversions, like Standing Forward Bend or Downward-Facing Dog, staying for only brief periods of time and noticing afterward if anything changes with your symptoms. If any of our readers have had person experience with floaters and yoga, please write a comment back to us. We’d love to hear about it!

—Baxter