The content of this podcast is provided for general informational purposes only and is not intended as,

nor should it be considered a substitute for professional medical advice.

You are listening to itchy and bitchy, a podcast that provides answers to your many health questions.

This is Karen Nicholl, Family Nurse Practitioner, and I welcome you back. This week I had a patient

ask me what options there are other than surgery to correct hooded eyelids, and I realized that I

didn't really know all the non-surgical options for this problem, which is super strange because I

have whopping hooded eyelids, my own self. How could I not know the answer to this question my patient

had? It's unreal to me, but hooded eyelids are usually caused by a combination of many age-related

changes in the eyelidskin, in the eyebrow, the underlying fat, the muscle, and the bone. As you age,

your eyelids stretch, and the muscles supporting them weaken. As a result, excess fat may gather above

and below your eyelids, causing sagging eyebrows, droopy upper lids, and bags under your eyes.

So if you have puppy bags under your eyes, sometimes that can be allergies or fluid retention,

but lots of times it's due to fat deposit, and it's going to stay there until you, unless you take

it out. So besides making you look older, the severely sagging skin around your eyes can reduce your

side vision, your peripheral vision, especially the upper and outer parts of your field vision.

The hooded eyelids can also be congenital, meaning you were born with that type of eyelid. I

happen to have a double whammy in that everyone in my family, myself included, have this type of eyelid,

and I'm old. So between those two things, my upper eyelids are pretty darn droopy.

I looked into all the different things we could do instead of surgery, and the first thing I found,

the cheapest thing I found, is something called eyelid lift tape. So

this, I had no idea this existed, which is strange to me. So that cheapest option is to lift the

saggy eyelids, is eyelid lift tape, and I actually have tried these, and they do work. But it takes

...