So do your eyes burn or feel irritated? Well maybe you have blepharitis, and in
this video I'm gonna be explaining exactly what blepharitis is and how you
can treat it at home so let's take a look.
This video is brought to you by
Ocusoft, the number one doctor recommended brand of eyelid cleansers.
hey everyone this is dr. Joe Allen here from doctor eye health. The channel helps
with the eyes, vision and finding the best vision products and on this channel
you'll find us doing a lot of different product reviews as well as educational
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miss any of my future videos. Also remember that any point throughout the
video you can check out the show notes and links below for further information
about everything that I go over otherwise let's talk about blepharitis.
So blepharitis is a general term describing the inflammation of the
eyelids themselves now most commonly we describe this as marginal blepharitis
because the inflammation is right on the eyelid margin the part right by where
the eyelids are opening and this is extremely common in fact most people
either have blepharitis right now this exact second or they've already had it
when they were younger or they're gonna get it again when they're older. Yes,
it's actually that common. The symptoms of blepharitis are usually inflamed
irritated eyelids they're chronically red itchy and kind of have a burning
sensation now there's actually different types or classifications of blepharitis
in the clinic we either call it anterior blepharitis or posterior blepharitis
based on where it's located and what's causing it. Now anterior blepharitis is
where you actually have inflammation of to the eyelashes and hair follicles and
this usually kind of looks like kind of like a dandruff or an oil buildup on the
surface of the eyelid and kind of imagine it kind of like scalp dandruff
but on the eyelashes themselves now sometimes it's tough to see this unless
you have high-powered magnification like we have in the eye clinic but again it's
very very common but it's not just dead skin cells and oil that are building up
on the lashes the actually bacteria live in these oils and those bacteria
actually produced toxins that interact with the oils and that causes
instability of your tear film and eventual dry eye disease now again
there's anterior blepharitis and then there's posterior blepharitis and
posterior blepharitis involves inflammation of the backside of the
eyelid which involves the Meibomian glands now if you've never heard of the
meibomian glands before they're actually these rows of little glands that run on
the bottom portion of your eyelid and on the top portion of the eyelid and they
function that every time you blink they squeeze these glands just a little bit
and a little bit of this oil comes out and floats on your tear film and
prevents the tears from evaporating and if these oil glands aren't functioning
properly either that they're not producing enough or the quality is very
low then your tears start to evaporate almost instantly and so it's actually
the number one leading cause for all of dry eye disease in fact if you are
somebody who has either really bad dry eye do you want to learn more about dry
eye treatment I have a whole other playlist on that and hooked that up here
in the YouTube card above as well as in the description below if you want to
check that out now I get this inflammation and dysfunction of these
meibomian glands are part of posterior blepharitis but they're almost always
present with anterior blepharitis to some degree but this dysfunction of the
meibomian glands it actually has many different causes including aging
hormones genetics and even contact lens wear. okay so How do you treat
blepharitis at home? well what's great is that blepharitis is easily treatable and
a lot of times it's preventable just with good eyelid hygiene and so I have
this discussion with a lot of my patients who are like teenagers getting
contact lenses for the first time and I'll look at their eyelids and they
don't look that clean so I'll discuss with them the importance of cleaning
away all this extra debris on the eyelid and this is a matter of washing your
face basically every day I don't like getting soap in my eyes or anything
either and I think most of us kind of neglect really cleaning away on the
eyelids but you want to find a soap that's not really irritating to the eyes
and there are some really excellent ones out there and we're going to go over
some of those now you may have seen either lid wipes or foaming eyelid
cleansers like these either at your doctor's office or at the store and both
work excellent for treating blepharitis because they have surfactants that
actually help remove oil and debris away from the eyelid and has some effect
against some types of bacteria with these type of eyelid pads you know
again you can buy these at the store or online and I'll hook you up with some
links in the description below but really you just open it up you take out
the pre-moistened pad then you unfold it and you can see it's a little bit soapy
but then you basically just close your eyes and then you clean the eyelid so
you could just close the eyes here you can rub along the eyelid margin you
clean of all of the eyelashes including the brow as well and then you go ahead
and you just clean right along that eyelid margin really get it those lashes
okay of course you do it on the one side then
you do it on the other same thing then rinse
once you're done drying off your eyelids then it's really just a matter of
repeating this at least twice a day for about two weeks in really bad cases
otherwise you want to just regularly maintain good eyelet hygiene now again
these are convenient kind of pre-moistened pads they're excellent
because you can put them in your purse or wallet or you can take it with you
somewhere but I otherwise like to use the foaming island cleansers because
it's just a little bit more gentle on my skin now beyond just using the lid
scrubs and those really severe outbreaks in cases doctors are now recommending
maintenance eyelet hygiene with hypochlorous acid and you've never heard
of hypochlorous acid before this is the aqua soft hypo chlorin it's a very safe
non-toxic spray that goes on the eyelids and it fights many many different
bacteria and so that's why many doctors are recommending it now I do have a
whole other video on hypochlorous acid if you want to know more about that and
I'll hook that up here in the YouTube card above as well as in the description
below if you want to check that out but what I liked is that Ocusoft is
actually packaging a cleaning spray kit now so it actually includes 20 of the
lid scrubs and a full bottle of the hypochlorous acid so you don't have to
actually buy like a full set of the lid scrubs by themselves and then the
hypochlorous acid by the zones you can do that if you want but it does come in
a full kit now and I'll hook that up for you in a link in the description below
now I personally don't just clean my eyelids every day with something like
hypochlorous acid that helps again fight the bacteria and the oils from building
up on the surface of the eyelids but I have issues with the oil glands on the
back surface of my oil glands so I do have some posterior blepharitis issues
and really what I do to help with that is something called a warm compress
I love doing these things it's actually something I look forward to but a warm
compress there's different ways to do that but I personally prefer the ones
that are like microwavable heat packs ones that you can put in the microwave I
just find them more convenient they get to a hotter degree and last longer again
using those heat packs every day is gonna help melt those oils the thickened
oils stuck in the meibomian glands so that they actually run smoother and it
allows them to kind of run more freely so that way it doesn't get clogged up
and then those meibomian glands continue to live on and I find the combination of
those two doing both the eyelid cleansing and the heat compresses kind
of work synergistically together because then you're treating both the anterior
blepharitis and the posterior blepharitis together so I have a
question of the day have you ever tried any of these products do you like the
lid scrubs better or do you like the hypochlorous acid spray better go ahead
and comment in the section below I'd love to hear what you think.
alright guys
thanks so much for watching if you like the video give me a big thumbs up
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whole series about eyelid hygiene and eyelid health go ahead and click or tap
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again this is Dr. Allen here from dr eye health the channel helps with the eyes vision
and finding the best vision products keep an eye on it we'll talk to you soon