﻿Perhaps you've been suffering from a burning, a gritty sore eyes or
perhaps even watery eyes that don't seem to respond to any treatment whatsoever.
And you've been through every kind of dry eye
product on the market, it seems, with no luck.
Well, in this video,
I'll explain some important considerations that could make all the difference between
you successfully having your dry eyes treated or not.
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This is Martin's Eye Tips with me optometrist Martin Oguzie.
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So this is the final video in a three part
series designed to give you the basics on what dry eye is, its causes and its
treatments. In this video will be covering its treatment
and like other videos in the series,
I'm going to draw from
the leading DEWS II research to give you what I think is
a very important overview on treatment strategies that may help to explain why
some treatments work and others don't work at all.
Hopefully you've been watching the other two videos in the series if not to go back
and watch those first using the link in the top corner just over here,
then come back to this video for a fuller context.
So when it comes to treating dry eyes,
you must know whether you're treating one of the two types of dry eyes.
So first of all, Aqueous Deficient Dry Eyes or Evaporative Dry Eye.
As a quick reminder, aqueous deficient dry eye is when you don't produce enough tears
and evaporative dry is when your tears evaporate away too quickly.
And once you know which type of dry eye you have, then you need to know
what is the underlying cause of your aqueous deficient or evaporative dry.
Obviously, this is the job of your
optometrist or your ophthalmologist to figure this stuff out.
But once they know, I think it's important for you to know also because you can then
take charge of your dry eye recovery if you are aware of what exactly is going on.
So my tip is to ask your eye care professional, these two questions.
Firstly, do you have aqueous deficient or evaporative dry eye?
And secondly, do you know the likely cause
of your aqueous deficient or your evaporative dry eye?
Now, most eye care professionals may not
tell you this stuff unless you ask simply because they don't want to confuse
and overwhelm people with too much information.
As I pointed out earlier in the second video of the series, all of the ways to go
about treating dry eyes should really involve treating these three aspects.
First of all, tear instability, tear concentration or Osmolarity
as we call it and inflammation. Tears become unstable, mainly because the outer
oily layer of your tears may become a low in supply,
and the main cause of this is blockage
of or clogging up of the gland that releases the oil
and we call this gland the Meibomain gland.
And we also call the condition Meibomain Gland Dysfunction, or MGD.
And you can also have problems with the mucus layer of production
from the mucus producing goblet cells, as we call them, being low,
particularly when evaporative dry has been going on for some time.
The result of all this can be that your
eye may sting when it's overly concentrated or you may feel so blurred or
even watery. Treating new cases of relatively new evaporative dry eyes.
First of all, eyelid hygiene and keeping your eyelids
regularly clean from oil and bacteria clogging up is a really important,
particularly in conditions such as Blepharitis where the eyelids may become
inflamed and this may be due to bacteria. You can use
dilute baby shampoo to do this with the cutting bud
just to wipe around the lead margins
but I think even better is to use some
of the specially created eyelid hygiene wipes,
just keep that area nice and clean on a regular basis.
Hot compresses with a heat mask is
excellent that helping to unclog the Meibomain glands
with a gentle eyelid massage routine.
And it's also worth noting that hot compress and a good eyelid hygiene routine
can potentially be enough to cure evaporative dry eye.
Lubricating eye drops are a source of immediate eye relief from sore, gritty eyes.
And there are a huge number of lubricate eye drops in the market.
And it's easy to assume that they all do
the same thing or try and achieve the same thing.
In reality, some are better than others for your type of dry eye.
If you find that your eyes are watering a lot, this is usually because dry patches
are forming in the tears and this triggers your eyes to your watering glands
to produce excess tears to try and fill in the gaps, a bit like the triggering
of tears that happens when you chop up onions.
And in this case, you might want to try
a Carboma based, a lubricant such as Viscotears
and these are good at having a longer retention time your eye to fill
in the gaps. If only the hand that your vision consistently goes blurred because,
as the water evaporates, it leaves more of the mucus layer,
which then may also get thicker then you should consider
using a lubricant product that has more quality properties.
That's to say that it contains agents such as the Glycerin or Acetylcysteine
which are designed to break down the excessive mucus and reducing
the blurring at the same time. As well as these some lubricants are
designed to replace the oily layer of your tears, while others may try and mimic
the complete composition of your tears altogether.
So selecting the appropriate lubricant
drop for your type of dry eye may make a significant difference to the overall
comfort. To treat long term chronic cases of evaporative dry eye.
Now, the problem here could be that an effective treatment that that's been
going on for some time has led to inflammation to build up.
So in these cases, it may be that the sufferer may need
to use steroids for a short term to get the inflammation under control.
And then after which you may well find then that the hygiene regime
and the lubricants may work a lot more effective. Aqueous Deficient Dry Eye treatment.
And when it comes to aqueous deficient dry
eyes, this is usually the most serious of dry
conditions because it's often linked to in a whole body
systemic health conditions such as auto immune conditions.
Now, because your eye doesn't produce the water component of your tears
sufficiently, it's important to get medical treatment in the initial stages
to manage your condition and particularly any inflammation that may be present.
Now, as far as dry eyes concerned,
inflammation is really the biggest threat to healthy eyes.
If you are somebody who, for example, has tried everything you
feel like you've tried everything to soothe the dry eyes.
Apart from seeing a dry eye specialist,
then it may well be the case that you actually have aqueous deficient dry
eyes, but you simply been treating it like it was evaporative dry eye,
and that simply won't work.
And it can in fact be, you know, something that leads to more
long term, you know, worsening of your symptoms or
even worsening damage to the surface of the eye. The treatments for aqueous deficient
dry eye include, first of all,
want to make sure that we retain the small amount of tears that you may well be
producing by limiting or blocking the drainage,
and we do this using a lot of plugs
that go into the drainage holes. Treating inflammation with steroids or
non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as methotrexate where necessary.
Another popular option is to use cyclosporine based drugs such as Restasis
to try to stimulate the production of extra tears.
May be worth considering the creation
of personalized blood serum eye drops from the individual's own blood supply.
So there are many more tools
and treatments and all of these should be used on top of the normal eyelid hygiene
and lubricant options we talked about for evaporative dry eye as well.
May not be possible to cure aqueous efficient dry eyes unless you can get
tear production levels up, but it should be possible to minimize
the symptoms that can be so disabling for sufferers of dry eyes.
The other key thing that is important
for treating dry eyes over the long term is having a consistent dry eye regime.
The aim here with the dry regime is
to keep a dry eyes free from inflammation and to allow your
eyes to recover naturally as much as possible.
It's also very important in dry eye regime
is nutrition, and particularly in the case of aqueous deficient dry eyes,
nutrition is critical to dealing with inflammation, helping to get it right
down and really should form part of any long term chronic dry eye regime.
Researchs suggests that one
of the reasons that many people don't have success with their dry eye
treatment is because they really don't continue with the treatment and any regime
for a long enough period of time with most people stopping their regime
before two weeks.
And typically I would recommend about five
weeks system designed to be intense in the first two weeks and then gradually
reduce in intensity over the following weeks.
So in my experience,
consistency and intensity is really the key to getting dry eye under control.
Now I'm interested to know what you have tried for your dry eyes and whether any
of it has worked before? Leave me a comment in the comment section below,
you know, and I look forward to reading
your thoughts and your experiences in the comments section.
There's so many things that I could have covered over this three part basic dry eye
series, and I could have gone into a lot more specific in detail,
but the plan here really is to
give you somewhat of an introduction to dry eye over this three
and an overview of three options,
but plan to be back with a lot more detailed information on treatments,
product reviews and other useful tips for dry eye management on this channel.
Please make sure to stay tuned for more help with your dry eye.
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so you get reminded whenever I release a new video. You can catch the rest
of the series if you missed any of the videos in the three part series
by just checking out the playlist over here in the corner.
Thank you so much for tuning in
and I really look forward to catching you guys in the next video.
Take care.