7 Tips for Dry Eye Treatment
Dry eye disease is a common condition that occurs when your tears aren't able to provide adequate lubrication for your eyes. Tears can be inadequate and unstable for many reasons. For example, dry eyes may occur if you don't produce enough tears or if you produce poor-quality tears. So if you are having dry eye symptoms then this is the article for you because we are going to go over seven dry eye treatments at home that your eye doctor probably just didn’t have time to talk with you about. Now, let’s take a look.
7 TIPS FOR DRY EYE TREATMENT
Preservative Free Drops
That’s not just once like maybe in the morning or once at night but often times using them maybe three, four times throughout the day. I know if you go to see an eye doctor for dry eye disease, almost every single one of them will hand you a sample of artificial tears or some sort of dry eye drop that they could recommend for you. I definitely recommend trying the eye drop that they selected for you and your type of dry eye disease otherwise the eye drop I often hand out as a sample is sustained complete. I prefer to use sustained complete just because it does cover both aqueous deficient dry eye that’s where people don’t produce enough tear or watery component to their tears and then there’s the oil component which over 80 some percent of all dry eye disease has some form of oil declined efficiency and the sustained complete also helps with the oil component of the tears for people that need to use artificial tears.
Doing Hot Compresses for your eyes
Doing a hot or warm compress for the eyelids, the whole purpose of it is to heat up the oil glands in the eyelids that allows the oil glands to melt because a lot of times these oil glands will become inflamed and then the oils become clogged up. It turns solidified into something like butter and then heating it up we’ll get those oils to melt and then they run smoother out of the glands and onto the tears and that prevents the tears from evaporating.
Blepharitis
Blepharitis is when the eyelids become red crusty inflamed due to skin oils and bacteria that sit on our eyelids. Blepharitis is very similar to having dandruff on the scalp except that it’s more on the eyelashes and eyelids so to treat that oftentimes doctors can use medication but at home, you can also use moist heat compresses that help breaks up the oils that have solidified on the eyelashes.
Doing Blinking Exercises
You can do these blinking exercises after doing a warm compress that’ll get the oil glands pumping because the whole process of blinking is what squeezes your oil glands of the eyelids and get them to release those oils. And one of the major issues these days is that everyone seems to be on a computer or a phone or studying really intensely whether you’re looking for a book or perhaps you’re just playing a board game with the family. You are studying very intensely and we don’t blink as often. If you and I were just in conversation, typically our blink rate is around 20 times a minute but as soon as we start focusing on something up close, our blink rate drops to about four times a minute. That’s a significant decrease that means our eyes are more exposed to air and our tears are going to evaporate much quicker.
Taking an Omega-3 Supplement
Now, there’s a lot of debate over the benefits of omega-3s in different parts of the body. They have strongly been suggested from both neurological benefits, historically heart benefits, but skin as well as the retina in the back of the eye. In terms of Omega-3 benefits for dry eyes, some studies are strongly supported omega-3s and there are some that really kind of have cast doubt on the benefits of omega-3 for dry eyes. But the vast majority of dry eye specialists that I know all do still strongly recommend omega-3s as a potential treatment for dry eye disease. The whole idea of omega-3s in medicine is that it reduces the inflammatory load within our body and with dry eyes specifically there’s a lot of inflammation that occurs and it kind of adds like adding gasoline to fire not only under the eyes not having enough tears and that they’re having a lot of evaporation from oil components but there’s an overall inflammatory cascade that occurs and causes dryness to get worse and a lot of us are living lives where we eat a lot of processed food and there’s a lot of kind of processed oils like soybean oil that have a lot of omega-6s and that they really promote inflammation in our body.
Using a Humidifier
No matter whether you are in a bedroom or the living room, the air around us can get very dry. Especially if you have the heater running at all. The heater can really dry out the air in your house and that can cause the eyes to feel really dry. A lot of us are not blinking enough when we’re sitting in front of a computer all day so having a humidifier to raise the humidity in the room is going to help soothe those dry eyes and prevent the tears from evaporating so quickly. One special tip I’ll include is that if you are using a humidifier, make sure you use distilled water and not just using tap water which has different minerals.
Using moisture chambers
Now the whole idea of using moisture chambers as a treatment for our dry eye is certainly not a new treatment by far. The moisture chambers are all around a star on the same concept. They wrap around the eyes and hold on to the side of the face and that seal in the moisture of the eyes and prevents the tears from evaporating as easily.
Conclusion
I hope these tips help you but as always make sure that you do follow up with your local eye care physician to make sure that your eyes are being well taken care of.