Stephen Oppenheimer with the Oppenheimer Eye Clinic joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about dry eye.
What are some of the symptoms of dry eye?
Dr. Oppenheimer said, “The eyes are burning, and their statement is, but I have tears rolling down my cheeks. We have to tell them they have dry eye. There are two sets of glands that produce tears. The lacrimal accessory glands are in the lid and those in meibomian glands produce tears and oil to keep the tears from evaporating. But when those malfunction, the brain tells the lacrimal gland, the thing we cry with, to produce tears to protect the eye. It’s an all or nothing gland, so it pumps a huge amount of tears in, and they go rolling down your cheeks, and then you come in and one of us says well, you have dry eye and it’s hard to understand when tears are rolling down your cheeks, but it’s because the wrong gland is producing tears. Most people that have dry eye have what we call meibomian dysfunction. They don’t produce enough oil so the tears evaporate so quickly that the eye gets dry.”
Will it always be that way?
Dr. Oppenheimer said, “No. After a while, even the lacrimal gland stops producing as much and as we get older, if we have dry eye, the condition gets worse and worse.”
What are some treatments for dry eye?
Dr. Oppenheimer said, “InMode is using radio frequency. First of all, those glands, those meibomian glands, that are causing the problem, get blocked with like cakish material, and the radio frequency heats them up, turns that to liquid and then we can extract that liquid from the lid and the gland begins to produce normal oil. We use a wand type thing to heat those areas up and then extract the cakish material, but it’s liquid by then. Then what happens is when the lid realizes that it’s not producing enough, it starts to produce excess blood vessels, and we use pulse light to eliminate those blood vessels at the same time. The treatment is four treatments, they take about 30 minutes, the first treatment, then two weeks later, another and then one month and one month. So it’s four treatments in all, and we’ve had phenomenal results with it. We’ve done probably about 25 patients so far. We just got it not too long ago, and it has just been a godsend to a lot of people, everyone that we’ve done has gotten tremendous relief. It’s a phenomenal system that hits at the heart of what’s wrong. Artificial tears wet the eye, but they don’t cause you to produce more tears. So 15 minutes later, you’re back where you started. So we find people come in and they’re putting artificial tears in 10 times a day and it doesn’t cure anything, it doesn’t change anything, it just re-wets the eye. We used to use punctal plugs, we still do, to some extent, to keep more tears in the eye. But again, as time goes by, less tears are produced, less oil is produced, and then the plugs don’t work. This goes at the heart of what’s wrong, and it corrects the problem that’s causing the dry eye.”
Tears are actually really important for the eyes.
Dr. Oppenheimer said, “It’s the first treatment that actually gets to the heart of what’s causing dry eye, as opposed to treating dry eye. There’s been lots of different types of cures and all kinds of things to treat dry eye, but those things don’t correct the problem that causes dry eye. This is the first one that actually goes to the cause of dry eye, corrects that, so that the eye can produce normal tears in oil and not have the problems that go with the other.”
For more information, click here: https://www.oppenheimereyeclinic.com/