Today's Tip: Experimenting with artificial tears

[Rebecca Petris]

My personal suggestions for trying out new eye lubricants:

1) Give it a fair trial.

Two doses is not enough... two days may not be enough either. Try and give it a week or two and under circumstances where you would actually be able to tell what it's doing for you. For the compulsive dry eye addicts amongst us... that means not trying out a new tear when you have a cocktail du jour of 16 different dry eye treatments.

2) Don't discard it because of minor inconveniences.

Slight sting? Guess what - lots of tears can sting depending on the state of your epithelium at that particular time. Just because it stings a little today doesn't mean it always will. And just because it stings a little immediately on application doesn't mean it is doing you no good.

Vision blurring for 2 minutes after application? C'mon. Sure it's a little inconvenient. But if your dry eyes are bothering you enough that you're even on this bulletin board, surely a little blurring is a fair tradeoff for the potential for longer relief. If we want better-than-average relief, we have to have reasonable expectations about tradeoffs.

3) Keep your eye on the goals.

Which are... to improve the tear film, and to improve eye comfort overall. Don't expect eye lubricants to always give you instant gratification.

4) If possible, find an objective way to measure how you're doing before starting a new product and after a couple of weeks on it. Scoring yourself on OSDI before and after is one example.

[suzanne E.]

Thanks Rebecca!
I just joined.
Today I retried Theratears gel in the individual portions. Sure enough, the first vial DID sting, and I thought ,"Wow! It must be I'm allergic to this stuff." So, after reading your comment on artificial tears, maybe it's OK. I'll experiment longer. Maybe my eyes were so bad that anything would've stung. The drops felt really good on the second application.
Suzanne

[Terri]

Rebecca: Thanks for the link to the OSDI! That's a great way of quantifying progress on a week-over-week basis and keeping track of improvements.

[yoganut]

I agree, thanks so much for the link and the advice.