Author: innexus

OptiLight by Lumenis

Dry eye disease is becoming increasingly common, affecting millions of people worldwide. This chronic condition can significantly impact your life, sometimes making even the smallest of tasks seem difficult.

If you have eye pain, blurry vision, and dry or watery eyes, it could be a sign that you have dry eye disease. But don’t worry! With an in-depth eye exam, our team can assess your vision and eye health to get you the treatment you need.

With treatments like OptiLight by Lumenis, we can help manage your dry eye symptoms and get you back to seeing clearly and comfortably. Keep reading to learn more about OptiLight by Lumenis and how it can improve your life.

What Is Dry Eye Disease?

Dry eye disease is a common eye condition that occurs when there is an issue with any one of the three components of your tears.

Your tears are made up of 3 distinct layers, all of which work together to keep your eyes healthy:

  • The oily layer prevents your tears from evaporating too quickly

  • The watery layer delivers nutrients to your eyes

  • The mucus layer keeps your tear film stuck to the surface of your eyes

What are the 2 Types of Dry Eye Disease?

There are two types of dry eye disease.

Evaporative Dry Eye (EDE)

EDE is the most common type of dry eye disease. This type of dry eye occurs when you lack the proper amount of oil in your tears. When this happens, your tears can evaporate too quickly, drying out your eyes.

In some cases, EDE can be caused by meibomian gland dysfunction, a disorder where the meibomian glands in your eyes become blocked, limiting the amount of oil being produced for your tears.

Aqueous Tear Deficiency (ATD)

If you suffer from ATD, your eyes lack the aqueous layer in your tears. This means that your eyes aren’t producing enough tears to keep the eye moist, which can lead to irritating and uncomfortable symptoms.

What are the Symptoms of Dry Eye Disease?

If you are suffering from dry eye disease, you may notice any of the following symptoms:

  • A burning or scratchy sensation in your eyes

  • Stringy mucus in or around your eyes

  • Irritated or overly-watery eyes

  • Sensitivity to light or photophobia

  • Eye redness, blurred vision, or eye fatigue

  • A sensation of having something in your eyes

Difficulty wearing contact lenses

If you are experiencing any of these symptoms, book an appointment with your eye doctor to receive a dry eye disease diagnosis and get the treatment you need.

What Is OptiLight by Lumenis?

OptiLight by Lumenis is a safe, gentle, and effective treatment done to manage dry eye disease. This non-invasive procedure is the first and only FDA-approved intense pulsed light (IPL) treatment for dry eye management.

OptiLight uses pulses of light precisely administered in the area below the eyes to reduce dry eye symptoms. This 10-15 minute procedure can relieve dry eye symptoms by:

  • Increasing tear break-up time

  • Reducing the amount of demodex mites and bacteria around your eyes

  • Decreasing inflammation inflammation

Improving meibomian gland functionality

What to Expect

If your eye doctor has recommended the OptiLight treatment, they will go over everything you can expect before, during, and after your appointment.

Preparing for Your Appointment

To prepare for your appointment you should avoid:

  • Using skin brightening agents or serums for the week before your appointment

  • Using tanning beds 1 month prior to your appointment

  • Getting botox for at least 3 months before your appointment

  • Taking oral isotretinoin, tetracycline, or doxycycline in the 3 months prior to your appointment

The OptiLight Treatment

This treatment is fast and simple, taking only 10–15 minutes. During your treatment your doctor will apply a cool gel on the treatment area and cover your eyes with shields to protect them.

As light is applied to the skin, you may experience a warm or a tapping sensation, but you shouldn’t feel any pain.

Post-Procedure Care

While side effects are uncommon, your eyes may feel slightly more dry or gritty for the day following your procedure. If you do experience dry eyes, you can use preservative-free artificial tears.

Following your treatment, your skin will be sensitive, so we recommend avoiding sun exposure and wearing sunscreen.

Am I a Good Candidate for OptiLight by Lumenis?

How do you know if OptiLight is the right treatment for you? During an eye exam, your doctor can determine whether or not it is the right option for you.

In general, OptiLight isn’t recommended for patients who:

  • Are taking certain medications, like Accutane

  • Have active acne

  • Suffer from certain skin disorders

  • Are susceptible to keloid scarring

  • Have severe scarring

Have severely sunburned recently

Find Relief Today

You don’t have to live with the uncomfortable symptoms of dry eye disease. With OptiLight by Lumenis, your symptoms can be managed effectively and efficiently, restoring your quality of life.

Our team is always here to help you find relief from dry eyes. Book an appointment today to see how OptiLight by Lumenis can help you!

Ocular Nutrition & Sports Performance

We are all aware that nutrition is the basis for our health and performance. What we may not be aware of is that the brain and visual system, while only comprising about 2 percent of your body weight, use up about 25 percent of your nutritional intake. This is why it is so important to pay attention to our nutrition in our daily activities as well as in our sports performance.

Optimal sports performance coincides with optimal nutritional support for the visual system. And while most coaches, trainers and athletes recognize the importance of nutrition in sports performance, the effect of nutrition on the eyes—and on visual skills that are important for sports performance—are often overlooked.

Recent research has demonstrated that certain nutrients can help improve visual performance factors. These recommendations suggest that the carotenoids lutein, zeaxanthin and astaxanthin are beneficial nutritional supplements and can play a role maintaining or enhancing visual abilities that are important for sports performance, such as Dynamic Visual Acuity, Eye Tracking, Eye Focusing, Peripheral Awareness, Depth Perception, and Eye-Hand or Eye-Body Coordination.

(Excerpts from an article by: Jeffrey Anshel, OD, FAAO)

Myopia in Children

Imagine waking up unable to see anything more than a few inches from your face and knowing that is the best your vision will ever be. Wouldn’t that be frightening and debilitating? If there had been treatments available to slow your vision loss, wouldn’t you have wanted to have known about them?

As a parent, if your child were at risk for blindness due to glaucoma, cataracts, maculopathy or retinal detachment later in life, wouldn’t you want your pediatrician, family practitioner, ophthalmologist or optometrist to share information with you regarding treatment approaches and lifestyle choices that could help preserve your child’s vision?

This might sound a bit dramatic, but myopia is a highly prevalent and silent disease occurring during a child’s eye development that can lead to a lifetime of poor vision. The Brien Holden Vision Institute estimates that half the world’s population could have myopia by 2050 and that 1 billion could develop high myopia, placing them at the greatest risk for the most devastating consequences related to this disease (glaucoma, cataracts, myopic maculopathy and retinal detachment). The time to act is now.

Most of us are born hyperopic or farsighted, and as our eyes grow during normal development we become emmetropic and without significant refractive error. During this critical period of eye development, when we are progressing as young children and adolescents, with myopia something goes wrong. The eye grows disproportionately too long, the axial length is extended and myopia occurs.

There are many theories regarding the causes, but most likely a combination of genetic predispositions and environmental factors adversely affect emmetropization.

The need to intervene during this critical period drives the importance and urgency to slow or stop myopia progression. Myopia progression is irreversible, so when this treatment window closes, the higher risk of vision loss remains for life.

Some actions and interventions can be started today! Early detection and ongoing monitoring are key. Limiting screen time, spending more time outdoors and reducing near visual work are also very important. There are also other available treatment options such as orthokeratology or the MiSight 1 day soft contact lens and many other device and pharmaceutical options in development.

So much good can result from myopia management, and many lives can be improved if successful. We want our patients to understand this disease, its potential consequences and the interventions available to help children before the treatment window closes.

(Credit to: Raul A. Trillo, MD, MBA 3/1/2020)

Introduction

Do you feel nervous going to a new doctor or worry that we’ll shoot air in your eyes?? Believe me, you are not alone!! Nobody, even the eye doctors, like to have things shot into their eyes! We are here to help you! When you come into Blink Eyecare, we will greet you with a smile, explain everything from the insurance benefits to the exam findings in detail and never shoot anything in your eyes. (We will still check your eye pressures for glaucoma but in a much gentler way!)

Leslie and I (Dr. Stromberg) both wear glasses and/or contact lenses, so we’ve both been in your position before. I got my first pair of glasses in 6th grade, so I understand your children’s apprehensions about wearing glasses. Thankfully, glasses have become a lot cooler and more of an accessory than they were in for me in 1990. Like most kids I went through the stage of not wanting to wear my glasses and choosing poor vision over glasses. Then at 13, I got contact lenses. Like anyone trying contact lenses for the first time, I had problems with inserting and removing the contact lenses. I even had to go back for another “class” to try the contacts a different day.

So we understand….. we understand that it’s hard to wear glasses when you’re a kid…we understand that kids want and need to look cool around their friends…we understand that contact lenses seem scary for parents and everyone needs practice at first…we understand that you may have gone 40 years not needing glasses and that you really don’t want them yet…we understand that I bifocal may sound scary (I just got my first pair of progressives too). But we are here to help you! We will work with you to get you into the right eyewear or lenses that YOU feel comfortable in. We love seeing children but also want to take care of you parents and adults.

Thanks for reading my first blog post and trusting us to take care of you and your family. We can’t wait to see you all in the office and introduce ourselves in person! Stay tuned for more posts to come. Bye for now!

Erin Stromberg, OD