The Dry Eye Remedy: The Complete Guide to Restoring the Health of Your Eyes: The Complete Guide to restoring the Health and Beauty of Your Eyes - Softcover

Latkany, Robert, M.d.

 
9781578262427: The Dry Eye Remedy: The Complete Guide to Restoring the Health of Your Eyes: The Complete Guide to restoring the Health and Beauty of Your Eyes
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1578262429 ISBN 13: 9781578262427
Verlag: Hatherleigh Press,U.S., 2007

Inhaltsangabe

IMPROVE YOUR VISION, REDUCE WRINKLES AND REDNESS, AND RESTORE OVERALL EYE HEALTH

It can happen any time. Your eyes feel tired. You rub them. You look at yourself in the mirror and see lines, wrinkles, bags, redness that were never there before. Dry eye often starts as a minor irritation but can develop into a deeper problem affecting your vision and appearance.

Approximately 77 million Americans suffer from dry eye (also known as
dysfunctional tear syndrome). And traditional solutions, such as eyedrops and eyelid surgery, may actually make the problem worse.

The Dry Eye Remedy is the first book to give dry eye sufferers simple and
practical ways to restore eye health and appearance without surgery. Robert Latkany, M.D., offers:
• an innovative Home Eye Spa program with a soothing eye-cleansing massage
• easy environmental and lifestyle changes to help you look and feel better
• cutting-edge research on which medications and procedures may help and which to avoid.

The Dry Eye Remedy is an essential tool to ensure there is “not a dry eye in the house.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Latkany, M.D., a board-certified ophthalmologist, is the founder and director of the Dry Eye Clinic at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary as well as the Dry Eye Center of New York, the first center in the area devoted to dry eye disorders. Actively involved in dry eye research, he graduated from Columbia University and the Boston University School of Medicine, and now lives and practices in New York City.

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INTRODUCTION

What’s the Big Deal About Dry Eyes?

An estimated 30 percent of adult Americans are afflicted with dry eye, a disorder that adversely affects the tear film, which is the essential coating that protects the surface of the eye,washes away debris and irritants, and creates a crystal-clear window through which we see.

Those tens of millions of dry eye sufferers are the tip of the iceberg. For it is considered likely if not inevitable that everyone will experience the discomfort, irritation, displeasing appearance, and potential visual blurring of dry eye disorder at some point in their lives–if they haven’t already.

In other words, we’re all susceptible, and the categories of people deemed particularly susceptible are as wide-ranging as the population. Contact lens wearers, people with allergies, peri-menopausal women, people who have undergone laser eye surgery or cosmetic eye surgery: all of these–and others–may be said to be especially prone to dry eye disorder.

But…

Do you work in front of a computer all day? Spend your evenings glued to the television set? Have difficulty reading even a page-turner of a novel or your local newspaper? Find that you need a new prescription for your eyeglasses every two years? Notice that the whites of your eyes are kind of red?

Chances are good you have or will develop dry eye.

Do your eyes sometimes feel “gritty”? Are they crusty in the morning till you have your shower? Are there bags under your eyes that make you look a lot older than you are?

These, too, are symptoms of dry eye.

There’s one certainty about these symptoms: untreated, they will only get worse. For dry eye is a progressive disorder. In fact, one reason we are hearing so much more about it today is that the first wave of Baby Boomers is just now coming into its 60s and just now beginning to feel the effects of dry eye, and the legendary refusal of the Boomer generation to accept the effects of growing older is often expressed vocally and loudly. Since the elderly are the fastest-growing population sector in the country, that decibel level is unlikely to go down any time soon.

The lesson, however, is clear: Don’t wait. Don’t put off treatment of dry eye till you’re ready to scream along with the Baby Boomers.Whatever your age, you would be wise to start now to deal with the symptoms of dry eye. Begin today to do the things
that can make you feel and look better so you break the back of this disorder before it robs you of vision or ages the appearance of your eyes well before time–and while it’s still relatively easy for treatment to make a difference.

For while there is as yet no cure for dry eye, there are many, many options for dealing with the disorder so as to keep the eyes as healthy and youthful–looking as possible.

That’s what this book is about.

Symptoms and Effects

Dry eye is almost a stealth disorder.Your eyes are tired, or they feel irritated, or they’re looking red-and you tend not to give it a second thought.You suppose it’s normal, and you get yourself some drops from the drugstore and forget all about it.

You shouldn’t. Eye discomfort is not normal, and what you assess as minor irritation could be a signal of a deeper disorder or could grow into a major problem. Sensations of stinging, burning, grittiness, and itching in the eyes; sensitivity to light; the feeling that there is something in the eye; soreness, redness, the inability to wear contact lenses for very long; an aged and wrinkled appearance and the area around the eyes: these may all be symptoms of dry eye disorder.All should be reported to your doctor. All should be dealt with medically–and all are most certainly covered by health insurance plans.

But dry eye is more than discomfort. The clinical term for what these symptoms represent is “thief of sight,” as the instability the disorder causes to the eye’s tear film impairs quality of vision bit by bit. At the same time, the disorder’s intermittent but chronic irritation saps the person’s energy and robs the body of its natural vigor. All of this can erode the individual’s ability to read, drive at night, or even use the phone or an ATM machine.

It can also affect more than your eyes. One patient of mine, a high-level corporate executive I’ll call Philip, told me his dry eye was such a persistent annoyance–so utterly preoccupying when he was trying to work–that he actually forgot the names of co-workers. Pain in the eye, after all, is pain you cannot get away from; it can be distracting, and it can affect your state of mind, your mood, and your productivity, as Philip’s case makes clear.

Think about people who work all day in front of a computer screen–and there are more and more such people with every passing year.They’re concentrating hard, focusing on the screen. And although the work may not be particularly stressful, by 3:00 in the afternoon, they feel exhausted, and the pace of their work ebbs, slows, then crashes to a halt. The problem? We tend to blink less when we concentrate. Less blinking means the tear film isn’t coating and protecting the eye. Result: you feel tired, you soon can’t concentrate, you lose focus–your productivity takes a nosedive. Can dry eye be blamed for lowered productivity in today’s offices? For some of it, certainly.

Dry eye can also affect the way you look.You tend to rub your tired or irritated eyes.The rubbing exacerbates the irritation. You squint to get rid of the irritation.You look at yourself in the mirror and see lines, wrinkles, bags, redness that were never there before.

Or maybe you’re an allergy sufferer–and the number of allergy sufferers, so great as to be impossible to estimate, continues to increase. Allergies tend to locate in the eyes, where they cause inflammation. Unhappily, most anti-allergy medicines only worsen the dry eye dysfunction. Result? Allergy sufferers rub their eyes almost automatically; over the long term, this stretches and wrinkles the skin, causing a telltale old-eyes look.

No one wants to look that way. No one wants to feel the tiredness, irritation, and discomfort that dry eye produces. And certainly no one wants to neglect the health of their eyes such that they may damage their appearance, feel chronic discomfort, or imperil their vision.

You don’t have to.

Dry Eye and Me

My experience with dry eye is both personal and professional. I was diagnosed with the disorder when I was in my early 20s, so I can empathize, virtually symptom for symptom, with other dry eye sufferers. But it’s what I’ve seen as a practicing ophthalmologist that has prompted me to specialize exclusively in dry eye–and to write this book.

I’ve seen this pervasive disorder affect people’s lives in profound ways, and I’ve seen it all too often go unnoticed, undiagnosed or under-diagnosed, unmanaged and under-treated. A patient I’ll call Bill came to my office after getting his sixth new eyeglass prescription in seven years. After spending $500 per new pair of glasses, Bill’s wallet was feeling as deprived as Bill was feeling befuddled. Bill told me that his vision sometimes turned blurry–”I can be reading the paper, and suddenly it’ll go all blurry on me,” he said, but it would then just as suddenly return to “normal.”

Bill assumed that his fluctuating vision was a matter of visual acuity; in fact, it sounded to me like a typical symptom of dry eye. It wasn’t an imperfect prescription that...

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Verlag
Hatherleigh Press,U.S.
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1578262429
ISBN 13 
9781578262427
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
216
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Verantwortliche Person
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