What is dry eyes and why does that happen?
Dry eye occurs when the tear film doesn't properly moisturize the eyes and there's two main types of dry eyes.
The first type is what we call aqueous deficiency. And that is just a fancy way of saying your eyes don't produce enough tears.
This typically happens if you have some kind of underlying auto-immune condition.
Now, the more common type is what we call evaporative dry eye.
And that's when you produce enough tears, but the tear quality that you produced is, not the right balance and your tears evaporate too fast.
So a lot of my patients, they actually complain of watery eyes.
And this is not super intuitive because you know, the body's reflex is actually telling you that the eyes are dry and that's why you're producing more tears.
And then in terms of dry eye itself, it's not very simple. It's quite complex.
There's a lot of factors that play into what makes it people symptomatic or not.
Some factors include age, uf you're a female or male, the medications you're taking, your work environment and the environment you live in,
If you're a contact lens wear and a lot of different things that as physicians, we need to take into account and kind of personalize and tailor our treatments towards each individual.
