Dr Bergin is happy to answer any questions you may have, here are a few FAQs from her patients.
What is Dry Eye?
Dry eye is a disease caused by poor tears, either poor quality or low volume.
It has many symptoms like redness, burning, stinging, sandy, gritty sensation, and tired eyes. Even symptoms such as decreased vision, and fluctuations in vision along with sensitivity to light can be signs of dry eye.
It really can impact the quality of life.
Dry eyes should be taken seriously as it can cause corneal scarring and decreased vision. Dry eye can also be signs of other health problems such as autoimmune disease.
Also, patients who’ve had LASIK or other refractive surgeries, along with those who spend hours in front of screens are more susceptible to severe forms of dry eye.
How is Dry Eye Treated?
In the past there have been several options to improve the symptoms of Dry eye, but not researched treatments to get to the root causes.
In our office we have 2 FDA approved devices specifically for the treatment of dry eye disease. Both are used in combination to achieve the best results.
Lipiflow is the first device that uses heat to improve the oily layer of the tears, and the second device uses light, and it’s called Optilight.
Optilight uses light to decrease inflammation.
Light is applied to the skin below the eyes in multiple sessions over time. Improvements in dry eye are usually noticed after the 2nd to 3rd session.
Patients in our office that receive these treatments have a successful reduction in symptoms, and do understand that, although there is no cure for dry eye, research and technology has advanced to enable us to get to the source of the problem vs masking the symptoms with eye drops.
What is Vision Therapy?
Vision Therapy is an individualized treatment program to improve visual skills as it relates to deficient eye focusing, eye teaming, and visual perception.
Lazy eyes, crossed eyes, and difficulty with reading inwriting can be helped with VT.
Although VT does NOT treat dyslexia, VT can improve symptoms of double vision, skipping words, and skipping lines while reading. Also, it can help improve motion sickness as well.
The patients we’ve seen in our office have dramatically improved their quality of life with these in office programs.