Managing Dry Eye: The Need for a Short-Term Treatment (Part 2)
Whitney Hauser: Hi. I’m Dr. Whitney Hauser with Dry Eye Coach Podcast. And today I am joined by Dr. Walt Whitley. Dr. Whitley is the director of Optometric Services at Virginia Eye Consultants. And he also oversees the Dry Eye Center there with some of his colleagues. So, welcome to our program today, Walt. How are you?
Walt Whitley: I’m doing excellent. How are you, Whitney?
Whitney Hauser: I’m doing great. I’m doing great. We’re going to be talking today about educating patients about treating their dry eye disease and including a feature called flares. I’m going to kind of dive into some questions and then we’re going to get some of your perspective on how you talk to your patients about this particular aspect of dry eye disease. To kind of kick us off, why is there a need for a short-term treatment for dry eye? I mean, we have a lot of chronic therapies out there. Why do you think there’s a need for a short-term treatment for dry eye disease?
Walt Whitley: That’s a great question, Whitney. And when it comes to the need, it’s because patients are suffering. You just mentioned the word chronic. We’ve always heard about a chronic inflammatory condition that gets worse over time. However, patients, they’re suffering. What we need to do is have treatments that are available that can help provide them rapid relief. You mentioned dry eye flares. With the flares, when is this going to occur? Oftentimes patients don’t know. How often does it occur? They don’t know either. But they know it does happen. Unfortunately, some patients feel that it’s pretty, pretty common. They don’t realize that it’s actually dry eye or maybe associated with dry eye. We’re all familiar with the various symptoms with dry eye, the sandiness, burning that patients may have. We know the [1:58] is inflammation as well that leads to that chronic vicious cycle that we’ve talked about. But when it comes to the flares…
Whitney Hauser: You know…
Walt Whitley: Go ahead.
Whitney Hauser: No. You hit on a great point, Walt, and that’s, they don’t know when it’s going to happen. We don’t know when it’s going to happen. But the education component of at least talking to them about it. The fact that they’re already, probably, experiencing it and now kind of putting a name on it. If they’re not already experiencing, what might happen is really important because, by the time it’s happening, it’s hard to get into our offices, sometimes. Especially with what we’re seeing right now with COVID-19, you can’t just jump into your optometrist’s office at the drop of a hat. It takes some time. The education, I think, probably is more important than ever.
Walt Whitley: Oh, definitely. The sandiness, the grittiness, that’s what we always think of.
Whitney Hauser: Right.
Walt Whitley: But what matters to patients is looking at the quality of vision. Patients, they do experience blur, and you and I have talked about this before, that blur or fluctuations in vision is a sign of dry eye disease. If patients are suffering from that, they definitely want treatment for that. I mean, there’s numerous reasons why there’s a need for this. You mentioned chronic, once again. Chronic means long-term therapy. But when we look at compliance, yes, we can tell a patient what to do, do they do it? Yes or no. Short-term is going to be much easier than long-term management because we know the data shows that over time, patients are going to be, not necessarily compliant, but adherent and that’s what we want when it comes to our patients; them owning their condition, owning their disease state and their treatment. When we look at the adherence data, within a year, about 60% of patients may have discontinued their therapy.
Whitney Hauser: Right.
Walt Whitley: We need to get, we need shorter therapy to get in, get out, address their concerns,
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