Hi ,New and needing advice!

[Lynda]

Hi,i would be really grateful to anyone who could offer me advice. Since as a young teenager i watched my mum using "Blue,dazzling,whitening eye drops" i followed suit.
Unfortunately that was about 40years ago!I have'nt used them for the whole of that time.I suppose then they were used as a sort of cosmetic!(they were almost marketed as such).I have had problems with red eyes for a long time.But never did i connect the two.So the redder my eyes got,the more i used them. I went to the us on holiday last year and was really pleased to find some "maximum strength" ones,which worked brilliantly.So i bought 4 lots and took them home! Over the last couple of years i've asked the dr and the optician about the state of my eyes.The dr had'nt a clue and was quite dismissive,the optician said my vision is fine and my eyes are ok.
So i did what we all do when desperate,i "Googled"! I found this forum.
I have thrown my eyedrops away and gone "cold turkey".Please is there anything i can do? I cant believe i have inadvertently done this to myself!
My eyes are at their worst in the morning and under bright lights.After a week with no drops thet dont look good!but surprisingly not as bad as i thought they might be.
They feel tired and strained,not really sore,sometimes a bit blurry anduncomfotable.
After reading some of the posts i feel i'm lucky i can still see,also lucky to have found out what it is. Am i too late to ever get them right? Thanks

[littlemermaid]

Hi Lynda ~ Do you want to list exactly what's in the drops? You might get feedback on how the eye surface recovers from the specific ingredients.

I think you need a proper Cornea & External Disease Ophthalmologist's advice on how to get the eye surface back to health, what's happened to the tear film and tearing functions, and inflammation. (Eg we are using preservative-free Celluvisc (carmellose sodium) and Hycosan (sodium hyaluronate) but, as you say, cold turkey might be recommended if the docs judge surface healing is better without. But leaving it without help might not enable the eye surface to recover so well, depending on the condition. If there is inflammation, sometimes they want to get that under control before the other good stuff can happen.) Healing the eye surface is a wonderful doc skill and experience is best.

If I were you and the optometrists and GP were being dismissive/clueless and I couldn't get an NHS referral to a decent hospital eye clinic, I would consider paying Private to see a cornea & external/surface disease specialist from one of the regional teaching hospitals (c£135-180) for detailed advice on what's happened and on what attention would best heal the eye surface and restore the tear film components (http://www.dryeyezone.com/talk/showt...octor-who-will). Sometimes they take you on in the NHS clinic after. Obviously you would take along the various drops you've used to show the expert, or an internet printout if you have chucked them all.

Problem is if your local NHS eye service is overstretched, there's a danger a GP/high street optometrist may not feel a cornea specialist NHS referral is justified for this red eye and may be under pressure to treat 'in the community'. So there's some advantage in yours being non-starters on this. In the GPs' case, they sometimes feel forced to attempt this even without an ophthalmoscope or tonometer (no GP should be prescribing steroids, especially without monitoring the eye pressure). Aaargh, noooo. Surface inflammation is not yet fairly recognised in NHS targets as a cause of blindness or debilitation, whereas if you have raised intraocular pressure or other signs of glaucoma you would be straight into an eye clinic and monitored regularly because this a current treatment target with funding.

The protocol is 3 months unimproved red eye on standard GP solutions necessitates a referral http://www.cks.nhs.uk/red_eye. A wise GP/UK optometrist would not attempt to diagnose and treat eyes without specialist eye disease qualifications. But it sounds like you need assessment, ongoing follow-up and management advice for a dry eye condition anyway. If you need to access an emergency eye clinic, you can describe this as an eyedrop reaction to qualify for their 'inflammation on drug reaction' criteria - speak to the triage nurse. The goal would be to get an ophth who knows what they're doing to have a look and assess what's happened/ing, and then keep you on their list for ongoing management.

Once you're in there, the consultants and cornea team will not judge; imagine what they see all day every day, especially contact lens related. They will want to help, esp if you're paying. They will be irritated about the brightening drops being sold in the high street to people who don't know they're dodgy and trust the chemists. There is nothing to beat yourself up about but every reason to seek the best available advice now. I think these whitening drops are a dangerous con. There should be warnings on the bottle.

Sorry this goes ranting on a bit; I love the NHS eye service and feel very strongly about underfunding our ophthalmologists and this is an example of an undiagnosed red eye that slips through the gaps. Hope some of it's useful and you find the help you need.

[darkhorse81]

Yeah, it really is amazing how many mediocre eye doctors there are out there. Even the good ones may know a lot about certain conditions but I'd say we're still in the bronze age of eye medicine, better than the stone age but still very primitive. Most eye doctors are just happy if you're not going blind, and I guess they do have perspective with the types of patients they see, but it can all be very dismissive if you do want to cure your problems. I know I'm not going blind but I'd still like to fix my eye problems cause they can be debilitating in their own ways.

[littlemermaid]

Hi Darkhorse, These eye-whitening drops and procedures seem awful to me. How damaging must they be. It reminds me totally of the 18th century when people put belladonna (deadly nightshade) in their eyes to get big pupils (yeh, I know we still do this with atropine very time we get a back of the eye exam), and lead on their faces to get white skin which eventually destroyed the face.

Re the study of specialist medicine - don't these guys read the current clinical guidelines, update on journals, and use the internet to keep current? I just use PubMed and Google Scholar and Rebecca's blog and information brokers like Journal Alerts to get a news stream. Surely there are search engines for practicising docs to keep up to date with the research these days? Are they all on the golf course?