Blink rate

[lasiksurvivor]

Blink rate is an important factor that should not be overlooked when treating DES. If your tear film break up is below 5 seconds, it is important to make sure you maintain a good blink rate to keep wetting your eye. This is especially true if you do a lot of computer work (who doesn't?) as the blink rate associated with this type of activity is down around 2 or 3 times a minute! A useful exercise is to practice once a day consiously doing a full blink every 3 seconds for 5 minutes. This will allow the edge of your eyelid to get a good dunk of lubricant from the lower part of your eye and spread it over your eyeball surface. This really helped me. I played a lot of computer games and did a lot of computer work in my job before and after Lasik. I'm sure it did not help things that my blink rate was low. It took about a month or two to improve my blink rate doing this exercise. Hope this helps.

Thanks

[dave25]

Good idea! I will give this a try. Plus it's one of the few things that is absolutely free.

[Rojzen]

blink exercises

Does anyone have access to the blink exercises used by Boston optometrist Dr. Korb and his team? Dr. Korb is a pioneer in mapping the lipid patterns of patients with MGD. I believe he played a big role in the development of Soothe. In any case, when I saw him, years ago, he gave me instruction in an exercise that got the eyelids to open and close with varying degrees of force, and in a particular tempo. My meibomians were already probably too inactive to respond, but the concept behind the exercise seemed sound, to me. The goal seemed to be to get the patient to adopt the habit of more frequent and more robust blinking.

I no longer have the exercise instructions, but perhaps someone here has a version of them to post?