Why You Should Always Seek Treatment for Dry Eye

Dry eye is a prevalent condition that causes your eyes to feel itchy, gritty, or tired. Oddly, it can also cause excessive eye-watering as your eyes attempt to compensate for their lack of lubrication. Milder cases of dry eye might seem like just an inconvenience that should subside on its own, but dry eye can be a more severe problem than you might imagine.

Here at Marano Eye Care, a division of Opthalmology New Jersey, our expert eye care team provides treatment for dry eye that can alleviate symptoms and prevent the daunting list of possible complications and risks. 

Here’s why it’s a good idea to seek treatment for dry eye any time you get symptoms:

Tears wash debris away from your eyes

A lack of tears means your tears can’t serve one of their primary functions: keeping dirt, eyelashes, and other debris out of your eyes. Having something stuck in your eye is more than a little irritating, and a particle on your eye’s surface can scratch the cornea. When there are no tears to help lift debris from your eye, you’re at a higher risk of experiencing irritation. 

Beyond general discomfort, the scratch left by dirt in your eye could let in bacteria. This can lead to an eye infection, which can further develop into a corneal ulcer. Without prompt treatment, a corneal ulcer can spread to cause permanent eyeball damage, which can even lead to blindness. 

It’s best to treat your dry eye before any of this happens to save yourself the discomfort, possible blindness, and the costs of treating such complications. 

Your contact lenses may stop fitting

There are innumerable benefits to correcting your vision with contact lenses, including a lack of change in your appearance (as opposed to glasses) and the convenience of not having to keep track of eyeglasses, which are easy to lose. Dry eyes mean dry contact lenses, which leads to additional irritation, redness, and grittiness. 

If you’re not careful, dry contact lenses can stick to the surface of the eye. Removing them in this case is extremely difficult. Until you treat your dry eyes, you should only use glasses to correct your refractive error. 

The discomfort only gets worse

Irritation of the eyes due to dry eye can increase the longer you go without treatment, but the discomfort doesn’t stop there. Due to increased light sensitivity and trouble keeping your eyes open, dry eye can lead to eyestrain and headaches, too. While research is ongoing regarding the link between dry eye and headaches, there appears to be a connection between the two. 

You can also develop conjunctivitis (pink eye) as a complication of dry eye, which is the result of inflammation of the clear layer of cells over the whites of your eye. 

If you have dry eye symptoms, don’t ignore them. Schedule an appointment with us at Marano Eye Care at any of our locations in Denville, Livingston, or Newark, New Jersey, today.