What’s to Be Done About Everyone’s Dry Eyes?

I first reached for that tiny bottle of drops more than two decades ago, around the time I began to hear my own blinks and my eyes started to feel as if they’d been dabbed with cotton balls. Now, just about everyone I know depends on artificial tears.

- BY GLORIA DAWSON

TO GET TO THE ROOT of what seems like a dry-eye epidemic, I called Dr. Christopher Starr, an ophthalmologist at Weill Cornell Medicine–NewYork-Presbyterian who specializes in the condition. He says patients and doctors haven’t been taking it seriously enough.

WHAT'S BUGGING OUR EYES

Starr explains that the problem with prolific eye-drops usage is “it doesn’t treat the underlying disease. It just treats the symptom briefly,” while the collection of problems under the “dry eye” umbrella is vast and complicated. Many are becoming more prevalent. A knock-on effect of the pandemic is increased screen time that hasn’t abated; when we look at screens, we blink less frequently, which leads to drier eyes, he says.