Know More About Digital Eye Strains & Dry Eyes!

Hello,

I am Professor Dr. Sonia Nankani, I have been in practice for almost 23 years and I am consulting an ophthalmologist. Today I am going to discuss with you the topic which is kind of growing in India like an epidemic. There are almost three billion people around the world who are using the internet and this is growing at a speed of 10-12%. Out of these people, we have found that 50-70% of the people have a screen time of more than 3 hours and those who have a screen time of over 3 hours are likely to come to our clinics complaining of redness, pain, watering, headaches, doubling of vision difficulty, to focus on the screen and sometimes even on the inability to look into the screen. Along with this, they may have severe photophobia. Now all of this basically contribute or is contributed by two conditions that are going on to develop the eyes. One of them is known as the digital eye strain and the other one is the dry eyes. Now, these are kind of intertwined but everything is not just dry eyes here and treating them we just plain eye drops or tear substitute is probably not going to give us as much relief as is required. We are finding that what is going on with these patients is that they are having or rather they have developed by ocular visual function dysfunctions which amount to the inability to keep focus or rather make the eyes work together. So uniocular when we say is the function of one eye singularly but God has not given us our eyes like the fish on the side of our face, we have eyes in front of our face. As a result, lots of our visual functions are a result of both eyes working together. Now these visual functions which are known as the binocular visual functions are basically of two types which help us to hold focus one of them is known as convergence and the other is accommodation.

Now in computer users who are using computers over three hours, they kind of develop a problem which is known as convergence insufficiency which means they are not able to hold on to a focus clearly and that is why it is convergence insufficiency. And the other is the inability to change focus which is a failure of accommodation or different types of accommodative functions, the management for this is extremely simple and it is catching up in our country now. So this can be treated without the help of really having to wear some special glasses or some surgeries or some eye drops. This all it needs is to rebuild these two functional losses one can just do some eye exercises and rebuild or reboot their eyes. There are certain software which is available in our country and they do help in building and one can sit at their own desk and do these exercises if they are very scientifically produced. I have been using something called bionics for a long time now and results are excellent with it and my patients go back without headaches and without eye strains and they go back to their world, to their digital world. I would say. So that’s one part of it and the second part of it is the dry eyes that develop because of infrequent blinking and this can be treated through different mechanisms now. So there are some advanced forms of dry eye treatments besides the eye drops, one of them is with the use of some light, modalities and which is put onto the face like a mask and some LED lights are given and these help in expressing more tears from the eye glands. So these are the different ways in which we are doing it, we are trying to manage digital eye strain and dry eyes and of course, the 20-20-20 rule does apply the ergonomic stuff help make sure you are sitting well on your table with your computer placed at the right distance, there is proper lighting and your chair has the perfect ergonomics. So there are a lot of things, a lot of other things that help keep looking off the screen every 20 minutes for 20 seconds and keep your distance around 20 feet away, look away at 20 feet and so this way it does help to minimize the effects of the digitalised tree. I hope you have liked my little input and this video. And in case you want to find out more about the treatment modalities that I am talking about, you can find me Lybrate.com.

Thank you.