Assessing dry eye requires an expert, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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If you’ve been trying to manage your dry eyes yourself with the multitude of products available over the counter, you may be causing yourself more harm than good. That’s because dry eye may be a symptom of a number of health conditions that should be assessed, and dry eye itself can cause harm over the long term. Lauren Gormley, an optometrist at Johns Hopkins, explains.

It really does come down to that ocular surface being disrupted and it can come to any number of things. There can be environmental factors, there can be health factors, there's gender specific factors, lifestyle specific factors but when that tear film becomes unstable or the tear film becomes deficient that's when you will get eye discomfort, and you will get changes in vision and structurally when the tear film and the ocular surface are out of balance. The inflammation increases and then there's damage to the structures of the ocular surface.              :30

Gormley says successfully managing dry eye must begin with why it’s happening. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.