Hi! I can’t begin to convey my excitement for scleral lenses and all their various applications through text – but I’m going to try. They are incredible. And for the patients that need them – certainly life changing. There are numerous reasons why a patient may seek a scleral contact lens fit but here, briefly, I’m going to talk about their use for dry eye.
For many reasons, patients with dry eye (or as I like to refer to it as …ocular inflammation!) struggle greatly with wearing a traditional soft contact lens. Problems include intolerance, poor vision, lens awareness, redness, and even infection. That’s where the benefits of scleral lenses can step in and solve some of these issues while still correcting vision and in come cases, providing therapeutic relief.
Just to sing some of their praises – scleral lenses don’t actually touch the cornea - they vault over it. And in that vault space is fluid. And in that fluid, we can sometimes put a cocktail of healthy, regenerating components that will create a sort of “bath of moisture” that the cornea sits in while the lens is on. This both provides immediate relief (ahhhhh) and long-term healing of the corneal tissue (yay!).
I have a patient that has a long history of severe dry that I had fit in sclerals just recently and just saw her for a follow up and she was so so happy – remarking that this is the first time in 7 years that she’s able to function without the constant pain of dry eye. She admitted there were days she could not get out of bed due to the toll that her ocular inflammation was taking on her and now – she’s happy and joyful and able to do everything she wants and needs to do. I have hundreds of stories like this and I just hope that anyone that thinks this could be an option for them to please come in for a consultation and talk to me about it. Sclerals are truly life changing.
More later on these incredible lenses and their other applications.