Academy dreaming

ByDarrell E. White, MD

Well, what did you think? How was your American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting experience? Learn anything new or interesting? Although there was an awful lot of chatter about dry eye syndrome / ocular surface disease in our meetings, there wasn’t a whole lot of truly new stuff I came across in my admittedly short AAO experience.

It seems to me we are in a bit of a “consolidation” period in the dry eye world. The early adopters among us have made their choices of drugs and devices, and those among us who talk about such stuff have made public our picks. Now come the “great middle,” or mainstream adopters, who will parse the science and try to read the tea leaves left behind to determine a) whether they will jump in and aggressively treat dry eye with medications and b) which path they will take regarding those meds and machines.

As I’ve said before, the science behind what we do to treat dry eye syndrome / ocular surface disease is very cool and very strong. So much so that this “Black Box” tech guy — tell me that what’s in the “Black Box” of a medicine or device works and is safe and I’ll figure out how to make it better — actually opens up the box to learn the details of the science within. There are some very cool tools at our disposal.

There are a couple of equally cool things coming that I know of, and certainly many things no one has told me about, I’m sure! For now we are what is best described as a “commercial phase,” in which we are beseeched to buy one or another competing product.

After its “coming out” party at the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery meeting, I bet Rapid Pathogen Screening was a pretty popular booth in Chicago, and its publicity probably put a little extra wind in TearLab’s sails, too.

Just remember to look at the science underlying the sales pitch and evaluate how any device or drug fits into your very particular dry eye syndrome / ocular surface disease clinic.