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BLOG: We need a name for TrueTear use
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OK. You just unpacked your brand new, ultra clean and cool TrueTear unit. It’s fully charged and ready to use. You’ve loaded up your silicone gel tip, turned on your iPhone camera, logged in to Facebook Live, and just when you get ready to insert the tips and push the button, you stop: What are we going to call it when we use TrueTear?
We need a word or a phrase to use when we tell our friends what we did.
I’m serious. Something as cool and useful as TrueTear (Allergan) needs a cool and useful handle to describe the act of neurostimulation. We can’t just leave it to chance. The thing that sticks is going to come up in the first few weeks after it hits the market. As an eye doc in the dry eye disease space, I can tell you for sure that we don’t want anything as pretentious as “vape” is for so-called “smokeless smoking.”
It doesn’t seem as if anything is set in stone just yet. There is one term that I’ve heard that probably needs to be discouraged, though. I’ve seen a couple of very early adopters/doctors/AGN folks using the term “stim” or “stimming” to describe what they are doing with their TrueTear. This particular term is fraught with emotion and negative connotations in the autism community. Let’s all please take the lead and discourage this one so that we as a community do not cause unnecessary discomfort for those folks.
So what do you think? What’ll it be? My vote is “pulse” or “pulsing” (no surprise if you read my column this month). A case can be made for “buzz” or “buzzing,” too. Just think about the marketing possibilities with that one. Maybe we can get Sean Penn to reprise his Spicoli character for the campaign. You know, still getting “buzzed” all these years later, just in a healthier way.
Let’s do give it some thought before it happens on its own.
Disclosure: White reports he is a consultant for Bausch + Lomb, Allergan, Shire and Eyemaginations; is on the speakers board for Bausch + Lomb, Allergan and Shire; and has a financial interest in TearScience.