New Year’s resolutions range from personal to professional in dry eye disease care
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Happy New Year! Yes, I know that it has been almost a month since New Year’s Eve, but I missed seeing you that night. What kind of a friend would I be if I never gave you a New Year’s salutation, however tardy?
Before I get to this year’s list of dry eye disease (DED) resolutions chez SkyVision, I thought I would take this opportunity to remind everyone of who I am, what I am doing here and, just as importantly, what I am not doing. For more than 10 years, I have been the recipient of the generosity of Healio. It has given me several platforms from which I get to share my thoughts on DED in a column and on a blog and all things eye care by way of a podcast (yes, Tal, I do have a couple of new episodes coming). It is a continuing source of astonishment that my particular variety of radical honesty has not only found a home here but has been strongly supported and encouraged. Indeed, it sometimes seems that the amount of support coming my way is directly proportional to the amount of controversy involved.
So, what, exactly, am I doing? Decades ago, what I did was go to work. Every day I woke up and went to my office or to the operating room. After a couple of years post-residency, I got a little taste of what life was like as a speaker and consultant. Not gonna lie, it was pretty fun. There I was, a punk kid just north of 30 years old, directly out of residency, and folks were asking me what I thought about stuff. We had a meeting of the board of directors of White Family Inc. to discuss how my career might go, and the chair of the board (not me!) suggested that rather than becoming a road warrior that I plan to be home for dinner every night. Thus began what my friend Bob Dempsey has called “D. White’s sabbatical.”
I went to work and spent every day doing what we would all recognize as the blocking and tackling of the game of comprehensive ophthalmology.
While doing so, I discovered that physicians like you and me, docs who spend their days doing the heavy lifting of patient care, are not well represented in the offices of the folks who make the stuff we use to make our patients better. Little was known about what we do or how we do it. Decisions about all manner of drugs and devices were made with barely a nod to the people who would use them. It was Joe Schultz, a vice president at Allergan, who first saw both the folly and the opportunity to access this previously untapped resource, the cumulative knowledge of the doctors who simply go to work.
Here, for the last 10 years or so, I have tried to share a little bit of just that. Riding on the coattails of giants such as Mike Lemp, Hank Perry, Ken Kenyon and Marguerite McDonald and joined in spirit by contemporaries such as Mark Milner, Helen Wu, Cynthia Matossian and literally too many others to mention, I have tried to use my columns and blog posts to help all of you who do what I do each day: take care of DED patients of all sorts. I am not paid to do this, nor do I receive any kind of compensation from any companies that may be mentioned. Indeed, I think my hand is even to the point that I offer equal amounts of praise and, I hope, constructive criticism. I make no claim to the mantel of THE representative of the regular eye doc, simply that I am trying my best to be A representative.
Now, on to a few New Year’s resolutions.
1. There are an awful lot of really smart people, both MDs/DOs and ODs, taking care of patients with DED. Heaven knows the amount of knowledge about this diabolical disease is growing at near exponential rates. I resolve to be a better listener and to be more open to changing my own DED protocols to incorporate the work of these super smart, super dedicated DED docs.
2. A few years ago, SkyVision became a center open to doing clinical research trials in addition to the business process research that we are known for. In 2022, I resolve that we will become much better at the nuts and bolts of clinical research so that we can earn the trust given to us by superstars such as John Hovanesian, Marian Macsai and Pedram Hamrah.
3. There are some cool DED products that are literally just over the horizon. I have written about some of them here and on the blog. When I knew that Restasis (cyclosporine ophthalmic emulsion 0.05%, Allergan) was coming, I “stockpiled” patient candidates so that I was ready to prescribe immediately. I resolve to consciously do the same thing as we await new offerings from the likes of Tarsus, Aldeyra, Bausch + Lomb and others.
4. Neurogenic eye pain that originates from DED is a scourge. It is beyond the capacity of almost all private practice eye doctors to adequately care for neurogenic dry eye. Sadly, DED is just as unpopular in most large institutional and academic settings as it is in the private sector. Thankfully, outliers exist. Here in Cleveland, Rony Sayegh is fighting the good fight at the Cleveland Clinic. He joins other stalwarts such as Anat Galor at Bascom Palmer in Miami. I resolve to do whatever I can to encourage other major institutions to develop multidisciplinary teams to care for these patients.
5. In many ways, the torch has been passed from the giants mentioned above, through Mark, Helen, Cynthia and those in our generation, and on to superstars such as Elizabeth Yeu, Chris Starr, Preeya Gupta and Sam Garg. It is a thrill to get to know the new “kids” on the DED block, the budding experts to whom the baton will be passed. If given the chance, I resolve to offer whatever counsel I am allowed in order to give this next generation a leg up in the fight to treat DED.
6. And finally, in 2022 as I have done since 1990, I resolve to go to work. I will wake up each day and head to the clinic or to the OR to do the best I can to help each patient who honors me with the task of caring for their eyes. I will take whatever insight I gain from that experience and share it in the executive suites of the industries that support us by making the drugs and devices we use to do our jobs. And if given the opportunity, I will share what I have learned in those offices, the clinic and the OR with you, here and elsewhere, for however long you will have me.
From the entire White family, I wish you and yours a happy and healthy new year.
- For more information:
- Darrell E. White, MD, can be reached at SkyVision Centers, 2237 Crocker Road, Suite 100, Westlake, OH 44145; email: dwhite@healio.com.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts