Dry Eye Awareness Month 2017

It's that time of year!

This time last year, I was awash in saline, thrashing around trying to figure out how to reshape my DryEyeShop business in the wake of the tsunami of consumer needs - mostly for information and reassurance! - that hit us when Unisol 4 was discontinued. I barely remember noticing the months slip in and out.

Here I am a year later... absolutely chomping at the bit, with newly formed, large, ambitious dreams to make a difference in the world of dry eye needs. There's still some business needs clutching at me desperately but I am making consistent strides in getting it staffed up and more independent and am absolutely determined not to wait any longer to jump back into my first dry eye love, which is education and advocacy. So brace yourselves... July 2017 is just the beginning!

For the remainder of July, though, we're going to do a little bit of an internet dry eye education blitz.

Every day, we'll cover a new topic. You'll see each new topic here in the blog as well as on DryEyeZone's Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest accounts and, if you subscribe to KeratoScoop, you'll also be getting my weekly bulletins summarizing what's going on.

Here's the lay of the land for what's coming:

Week 1 (7/12-18): Facts about dry eye

Daily topics will run the gamut from defining dry eye - both from our perspective as patients, and from a medical research perspective, including the all-new definition of dry eye disease as published in TFOS' DEWS II (whose whole report is also being released this month in Cornea!) - to symptoms, diagnosis, treatments, management, and mental health implications.

Week 2 (7/19-25): Getting help for dry eye

Topics in week 2 will start out focusing on prevention then get into lots of practical strategies for getting good medical care and peer support, as well as managing symptoms at different times of the day, and once again discussing mental health aspects.

Week 3 (7/26-31): Helping others with dry eye

Week 3 takes us into my favorite - advocacy topics. How do we help other patients and what can we do to encourage better research, help get effective drugs available faster, help increase awareness of non medical disease management topics, help get better consumer products designed? And how do motivated, qualified doctors equip themselves to meet our needs?