From the beginning to the end of human life, many of us may face various eye health issues and one of the common issue is dry eye. Tear lubricant or artificial tear drop used to protect our eyes from getting dry. Basically it help us to maintain our eye to stay healthy, nourish and and keep our eye surface moisturized.
These eyedrops were mainly used to overcome the eye dryness that caused by aging factor, dryness side effect from certain medication, medical or health condition, surgery related to eyes and environmental factors such as smoky and windy condition.
Tear drops or more likely to know as artificial tear drops are available off the shelf, which means we can purchase it without a prescription. There is no specific brand to recommend to use as your dry eye treatment eyedrops, as every single form of dry drops reacts in different way to your eyes depends on your sensitivity level.
But most of the available tear drop in markets are knows as one of the effective eyedrops such as Systane Ultra, Tear Naturale, Refresh Tears. For that, you may try a few different brands before you find out which one can work the best and effectively for you.
Tear drops may not function to keep your eyes moisturized only, some artificial tear drops also do promote healing in any effective way like repairing our superficial damage eye cells. Since artificial tears contain some agents and solution to keep it thick, it will stay in our eye surface for quite long time and also may decrease tear evaporation.
In market, there are two type of artificial tear drop:
- Preservative tear drop. This type of tear drop is already available in market for long time ago and it comes in a small multidose bottles. This bottles can be kept for few months as it contains preservative (chemical agents) to keep it lasting till the expiry date. This chemicals are basically used to discourage the growth of bacteria once the bottle has been open for use. Since there is a preservative, your eyes may feel stingy or irritated due to other dryness in the eyes too.
- Preservative-free tear drops. For non preservative tear drop, you may not offenly heard about it and this type of tear drop are produced in tube or in a small single dose vials. But these drops also do have their own advantages over dry eyes. This drops has less additives and it contain 8 onz only in a tube or vial. Thus, you may used it 4 times in a day (ex; morning, afternoon, evening and night, when ever you need it. This type has fewer additives and is generally recommended if you apply artificial tears more than four times a day, or if you have moderate or severe dry eyes.
Some artificial tears are also available as nonprescription gels or gel inserts. These may cause temporary blurred vision due to the thick viscosity.
The next step might be to try one or more artificial tear ointments, if you still don’t have relief after trying various products. The best time to apply ointment is before you go to bed as you may not feel disturbed by the temporary blurred vision.
But always remember that it would be better to seek for an eye care practitioner to understand more about your eye sight condition and the suitable treatment to treat your eye sight problems.