January 14, 2022

You’ve Had Your iLUX Treatment; Now What?

So, you’ve had your iLUX treatment and now you’re wondering what to do next? If that’s you, continue reading!

Depending on the severity of your dry eye disease, your doctor will prescribe different home therapies after you’ve had your iLUX treatment to help aid in your improvement. 

After you have your iLUX treatment, it’s very important to be compliant with continued aftercare so that we can continue to improve and keep our meibomian glands clear and functioning properly.

One of these home therapies will include a heat mask, which is going to be different than a simple warm washcloth. This therapy is important because it is going to help keep our meibum (oil) at a nice oily consistently and helps prevent the meibum from thickening up in the meibomian gland again. These heat masks get to a certain temperature and retain heat for the prescribed treatment time, usually about 15-20 minutes once a day.

The next therapy is our blinking exercises. I know what you’re thinking, “blinking exercises, what are those?” – one key part of keeping our meibomian glands healthy is getting the oil out of the glands and onto the surface of the eye. That’s where blinking exercises come into play. They help strengthen the muscle we use while blinking, allowing each blink to be a good complete blink where both upper and lower lids touch to apply enough pressure to secrete the oil. Blinking exercises are definitely a tricky one to get into a routine with because we don’t typically think about blinking, but they are very important to stick to!

The last therapy is a good triglyceride omega-3 and GLA (black currant seed oil) supplement. This helps to promote the good healthy meibum we need within the meibomian glands. The omega-3 property can also help with some inflammation seen on the surface of the eye. 

These are some of the main home therapies that affect the meibomian glands themselves and help us continue to improve after an iLUX treatment. Depending on other issues the doctor may find at your initial evaluation, you will have some additional treatments to treat those specific findings.