Once upon a time, dry eye disease was simple.
Like a desert, an eye with dry eye disease (DED) simply had too little water to get the job done. It makes me chuckle when I see modern medications that have little or nothing to do with tear volume evaluated in clinical trials named after famous deserts.
If you are an eye doctor of a certain age, a moniker that I wear with a wary degree of honor, you remember the ubiquitous archetype of a DED patient created by Allergan (RIP) that defined the dry eye world in the ’90s and ’00s: a 35- to 65-year-old woman, married, three children, 3 years of