There are a lot of different medications that we need to use on your eyes for a lot of different conditions. If we give them to you orally, your whole body is going to interact with that medication, so you're going to have side effects throughout your body. If we can give you a medication topically through an eye drop or an injection or something directly into your eye, only your eye is getting the majority of that medication. So we can really focus and target that specific area. And then you don't get all of the side effects that the rest of your body might get in an oral medication.

Eye drops

Eyedrops have been around for a number of years. They can treat anything from simple, dry eye conditions. Could be an over the counter, could be a prescription medication. It could be to treat a bacteria, could be to treat a virus on the surface of the eye, even a fungus. Most recently, we've seen a change with the new eyedrops. We've seen three or four new drops, which is really kind of a change because for 20 years we had almost no new eyedrops in the area of glaucoma. So now we've been able to have new drops that go at it from a different direction, meaning a different mechanism of action. But the real important thing is all of these drops are down to one application per day, which really makes a difference when we think of compliance. People forget. They put one drop in and, oh, I'm supposed to put two to three in. They forget. And so, we're really not getting the effectivity that we should. But now with these one-drop a day, it's a lot easier for these patients to manage.

Eyedrops are changing all the time. They're coming out with new ones all the time. New medications for different types of diseases. Mid-forties, most people end up needing reading glasses, right? Called presbyopia. You can't really see as well up close anymore. So, we use reading glasses to sharpen things up close. There are some eyedrops that have come out that we put into your eyes and it changes your pupil size and, kind of like a camera, it increases your depth of focus. It only works in a very small group of patients that don't really need glasses that have very early presbyopia. So, this is the first iteration of this. As they get this kind of nailed down, hopefully there'll be an eye drop that frees us from those reading glasses, but it's not quite there yet.

Eye injections

Eye injections are kind of scary, but they really don't have to be. And there are so many different types of eye injections. There are eye injections that go on the skin tissue on top of your eye or your eyelids around your eye. Those are very similar. Then obviously there are the eye injections that go directly into the eyeball, a little bit more serious, and those are generally performed by ophthalmologists or the medical doctors.

Eye drops are not always able to get to the site and have enough concentration of the drug to really be effective in the treatment. So, then we need an injection just underneath the clear covering of the outer part of the eye called the conjunctiva. It goes between the conjunctiva and the sclera, and it has very, very good effectiveness when we use, for example, an anti-inflammatory medication.

Now, there are some conditions where we do need to inject medication directly into the eye. If you have bleeding on the inside of the eye is one of the main reasons. So, patients with severe diabetes or patients that have age related macular degeneration, they can develop these really leaky blood vessels.

What occurs in the eye is that we get actually some vessel leakage in diabetes. Sometimes it's leaking actual blood itself, red blood cells in serum, and sometimes it's just the liquid, the serum that will leak through the periphery of the vessel wall. And if this occurs, we can actually get fluid that will bubble up, if you will, underneath the retina and cause swelling in that central area. This causes a person to have vision that's very distorted, so this is where the injection can bring their vision back to a normal status, usually within a couple of days.

About EyeMed

EyeMed Vision Care is a leader in vision benefits.1 We deliver stand-out vision benefits, and an outstanding member experience across America’s largest vision network.2 EyeMed is based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Learn more at eyemed.com.

  1. EyeMed internal book of business, 2023.
  2. Based on the EyeMed Insight network and analysis of competitors’ largest networks via competitor data, 2024