Robert Latkany - The Dry Eye Remedy: The Complete Guide to Restoring the Health and Beauty of Your Eyes

To my wife, Barbara

With thanks for putting up with all that pillow talk about dry eye

Every day is still like the first day we met.

By special arrangement with the publisher, the author will donate a portion of the proceeds from the sales of this book to the Sjgrens Syndrome Foundation and to the Society for Womens Health Research to increase awareness of dry eye and to expand information on potential therapies.

I n writing The Dry Eye Remedy, I have learned the extent to which authorship is a collaborative process, so I am pleased to be able to declare my gratitude to the many people who helped make this book possible.

First and foremost, I would like to thank my patients for indirectly encouraging me to establish myself as a dry eye specialist. The experience of treating suffering patients enabled me to perfect the detailed history, examination, and treatment regime for all types of dry eye sufferers. Dry eye is not a condition taught in medical school, and it receives little emphasis in residency training, so it is my patients who really taught me about this condition.

Thanks to Dr. Vickery Trinkaus-Randall for allowing me to be a part of her ophthalmic research team; I hope others will also benefit from such generosity. I am grateful to Dr. Celso Tello and Dr. Joseph Walsh for seeing potential in me and allowing me to train at the New York Eye & Ear Infirmary. To those who believed early on in my passion for treating dry eye, I thank Dr. Monica Lorenzo, Dr. Mark Kupersmith, Dr. Julius Schulman, Dr. Paul Finger, Dr. John Seedor, Dr. Jodi Abramson, Dr. Steven Ali, Dr. Arkady Selenow, Dr. Ann Abadir, and Dr. Robert Ritch for all their dry eye patient referrals. And I thank Dr. Mark Speaker for taking me under his wing and trusting me to pursue the never been done before career of a dry eye specialist.

I am grateful to Susanna Margolis for her editorial helpparticularly impressive for someone who started off with no knowledge of the subject matter. To my agent Sarah Jane Freymann, it was not just a coincidence that we met: I thank you for seeing the potential in this book.

I am grateful also to the folks at Hatherleigh Presseditorial director Andrea Au and publisher Kevin Moranfor their support and for playing an active role in the books development.

I would like to thank my mother Regina and my father Robert for being there for me every day. It is unfortunate that not everyone can be so lucky as to have parents like mine. I still remember every night that they put me to bed and said pleasant dreams. I want also to thank my brother, Dr. Paul Latkany, without whose guidance and support I probably would never have been a physician. And I want my brother Joe and sisters Lianne and Lauren to know what a joy it was to be the youngest in our family. To my father-in-law Jim and mother-in-law Carolyn, I offer fondest appreciation of your encouragement and guidance.

Special thanks to my Uncle Adam, who not only introduced me to the game of golf but, more importantly, taught me the importance of generosity. I am sorry I never got a chance to say thank you, but I think about him every day since the day he passed.

To my beautiful children, Brian and Amandaand those that may comeyou bring a smile to my face whenever I see you. So please stay close by. I hope you will be as passionate about your career as I am about mine.

A n estimated 30 percent of adult Americans are afflicted with dry eye, a disorder that adversely affects the tear film, which is the essential coating that protects the surface of the eye, washes away debris and irritants, and creates a crystal-clear window through which we see.

Those tens of millions of dry eye sufferers are the tip of the iceberg. For it is considered likely if not inevitable that everyone will experience the discomfort, irritation, displeasing appearance, and potential visual blurring of dry eye disorder at some point in their livesif they havent already.

In other words, were all susceptible, and the categories of people deemed particularly susceptible are as wide-ranging as the population. Contact lens wearers, people with allergies, peri-menopausal women, people who have undergone laser eye surgery or cosmetic eye surgery: all of theseand othersmay be said to be especially prone to dry eye disorder.

But

Do you work in front of a computer all day? Spend your evenings glued to the television set? Have difficulty reading even a page-turner of a novel or your local newspaper? Find that you need a new prescription for your eyeglasses every two years? Notice that the whites of your eyes are kind of red?