Blephex

Do you have dry, red, irritated, tired, or burning eyes?

Try BlephEx today, the latest treatment that relieves these bothersome symptoms.

What is BlephEx?

BlephEx is an office-based procedure to deep clean and exfoliates the eyelids and the base of the eyelash. Ideal for removing bacteria, biofilm, Demodex (eyelash lice/mites), dandruff, flakiness, and dead cells.

What is Dry Eye Disease (DED) & blepharitis?

The enigma of dry eye disease has long baffled eye doctors in terms of etiology and treatment, leading to the chronic suffering of tens of millions of people in the US and hundreds of millions WORLDWIDE.

Until very recently the thinking has been that dry eye is complex, confusing, and overlaps several different diseases when in actuality, dry eye can be very simple especially when caught and treated early.

Conventional treatments for dry eye have been replacement therapy with artificial tears or expensive anti-inflammatory eye drops, neither of which addresses the root cause.

The overlap with blepharitis (lid inflammation), another chronic and untreatable disease, was never understood, again leading to constant eye rubbing, redness, and discomfort in millions, with the only medical advice offered to be home lid scrubs.

The missing link was the BIOFILM or EXOTOXINS released by bacteria. Biofilm is a protective substance produced by bacteria that is resistant to nearly everything including antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, surgical scrub, and even our own white cells.

Bacteria begin producing it shortly after birth, but it takes 2-3 decades of accumulation to start producing toxins which are the cause of long-term, low-grade but unrelenting inflammation.

Long-term inflammation slowly degrades our ability to produce tears and causes the redness, eye rubbing, irritation, and itching associated with chronic blepharitis.

A secondary detrimental effect of biofilm is that it provides the food source for an eyelid mite/lice called Demodex that conservative estimates suggest infestations of over 100 million people’s eyelashes.

Eventually, the inflammation causes the tear gland structures to be destroyed and dry eye becomes irreversible.

It is now known that these blepharitis and dry eyes are one and the same and that dry eye disease is simply a late manifestation of blepharitis, just like tooth loss is a late manifestation of gingivitis…another well-known disease that is also caused by a biofilm.

How to treat blepharitis?

The key to treatment is therefore very simple…just remove the biofilm, early and often. Biofilm, however, is essentially “super-glued” onto the eyelid margin and is very difficult to remove.

A new device called BlephEx (blepharoexfoliation) now allows eye doctors to safely and effectively remove these biofilms from a patient’s eyelids in about 8 minutes, just like a dental cleaning.

And just like dental cleaning, we should be removing these biofilms early in life before we start getting damage. If we wait until there are symptoms, it is much more difficult, and sometimes impossible to treat. We do not wait until our teeth are falling out to begin dental cleanings.

Lid cleaning with BlephEx should start as soon as a child is old enough to sit still for the cleaning. By doing this, it is very possible that we can eliminate blepharitis and dry eye disease.

​​​​​​​Medicine should be about the prevention of disease if possible, not reacting to disease. The other great thing is that the BlephEx treatment is all-natural requiring no drugs and no chemicals. It is simply cleaning. A clean eyelid is a healthy eyelid.