PRODUCT PROFILE
Comfort in the bag By Professor Teifi James FRCP, FRCS, FRCOphth
Todmorden is a small town nestled among the hills on the border between Yorkshire and Lancashire. As a consultant ophthalmologist, I held a weekly ophthalmology clinic at the GP surgery in the town and that was where I met Mrs D: a formidable local lady from Todmorden.
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he first came to see me because her eyes were uncomfortable, sore, irritated and scratchy. She described the classic symptoms of dry eye, complaining bitterly about the discomfort – but also the disturbance of her eyesight with blurring of vision, which happened "every now and then". When I examined Mrs D, she clearly had problems with blocked meibomian glands, which were all plugged with solid material. None of the glands secreted any oil when I squeezed them gently at the slit lamp the way they should have. Having diagnosed her problem as dry eye with meibomian gland dysfunction (MGD), I gave her one of the sheets of A4 paper that we kept handy in the eye clinic – along with standard instructions for making and applying a warm compress to the eyes and cleaning the eyelid edges with diluted baby shampoo and a cotton bud. Every eye doctor in every eye clinic had a similar sheet of 'advice for warm compresses’, and we used to give them out to patients several times at every clinic. A fortnight later, Mrs D turned up without an appointment and I called her through to my consulting room. She flung the piece of paper with the warm compress advice, across the desk and said quite reasonably: “Have you ever tried to do this yourself?” I admitted that I had never actually tried to follow the instructions, but promised that I would follow them myself when I got home to see what had infuriated her. When I tried to follow the instructions on the sheet that Mrs D had returned to me with more than a smidgeon of indignation, I realised what a farce the process was. I felt embarrassed to know that the advice we had been giving out to so many patients was
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The Blepha EyeBag is an effective treatment for a variety of conditions
almost impossible to follow, and pretty much useless even if you did manage to follow it. This situation suited eyecare professionals very nicely. Because nobody was able to follow the advice properly, compliance was dreadful. No-one followed the hot wet flannels and baby shampoo treatment. So, whenever patients returned to the eye clinic and complained again that their symptoms were just as bad and hadn’t improved at all, we could always say without fear of contradiction: “You haven’t been doing the warm compresses properly, twice every day, have you?” Patients would sheepishly admit that they had failed to follow the instructions and we were able to blame the patient. It was their fault that their symptoms hadn’t improved. LIGHTBULB MOMENT This whole episode set me thinking about warm compresses. We were still telling people to buy a flannel or face cloth, dunk it in a basin of hot water and place it across their closed eyes. Then, to take a few drops of baby shampoo in an egg cup and fill it with cooled boiled water and use a clean cotton bud to wipe the eyelids and lashes with this solution. It really did seem a bit like following the recipe from a grimoire. I had spent the years from 1993 to 1996 doing laboratory research in the Molecular Medicine Unit at Leeds University and knew that everyone in the lab had used the microwave oven to heat re-agents, prepare
Professor Teifi James, EyeBag inventor
solutions for experiments, melt solids and generally as a laboratory tool. So, I decided to create a warm compress that could be heated quickly in a microwave, be re-heated time and time again, wouldn’t burn the patients’ skin or damage their eyes in any way, that wouldn’t drip water down the arms, elbows, face and hair and would be pleasant to use. I knew that regular use of an effective warm compress would relieve the dry eye symptoms and treat MGD. I also realised that compliance was the key. If I could come up with something quick and easy to warm, and pleasant to use, then people would be much more likely to carry out this treatment at home. And that’s how I came up with the idea for the EyeBag. After several prototypes, I settled on all the materials used in the EyeBag and these are the same as the Blepha EyeBag today. The black side of the EyeBag is made from a thick 100 per cent cotton material called moleskin. I chose moleskin because it has the physical property of insulation, so it
