We have seen rising prices on just about everything we buy, but it’s even more troubling to see how much it now costs for some eye drops that are needed to keep your eyes healthy and to keep good vision. Eye drops that formerly cost $10-$25 are now selling at over $100 in some cases, and some people are finding that they must use less of the drops than they are instructed to use, because of the cost. So, what can you do about that without hurting your eyes?

Think about when you put drops in your eyes:

• First, you need to get it to land in your eye, and that’s not easy for some people. As you get older or get arthritis in your hands, or just get scared putting eye drops in, you find that you get several on your cheek for each drop that actually gets in your eye. Certainly, that wastes a lot of expensive eye drops.

• Second, you should realize that when you actually get a drop in your eye, lots of the medication rolls out of your eye and dribbles down your cheek. More waste of expensive eye drops.

The solution to both problems could be a simple device that we have available for patients in our offices. To understand how it works, you need a little background.

Your eye can only hold a small volume of fluid on its surface. Some of that is your tears. If you add a medication drop to that, the extra fluid that your eye can’t hold runs down your cheek. It turns out that the drop size your eye can hold is probably around 5-15 microliters. When you put that on your eye, some of it soaks in to treat your eye condition, and the rest of it gets blinked away. The medication that gets blinked away runs down your cheek, or into the tear drainage channel that drains into your nose (where it’s of no help to your eye, and explains why some drops make your nose run, or get irritated.)

When you measure the size of the drop that comes out of your eyedrop bottle, it’s more like 40-50 microliters, or 8 to 10 times the amount that can stay on your eye. The extra rolls down your cheek or into your nose and is wasted.

That means that if you could reduce the size of the eyedrop coming out of your dropper bottle to just the amount of medication needed to treat your eye without all the waste, that expensive bottle of eye drops could last several months longer and save you from buying a new bottle so often. People who spend $100 on a bottle of glaucoma medication could save $800 to $1000 each year. And that’s not pocket change – that’s a lot of money you don’t need to waste.

We have a device that you can screw on to replace the cap on your medication bottle that does just what you need to shrink the size of the drop coming out of the bottle to only the smaller amount that works to treat your eye condition, but without all the waste running down your cheek.

It doesn’t fit on all eye dropper bottles, but it does fit most of them. When you come into our office, you should bring your medication bottle with you, and we can see if this will work for you. Alternatively, we can change your prescription to the same or similar medication that comes in a bottle that will work with this device.

We do have to buy this device, so we can’t give it away for free. But it will more than pay for itself in the money you save by making your bottle of drops last so much longer. We have these available at our Creve Coeur, MO and our Alton, IL office. We will show you how to attach it to your bottle and how it works when you come into our offices. You will need a separate adapter for each medication dropper bottle that you use. You can see how we use it in our offices to save money on the eye drops that we use to dilate or to numb your eyes.