Eye Drops
Or, the Continuing Saga of Safe and Effective
Today I had my first eye exam in a quarter century. I did this because I’ve had a couple of eye infections in the last six months, and wondered if there was a good reason for that. And sometimes I wake up with blurry vision that reading glasses don’t fix.
Also, I’m a geezer now. For those of you still too young to be in this special category, geezing involves several characteristic activities, including (but not limited to):
Complaining about “the kids these days”.
Insisting that “things were better in my day”. Even retired programmers like me can do this about our line of work. Example: “Back in my day, we memorized the PDP-11 opcodes and addressing modes, and wrote code in octal, and we liked it just fine. Assembly language is for sissies!”
Visiting doctors in the vain hope of finding remedies for our various ailments, including (but not limited to): hair loss, the heartbreak of psoriasis, weight gain, knee pain, grumpiness, etc.
It was item #3 that propelled me to the eye doctor. It turns out that my occasional blurry vision is probably due to dry eyes, not some scary condition requiring scary surgery. (I do have cataracts but they don’t require surgery.) The doc gave me some eye drops. When I got home, I did something that I learned to do in 2020 and 2021, and which led me to become a no-good horrible anti-Science™ extremist granny-killing conspiracy theorist: I Did My Own Research.
So what’s in these eye drops? Here’s the “active ingredient”:
I said to myself, "Isn’t propylene glycol the stuff they use in car radiators?” No, stupid, it’s not. It’s used in the “production of unsaturated polyester resins.” In food, it’s used “as an anticaking agent, emulsifier, flavor agent, humectant, texturizer, stabilizer, solvent, antioxidant, antimicrobial agent, and thickener.” It’s “commonly used to de-ice aircraft.” It’s even used as the liquid in electronic cigarettes. And of course, it is completely safe.
What about the other, so-called “inactive ingredients”?
That’s an impressive list:
“Boric acid, dimyristoyl phosphatidylglycerol, edetate disodium, hydroxypropyl guar, mineral oil, polyoxyl 40 stearate, POLYQUAD® (polyquaternium-1) 0.001% preservative, sorbitan tristearate, sorbitol and purified water. May contain hydrochloric acid and/or sodium hydroxide to adjust pH.”
The first one is boric acid, so I looked that up. It’s used to keep the pH in line, and is also a mild antibiotic. In fact, most (and possibly all) of these ingredients seem to be used to keep the solution sterile and at the right pH for long periods.
I remember playing with hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide in high school chemistry class. Those are powerful chemicals! The concentrations in these eye drops are probably pretty low, but even so, I don’t think I want to put them in my eyes.
Note also that if you are an idiot and happen to eat the eye drops, you should call a Poison Control Center. Despite that, I’m sure these eye drops are completely safe.
I then looked for alternatives to eye drops, and the one that came up first most often seemed to be warm compresses. I used those to heal my eye infection a couple of weeks ago. I think I’ll continue to use them instead of these eye drops.
And about those eye infections: for prevention, the doc recommended frequent face washing. That seems reasonable, but he also recommended antibacterial soap. I don’t trust that stuff for various reasons, so I think I’ll just use regular soap.
Disclaimer: As I mentioned above, I’m a horrible conspiracy theorist, so don’t treat anything I say as medical advice. Trust your doctor! Trust the Science™!
I won’t belabour you with a recounting of the many and varied conditions I am developing as a fellow geezer because the only thing more irritating than one old geezer wanging on about their physical and mental decline is two old geezers going on about it in a game of competitive complaining (and, yes, ‘back in my day’ and ‘I used to be able to do xxxx’’ are amongst my personal favourites’). Suffice to say that we not meant to last forever and bodily malfunctioning and decay is a reality of life (if the old life-span of ‘three score and the ten’ years was still extant, I would be just fine with that).
But, yes, the ageing process in the context of the ‘Covid’ debacle has made me question a lot of the medical advice I am now receiving from medicos who went Covid crazy and forever sullied their reputation and credibility with me. A judicious scouring of Google and a bit of my own thinking has steered me away from more than a few doctor-recommended treatments that looked likely to be either ineffective or dangerous or both and I am none the worse for it.
As a geezette, I wrote about eye drops too and the conspiracy to prevent us from buying organic, natural ones instead of petroleum by-products (which were in some I once bought) : https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/honesty-earthquakes-and-eye-drops.