Episode 33 - LIVE with Dr. Richard Maharaj and Dr. Trevor Miranda of the Canadian Dry Eye Summi

I had the pleasure of chatting with two amazing docs about how they each created successful practices with strong dry eye specialties.

Dr. Richard Maharaj, owner of eyeLABS optometry in Ontario, went well against the grain almost a decade ago to create a medical optometric practice focusing on dry eye. Dr. Trevor Miranda is co-owner of 4 optometric practices on Vancouver Island with all the latest tech in dry eye treatment. Both docs are also co-creators of the highly regarded Canadian Dry Eye Summit.

Listen to learn how you can win a free registration for full access to all the COPE approved talks at the Summit. You can also enter Dr. Maharaj's Instagram contest by following instagram.com/dryeyesummit and posting a picture using his "bald" filter and tagging #imajedi2.

Follow:

Dr. Richard Maharaj instagram.com/dry.eye.jedi

Dr. Trevor Miranda https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-miranda-463003aa/?originalSubdomain=ca

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Listen to the podcast here

LIVE with Dr. Richard Maharaj and Dr. Trevor Miranda of the Canadian Dry Eye Summit

Welcome to a special edition of The 20/20 Podcast. I am here with two fantastic optometrists to talk about some amazing topics. Before we go on to the conversation, I want to say a big thank you to my friends at Defocus Media, Dr. Darryl Glover and Dr. Jen Lyerly, for allowing me to come into their home and use their platform here to share the amazing insights from our guests here.

Thank you, Jen and Darryl. Thank you to everybody who's joining us for this conversation. Dr. Maharaj and Dr. Miranda are open to answering things on the fly. They probably engage with you more than you'll expect. Without further ado, our special guests are Dr. Trevor Miranda and Dr. Richard Maharaj. Thank you for joining me here.

Thanks for having us. Great to be here.

Thanks. Looking forward to it.

Why don't we start with a little introduction? Where you are, what you do, and why you're on the show. We'll start with you, Trevor.

I'm an optometrist and I practice on the beautiful Vancouver Island. We have four clinics out here. They're all cold starts. I graduated in 1995 from the University of Waterloo. We have subspecialties from vision therapy, low vision, myopia management, and dry eye. Of course, I have a special interest in dry eye. That's why I've been invited here to talk about making dry eye a little more fun and exciting. Looking forward to chatting about it.

Richard.

I'm almost on the other side of the country in shiny Milton, Ontario. I practice in Brampton. That's a little outside of Toronto. I went to the University of Waterloo as well and graduated in 2003. I am the medical director for eyeLABS Optometry Center for Ocular Surface Disease. It is a medically-focused practice with subspecialties as well. My particular focus is on dry eye and ocular surface disease. We're going to be having a great conversation talking about our education event, the Dry Eye Summit as well. That's me in a nutshell.

Since that's going to be the main topic of discussion, I want to ask you an open-ended question here, why dry eye? Why are we having this conversation? Why is it important for ODs and patients to be aware of dry? Why would somebody attend an entire conference based on dry eye? Either one of you, whoever wants to go first, answer any one of those questions you would like in any order.

I'll answer it from a general practitioner's point of view. Why dry eye? Because it's prevalent and we can help people and fix people. If you specialize in floaters, you’re just identifying the floaters. In dry eye, you can identify and treat and you can make a difference in people's lives. I always go back to who are my biggest fans?

They happen to be my dry eye patients that sing my praises the most because they've been overlooked for years. Some of these fixes, we can fix them and we can help them a ton. They're so appreciative. They’re fans for life. It's putting our skills to good work because there's a need. It's been overlooked in the past and now we have some viable treatments.

I'll add to that. Trevor hit the nail on the head. It belongs in optometry’s wheelhouse. On top of it being a prevalent condition, it's also a vision disease. I'm going to do a shout-out here to Scott Schachter who says this all the time, “Dry eye is a vision disease. We are doctors of the visual system. The tear film is probably the most important optical surface that our patients and ourselves have.” Focusing on that fine optical surface is important.

To add to what Trevor said, it is a life-changing service to provide. For those of you in the audience that provide care for dry eye patients, you can probably feel the change in lives and the impact that we have. That's the main reason. To look a little bit further, in the last few years, there has been an immense evolution in both industries, the dry eye industry and then generally, ophthalmic pharmaceuticals. There's a lot of investment going on in the dry space, so it makes sense to talk about it. You'd be surprised, people want more at the end of a two-day conference, surprisingly.

I'm not surprised but that's good to know.

I wanted to add on, why learn about it? There are various levels of expertise and how we learn is usually from our colleagues, what they're doing, and what their successes are. I owe a lot of our practice success to people like Richard and people who are concentrating in that area. I've learned, “I can do this, too. I could be a great dry eye practitioner and I can help my patients. We can monetize it and make it a profitable part of our clinics.”

Learning from great doctors like Rich and others in our network that are doing this on a day-to-day basis and have the nerve, gall, and bravado to open up a medically-focused clinic when maybe that wasn't involved before his time. That's impressive. That vision, “We can do this on a medical basis and still do well,” it's awesome to be associated with that kind of mindset. That raises everybody's skillset. He's the brains behind the operation.

That definitely deserves a lot of recognition, Dr. Maharaj. You and I chatted about that when we had our little interview about how you decided to start a practice focused just on dry eye when nobody was thinking about it or people were saying that's a terrible idea. You did it and clearly, it was successful. This dry eye industry has blown up over the last few years. I'm curious from your guys’ perspective, what's the impetus for that growth, especially as exponential, if you will?

One of the main drivers is that doctors have sunk their teeth into dry eye. In my experience talking to doctors across both countries, there's an order of fulfillment that we've achieved by treating this condition that we hadn't perhaps seen before. At least that was the case for me. We've become more passionate about providing this service and that is translated and by osmosis transferred to our patients.

Leaders in this field are attracting patients that have suffered with it for so long. In addition to marketing by industry and large practices, the word is getting out. At the end of the day, you hang up your sign on the outside of your clinic or storefront and you say, “We're treating dry eye.” You're going to get people looking at that because there are people suffering it. We just had to put a name to it. That has a big role to play. Our education is getting better. Our knowledge base and our ability to affect the disease is tremendous now compared to where it was years ago.

Our ability to view the conditions, image the meibomian glands, and these types of things. Understanding the chemistry behind the tear film, the TFOS DEWS II coming out with an increased definition has helped everything. Rich and I talk about it eyegiene. Eyegienes are how we're going to clean people's eyelashes. I’m mildly obsessive about cleaning people's eyelashes because I see the little collarettes and I desperately want to get them off. I don't even care. I didn’t buy it. I just feel the need to help them.

When you think about your eyelash catching everything in the air and we had smoky fires out here in the West Coast and people were complaining about their eyes, we can concentrate on that lid lash line and keep it clean just like the dentists have done that of the teeth. Everybody should floss and brush their teeth. We didn't focus on that when I was in school. Let's keep everybody's lashes clean. How about that as pandemic prevention perhaps?

Do you stop people on the sidewalk and be like, “Can I look at your lashes?” Do you carry some Zocular wipes with you?

I ZEST everybody I see. I need to wear a cape or some kind of superhero outfit and clean your eyelashes.

You got your FIGS scrubs. That’s your cape. That’s your suit.

Teardrop logo on your chest or something.

Trump was saying something interesting. He touched on people flossing their teeth and brushing their teeth every day. The concept of prevention is optometry’s wheelhouse. We see people annually or every two years and our goal is to capture disease in its earliest form. To be focused on prevention, dry eye has historically been a disease that we capture too late. We wait for symptoms to erupt and for signs as well to show up. Having the ability to see it early puts us back into our wheelhouse, which is in the game of prevention. Oral hygiene for dentistry is the equivalent of ocular hygiene for optometry. That's a big opportunity there.

When I heard that, I used to think, “How do I get into a position where I'm recommending this as a preventative measure versus people telling me about this problem, and then I'm trying to fix it?” It’s what I've been used to doing over the years. I would like to touch on a few tips and tricks or advice in general that you might have for the beginner. Somebody who's in the earlier stages of developing a dry eye practice within their clinic or somebody who wants to get off the ground here. Any starter points that you might have for them?

Clean everybody's eyelashes. Wouldn't that be awesome? You come and you clean everybody's eyelashes as part of their eye exam. Wouldn't that be profound? Wouldn't that be right up the alley that we want? When I started to do that, I've been in on this ZEST. This Zocular is impressive. Anterior seg camera is cool, too. Why not every slit lamp take an anterior seg camera picture of their eyelashes before and then clean their eyelashes afterward?

If you're starting out and you invested in something like that and made that part of your exam, wellness and hygiene or eyegiene for your eyes, how can we make you feel better? People walk out of that going, “I've never felt so good with my eyes before.” It is that big of an impression and you're doing something different. If you're starting out, shake it up, Zoc it up. Let's do something different and clean people's eyelashes.

You're suggesting that every time a patient comes in for a routine checkup, I would take that additional time and somehow build that into their exam fee that they were going to get this cleaning done every single time.

That's right. How about that for something different?

That sounds like a great idea.

That's Trevor Miranda right there changing the game. In my dry eye clinic, we're a busy dry clinic. What Trevor is suggesting is exactly what we do. Taking it one step further, talking about advice to give for the beginner, that's a futuristic world that I hope is quite close. However, for those that are getting started out dipping your toes into it, you simply screen. We screen for glaucoma, AMD, and all sorts of diseases at every visit.

How are we screening for dry eye? The easiest way to do that is with a questionnaire. I know everybody hums, huhs, and moans when I say, “A questionnaire. I’ll add another thing to our intake.” COVID has provided us with an opportunity here. I'm not saying COVID is the greatest thing to happen, but there is an opportunity, which a lot of us have invested in online forms. We're now sending our intake forms virtually to our patients. How long will it take for our patient to do a quick GEQ-5 or a speed score online virtually? You have that score.

When they come into your office, “There's your screening. You've done it.” You get your pretest staff to have a quick discussion saying, “We flagged your score,” if the score is six or higher. “Dr. Sian is going to talk to you a little bit about what that score means and what can be done or should be done or whether or not he needs to do more tests for it.” That sets them up. It puts them on a tee. It lets the doctor have the time to have a discussion and do the necessary test.

Bring them back for additional tests unapologetically. I'm going to say that clearly, we need to be unapologetic about looking for and treating active disease. I don't know why we feel bad or guilty about it. I have an idea and I'm going to talk about that at the BCDO. That's an easy step to take. Implement the questionnaire, flag it, the doctor talks about it, and then execute a plan, whether that's to bring them back or if you can diagnose and treat the disease right there.

Can you give us a teaser about your BCDO talk? What are 1 or 2 high-level things that you think are causing people to feel guilty or scared to do that?

It has a little bit to do with generally optometry psychology. There was a study done back in 2004 or 2005. It looked at the personality types of various health disciplines, optometry being one of them. As it turns out, optometrists in general, and this is not meant to be a sweeping generalization, but there's a bell curve. We typically land somewhere in the ISFJ, which is we're altruists and we treat people with kindness in excess to an extent. Almost like we are the Canadians of the eye world. We're super nice and we say sorry for everything.

It's funny, but it's also serious because we also feel a certain amount of cognitive dissonance with charging for something that we know is good but we somehow attach guilt to that. Of course, there are probably other cultural reasons for that guilt, but a big part of it has to do with our prevailing psychology.

It's interesting, someone told me once, “Trevor, you're not magic. You're not going to convince somebody to pay their own money for something that they don't feel value for.” I thought, “That's an interesting thought.” It's my obligation to let them know what's possible. When I started my own practice, believe it or not, I'm wearing a high-end premium frame I got from Tom Ford. For every patient that came in, I offered them the budget package frame.

I said, “This is your best deal price.” I missed the opportunity there to say, “I want to show you what's possible and what the features and benefits of everything that we can do. We can discuss what you want to do and which option you want to go with. This is our premium package and this is our entry-level package.”

That's the same thing with dry eye. I don't think you have to feel like you're pushing somebody and I don't think we do, but at the same point, you're missing your obligation as a healthcare provider to point out what could be possible and what is available. If you're not doing it, then it's your obligation to let them know that your colleagues could do this for you. That's a different way of looking at it as opposed to saying, “I'm scared I'm judging somebody’s budget or I'm judging their values. You don't know what's important to them.”

By the way, if they're scoring 20 or 30 on some of these dry eye questionnaires, dry eye is important to them. Let's ask them and let's be humble enough to have a conversation with our patients. If budget is a question, then let's give them some things that they can do on an everyday basis, whether it's cleaning their eyelashes or taking an Omega three that isn't super costly that they can do at home.

Also, heating masks and things that can help them and they could start with that. I don't think you need to say, “This is going to cost $2,000 or $3,000,” necessarily but you have to point out the range of treatments every time that's available to those patients. Also, what would probably be a good starting point for them depending.

Thank you, guys. We naturally progressed to this. I had this question or discussion point talking about selling and the fear that we have of selling treatments or products that would be specifically helping our patients to feel better and to cure or at least treat this disease or condition that they have. That's definitely a common concern. I'm sure it stems from a lot of what you're saying there, Richard, the type of person that lands in optometry partly is due to that type of thing, plus some other things. I look forward to that talk because I'll be registered for that one for sure.

Before we jump to the next thing here, we've had a couple of good questions come in and comments. First of all, my sister's reading. Thank you. She’s a lawyer. The comment is about optometrists having trouble charging money. She said, “Unlike us lawyers, clearly they don't have any issues with it.” Normally, we don't want to try to answer too many questions about patient difficulties because we could go down a rabbit hole and be stuck here all day.

I thought this one was a relevant question because I get it fairly often from patients. It's quite common. If you guys don't mind, a real quick answer or touch on this with a yes or no. “I struggled with intermittent blurry vision due to dry eye. Why only since the surgery? Is this condition a result of cataract surgery?” Do you guys get that question a lot?

That's my practice. My brief answer is, surgery of any kind, whether cataract or LASIK or retinal surgery for that matter, are all inflammatory events. More often than not, the disease was building up over time prior. Chances are you were corrected with glasses before or maybe contact lenses and now you are glasses and/or contact lens-free, which results in more exposure and more air getting to the eye. A lot of times, surgery is a manifesting event and it's uncovering a problem that was there for a while. Rome wasn't built in a day. Dry eye didn’t just happen. It takes a while.

It speaks back to the wellness factor. We interceded there years ago and now we tend to wait, “You're going for cataract surgery? Maybe we should treat your ocular surface.” Really? Should we not treat it earlier? Should we not identify earlier? I’m a big believer in early wellness prevention-type strategies. That is absolutely what optometry should be about.

Talking about myopia management and some of these other things that we could do, including vision therapy. I heard an interesting thought, “Why don't we train everybody in vision therapy before they read? We teach them how to go through the process of using your eyes and your brain, and then teach them the letters and the words.” I thought that was an interesting way to go about it and that is optometry.

It's like meta vision. Have you heard this term, meta-learning, learning how to learn? That's learning how to see before you can use your vision. That's interesting. I have a couple of comments I want to address here. Before I do, part of this discussion is we're going to be talking a lot about the Canadian Dry Eye Summit.

The doctors here and then the team at the Dry Eye Summit have been generous enough to give away one full-access registration to the summit, which includes all the COPE-approved lectures and everything else that comes with it. You might even get a personal thank you from Dr. Maharaj and Dr. Miranda in your inbox or something at some point.

To enter this, I was trying to find a way in the system here. Unfortunately, it's not quite as convenient as I would have liked. What we're going to do is I'd like for you to drop me a message on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn. You can email me or whatever you like. Say that you want to enter that contest. We'll draw the name and I'll make sure that I put it out on social media after we've got all the entry applications.

DM me on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, or LinkedIn and I will make sure to consider your name in the contest. We'll pick a winner and we will announce it on social media. Make sure you guys do that. I have one more comment I want to bring in here from a good friend, Dr. Michael Kaplan, who asks from a practitioner side of things, “How do you deal with patients with severe LWE eye soon, lid-wiper epitheliopathy?”

Anything clinical, let's get Rich first. I’m like, “I agree with the smart guy over there.”

Let me put disclosures though. I have no disclosures with what I am about to comment on here. Lid-wiper can be a pain in the butt. I'm not sure if I can swear on this or not. The tighter the eyelids, the more you're going to see it. The more severe cases tend to respond well to acute courses that have topical steroids. You want to make sure you pad that surface with non-preserved lubricants.

When you get to the point at which it's severe, where it's exacerbating filamentary keratitis or even causing linear keratopathy on the cornea, it's in those stages where you may want to reach for a bandage contact lens to at least address the cornea. In terms of the actual wiper itself, Zocular or ZocuKit is phenomenal at bringing down soft tissue inflammation.

No disclosure whatsoever. This is from the bottom of my heart. I'm saying this honestly. It is remarkable. I bring it down to soft tissue inflammation. I've used it on episcleritis or any type of conjunctiva inflammation. It keeps it cool and it calms it down quickly. I found an in-office microblepharoexfoliation with Zocular, the ZEST treatment works well in these cases. That's been my experience.

I'm amazed at how good ZEST is. I've used BlephEx. I've got no disclosure, too but I tried to do what works the best and I've put my BlephEx away, to be honest, quite a bit. Using the ZEST and Zocular is amazing. It’s okra-based. Who knew?

People love okra. Thanks for the question, Michael. Appreciate it. Thank you to everybody who has been commenting. I appreciate that. My cousin is also on the call. I’ve got my whole family in here. He was saying, “There's nothing wrong with being Canadian. We're the Canadians of the healthcare system. There's definitely nothing wrong with it.” Sorry to anybody who is offended by that.

Remember, we are giving away one full-access registration to the Canadian Dry Eye Summit. All you need to do to enter is message me on one of those accounts, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or wherever. DM that you want to enter into that contest and we will put you in there, and then we'll pick a winner.

On that note, let's talk about the Canadian Dry Eye Summit. I have to admit, I've unfortunately never attended one because I was supposed to attend one in 2020, then Coronavirus. Before that, I wanted to attend in 2019 in the fall and wasn't able to make it out there. I have heard so many amazing things from people that I look up to in the dry eye space. Trevor, I had met you but did not talk to you about it. Tell me how you guys developed this whole thing because it's clearly become the go-to conference and resource for dry eye in Canada and I'm sure outside of Canada as well.

I'll start with that, Harbir. Dr. Jeff Goodhew and I were at a conference and having lunch. I said, “We need to do better in the dry eye space. We need a website and we need something to communicate with our patients and information. We need to let everybody know who's going to treat dry eye and how we can raise the standard together.” We started developing a website called MyDryEye.ca. We could act as a resource for like-minded clinicians that wanted to get the word out to their patients, learn from each other, and work with manufacturer’s suppliers to understand the products that they can use.

We started that and it was well taken, and then we thought, “Maybe we need to do some more formal education.” This is where Dry Eye Jedi, Dr. Maharaj, comes in. We needed an on-the-ground clinician that specializes in this area that has connections with North American wide specialty speakers and gurus in this dry eye ocular surface space.

Rich has been working in the background on his own smaller education. He's a teacher at heart. It was a perfect fit for the three of us with our connections and being across Canada anyway. Being able to bring it all together, wrap it up with education, fun, and community, a lot of what we bring is a dry eye community.

We've started some patient-facing interactions at My Dry Eye Space on Facebook, Instagram, and such. I'll let Richard speak to that. It's been the three of us. We've added Dr. Winn, who's a new grad added to our Millennial mix and how to present to patients. We've got an event coordinator, Ronni Brown. We've got a great little team going to get us off the ground. 2020 will be the third annual Dry Eye Summit. Rich, do you want to add to that?

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. The genesis, of course, was Trevor and Jeff and I latched on. I had a smaller meeting in Toronto back a few years ago, and then we decided to launch the Canadian Dry Eye Summit. It's always been live. The benefits of a live meeting are always the community. The dry eye community is a tight-knit community.

Our education has been phenomenal. More than that, we've been tracking our previous attendees, keeping in touch, and seeing how much we're moving the needle in terms of their delivery of care, access to technology, and the pervasiveness of technology. Our impact has been reflected in dry eye care across the country.

Bringing on Dr. Winn, who's adding more to patient education, has been a remarkable change. Now we're engaging with patients giving public awareness. We're not selling anything. We're just making sure they're aware of what's out there. A lot of patients come to the office and have never heard of any type of meibomian gland dysfunction. IPL has never come across their table before. Now we're arming them with the vocabulary so that when they come to your office, they know about it.

With the Dry Eye Summit, we're providing you with the power, tools, and education you need to address the disease appropriately confidently. That helps take away some of the guilt. In 2020, COVID could probably be the answer to everybody's problem. COVID allowed us to merge into the virtual world and do this online.

2020 was going to be the year that we were going to launch our parallel online learning platform. If you go to Learn.MyDryEye.ca, we have content on there that is separate from the summit. It's a COPE-approved CE. It's also short instructional videos. We're going to continue to add to that throughout the year. For folks that register for the summit in 2020 for the live event, which is on November 14th and 15th, they'll also get access to the learning platform for the entire year and everything that goes on it. We're going to have everything from practice management to continued clinical learning.

We're always open to feedback. We're dynamic as a small group. That saying when the market busted, they say too big to fail or too small to fail. We're able to be lean and mean and give people exactly what they need. We're excited. This is going to be the first in Canada. We announced it on your show back in April, Harbir. We're super excited about this new meeting.

Anybody who registers for the summit gets full access to the online platform as well. Is that correct?

Yeah, absolutely.

We are giving away a full-access registration to the summit and you would also get in that this online resource, even more than what we originally expected to be giving away. To enter, I highly, strongly, significantly recommend that you drop me a message so you can enter to win this because it's going to be an amazing conference. DM me on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, or wherever you find me and tell me that you want to enter and we'll pick a winner from this. One of the things I wanted to ask you about, what are some of the challenges that you faced with doing a virtual conference?

The first issue we had was we had already booked two events for the year in live spaces, so we had some financial challenges. Everybody has their financial issues with practices, but we had the added headache of dealing with our venues. Anyways, that's behind us now. The main challenge in terms of putting on the education was to make sure that we have people engaged. It's a two-day event sitting in front of a PC for two days. It’s probably not realistic, we don't imagine.

What we've done is we've tried to make segments that are smaller and more digestible. We have general topics, which could be anywhere from 1 to 2 hours long. For instance, the practice management of dry eye. Within those general topics, we have shorter 20 to 30-minute segments we call Smart Segments that learners can sub in for and tune into.

In addition to that, we also will have live panels where you can engage with the speakers. We have a free-for-all discussion, no holds barred, ask any question you want to ask. Those will run for about 35 to 45 minutes. We tried to keep it engaging and keep it different. We're also going to have live demos that will be streamed remotely, where you're going to be able to see technology like LipiFlow and IPL.

We even have some other companies that are going to put on their live demos as well. You get to see what the technology does and get a trade show-like experience without having to visit the booth. We tried to differentiate it. We put our own Canadian spin on it. This is probably something like you've ever attended before. It's hyperbolic, but that's true.

It's okay. We're full of those hyperboles and superlatives. We say as many of those as we can. This is open to people to register from anywhere. I know it's called the Canadian Dry Eye Summit, but it's for anybody who wants to. Just for clarification, the COPE approval is also universal for North American ODs kind of thing. Anybody who attends can get the credit. I know there are people who've tuned in from the US and thank you for that. Don't forget that this could be a valuable conference for you as well.

In 2019, we had our first attendee from Mexico and we had a few people from the UK. While we were in the pandemic mode, we were shut down but we were doing weekly webinars. We had people coming in from Norway. It was a global reach. It was exciting. It looks like our little project seems to have crossed our borders, which is great.

That's the beauty of being virtual.

I want to add. To highlight what Rich said, the webinars that we put on were well attended and we had great feedback and great topics. We'd house those as well on our learning site, on MyDryEye.ca. That gave us some experience that we could do this and we can make it interactive and exciting with hundreds of attendees, so that helps.

Before we go forward and wrap up here, are there any other topics you want to discuss, any other information you want to put out there, or any last words, so to speak?

In addition to the contest that we're doing for Defocus members, we're also going to add a bonus contest. For anybody that's on Instagram, if you like @DryEyeSummit, we're doing an I'm A Jedi 2 contest. We'll put instructions there but you guys will notice that I have a nice clean dome here that keeps it easy to maintain.

My staff decided to use a Snapchat filter, which allowed them to be bald as well. We came up with this idea. If you could post your best Dry Eye Jedi Bald Filter, a picture tag at @DryEyeSummit, use the hashtag #ImAJedi2, and we'll look for the post. Tag a friend that will enter you into the contest and we will draw one person for free registration for the conference, which includes the year membership to the learning platform as well.

Use the filter, post the picture, tag @DryEyeSummit, and hashtag #ImAJedi2. You could be like Richard for a moment. It’s not a bad life.

Harbir, I wanted to talk a little bit about some exciting stuff that I've got in my clinic that I'm trying to figure out. We brought in radio frequency, IPL, and this cool LLLT. It’s like an Eye Light Low Light Therapy. You would look like Jason from Friday the 13th if people were fans. It’s pretty interesting stuff with ATP pathways and trying to work the system and improve the dry eye.

I'm excited from my point of view to dive deeper into the science there of what's going to happen but we're seeing some interesting early results there. That's part of it for what we learn at the Dry Eye Summit at various levels. You could be a beginner, but you could also be doing this for a while and realize that there's a whole next level in anesthetics and all kinds of interesting things to help you treat dry eye, meibomian gland dysfunction, rosacea, and other aspects around that.

I'm excited for 2021 as we implement some of these new strategies and different programs that you can opt in to our clinics with different levels of treatment. It's neat to see practitioners like Rich who have been doing this for a while but I'm getting more into it now that we've got these cool products and treatments.

I saw that post on Instagram. You did look either from Halloween or the other ones. I don't know, whichever movie it was pretty cool.

I remember that.

That's the stuff that I saw that's so cool and I want to learn more about it. That is what we'll learn at the summit. Whether it's RF, IPL or LLLT, we’ll learn it all at the summit.

They’ve got a red light, yellow light, blue light and they treat different things. One treats Demodex. I probably can't even speak properly about it. I'm learning as I go but it's interesting to be able to treat some of my long-term patients. We have something called Dry Eye Boot Camp at Cowichan Eyecare. I have patients that are in a perpetual dry eye boot camp.

They're happy but they don't want to leave me. They want to continue with regular treatments. What's wrong with that? That's not a bad place to be. We'd go to our dentist regularly every six months. Why can't you go to your eye doctor at a regular interval to maintain a homeostatic wellness environment on your ocular surface?

One more thing, Harbir. I know I'm chiming in. I did forget to mention, we invited this crazy GQ speaker to join our summit. This guy is dressed to the nines, cut like a knife, beard, and all on point Dr. Harbir Sian is going to be joining our faculty. We're looking forward to hearing your take on iLux as well and MGD. Welcome to the faculty.

Thank you very much. I appreciate that intro. That's awesome. Thank you guys for inviting me to be part of the team and to be involved. I’m super excited. I can't wait. I definitely got to make sure I got all my things in order because I know I'm amongst giants in the industry, so to speak like the amazing big names around. I’ve got to up my game a little bit before I show up there. Thank you for having me and I'm excited. I'm sure it's going to be an incredible event. Where can people connect with you guys individually? What platform would you like for people to reach out to you?

For me, it’s @Dry.Eye.Jedi on IG is probably a good way. You can always go to our website at EyeLabs.ca as well. It’s easy to find me there or call me.

On Instagram, it’s @DryEyeSummit, you can interact with our team, as well. You can find me on LinkedIn and Instagram as well. I’m happy to chat with folks. The DryEyeSummit.ca. We have a website where you can register for the summit. I wanted to throw in a thank you to you, Harbir for helping everybody communicate with each other during the pandemic and beyond. This 20/20 series of podcasts are amazing and well done. I wanted to thank you for having us.

Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

Thank you. You've been a compass in a storm here. It's been great checking in through your 20/20 Podcast and your IG account too, so thanks.

Thank you. That's kind. I appreciate that so much. Thank you so much. I appreciate everybody who joined us here. It's been an amazing time. Please make sure you connect with me on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, or wherever to enter it for that full registration that we're giving away for the summit.

Make sure you reach out to Dr. Maharaj and Dr. Miranda. They're amazing guys with insane amounts of knowledge. If anybody's looking for any info in dry eye or any practice management type of stuff, they know as much as there is to know right now. Thank you again. Take care and we'll see everybody real soon, hopefully at the summit.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you very much.

Bye now.

About Dr. Richard Maharaj

Dr. Richard Maharaj, owner of eyeLABS optometry in Ontario, went well against the grain almost a decade ago to create a medical optometric practice focusing on dry eye.

About Dr. Trevor Miranda

Dr. Trevor Miranda is co-owner of 4 optometric practices on Vancouver Island with all the latest tech in dry eye treatment.

Episode 33 - LIVE with Dr. Richard Maharaj and Dr. Trevor Miranda of the Canadian Dry Eye Summit

Listen to the podcast here

LIVE with Dr. Richard Maharaj and Dr. Trevor Miranda of the Canadian Dry Eye Summit

Important Links

About Dr. Richard Maharaj

About Dr. Trevor Miranda

Harbir Sian