Goggles for Dry Eye

• Your eyes are burning, nothing you try is helping, and you need to do something about them NOW!
• You are feeling imprisoned by eye dryness, housebound because it's windy outside
• You are mourning the loss of an activity you love -- e.g. bike riding
• You are willing to look out of the ordinary

For fulltime wear: Barz fogproof goggles

My conclusions in brief from almost two years with the Barz:

• The Barz goggles help considerably with the eye dryness. They especially help in windy and dry conditions (bicycling, ceiling fans, automobile defroster, air conditioning, automobile with windows open), and during reading or computer screen reading.
• The improvements are visible to my ophthalmologists. In fact, goggles can lead an ophthalmologist to underestimate the dryness of your eyes, because the goggles prevent the damage to the eye's surface that ophthalmologists use to gauge dryness.
• The manufacturing process for the antifog coating is still somewhat experimental, and there are some difference from batch to batch. I actually wound up having to use the perforated gaskets to get fog free results with some January 1999 vintage lenses. With later lenses, I have gotten two months' good antifog results.
• It looks like the durability of the Barz antifog lens coating is less in intermittent use than in fulltime use. In intermittent use I just can't get them to work as well; new lenses tend to get into a nonfogproof state within a couple of weeks of intermittent use. In fulltime use, I have seen the lenses last for up to two months.

For sweaty workouts and very high winds: Nike HydroVision 5000 triathlon goggles (no longer available)

The Nikes give a somewhat tighter seal than the Barz against the steady 20+mph headwind of biking, and when purchased in quantity are about half the price of Barz lenses. The Nikes have an antifog coating which has about a 4 week lifetime in my current intermittent usage pattern. I prime the Nikes with sterile saline solution to slosh around and defog them. If I am biking vigorously, the goggles collect sweat; I spill the excess and keep a little bit in to slosh around and defog the lenses. If my sweat won't keep up with evaporation and leakage, then I supplement it from the bottle of saline solution. The Nikes require more caution than the Barz, because in the Nikes there is a pool of liquid close to the eye, and there is risk of getting it into the eye, which seems a bad idea from a hygiene standpoint.