Do I Have a Stye?

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I like to tell patients that it is similar to acne in the eyelids. Again, it's a dysfunction of oil glands.

What happens is, an infection gets caught inside that gland, and then it starts getting bigger and bigger. And it can get very red, very painful, and large within a day or two. It can even get large enough to close the eyelid.

It could be on the upper lid, it could be on the lower lid. They could occur at any age, we don't know exactly why it happens.

Of course as doctors we can't use the word "stye." So we call it either a chalazion or hordeolum. Those are two medical words, but stye covers all of the bases.

Everyone calls. Everyone wants to be seen that day because it's an emergency, and so we have to really talk a lot of people off the ledge, and let them know that it's something simple; it will go away very quickly and it's not an emergency.

Some patients who have chalazions, they'll describe it to us on the phone. We advise them to go ahead and start warm compresses.

As far as compresses, a nice little trick is to hard boil an egg and put it in a wet wash cloth, and that way you can keep the heat going for about 10, 15 minutes. That will make it go away quicker.

And we will ask them to come in within, you know, a 24- to 48-hour period to examine them and be sure there's not something more serious going on.

We're gonna have you put warm compresses on your eyes, and what the warm compresses do is they melt the oils in the glands, allow them to become more liquid, so that they can get out of the gland properly.

Most are styes; sometimes they can be tumors of the eyelid. So we definitely don't want to miss that and we also worry about infection.

If you are running a fever, if you have any pain on eye movement -- those are all reasons to see a doctor instead of just waiting.

If the stye does not improve at all, or improves some but then persists after continuous treatment, then we would drain the stye.

And 9 out of 10 times it will start draining internally by itself and go away. One out of 10 times we actually have to give nature some assistance, little bit of surgery in the office, nothing bad.

There are some other conditions that look like styes that are actually cancers of the eyelid. So, in a chronic stye that hasn't resolved with even an attempt to remove the stye surgically, you have to be sure that there is not an underlying cancer of the eyelid.

Most people get one or two styes per lifetime. If you're getting one stye after another, it could be a sign of a skin condition.

It can really look bad and convince you there is something very bad wrong with your eyes, and the pain can get very significant, also. It's not ever dangerous to your vision. It's just dangerous cosmetically because you look bad.