This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hey, everybody. My name is Zarmeena Vendal, MD. I'm the founder and medical director at Westlake Eye Specialists in Austin, Texas. I'm here at ASCRS 2026 Business of Interventional Glaucoma (BIG). And what an amazing session we’ve had so far, really bringing interventional glaucoma (IG) to life, going from why we should do it to how we should do it.

In this day and age, [we need] to really do things for our patients that control their glaucoma better than ever before. My contribution this morning was to talk about the why, and how a lot of us could sometimes have preconceived narratives of why interventional glaucoma—be it lasers, procedural pharmaceuticals, or MIGS devices that we use in surgery—why any of those might be hard to implement. And so there were a lot of myths that we busted this morning by talking about the fact that a lot of practices where doctors might perceive that IG is hard to implement from an efficiency standpoint—that if I'm a high-volume surgeon, it might slow me down.

Another one was that the patients are a rate limiting step, that they’re hard to convince of using some of these technologies. And the last is, gosh, are they really going to last? Are they really going to be as effective as eyedrops?

I think we successfully busted all of these myths, talking about how efficient these procedures are in the OR and more and more doctors are using IGR finding that they're in fact a great way to even start or end their surgical day, because the procedures are very predictable and go along with the same, if not better, efficiency sometimes. The cataract surgery, there are patients who are super excited about new technology to help their chronic condition. Patients at the end of the day are worried about losing their vision. So they actually welcome IG as an opportunity, not as something to be scared of. And then the fact that even in the clinic, we can create a lot of efficiency with these different ways of intervening.

The last is, “gosh, is it going to last as well as eye drops?” And what we were able to show is how well the pressure can come down with something as simple as a procedural pharmaceutical, really because it creates 24/7 control, and eyedrops do not simply do that to the same degree.

So lots of myths that hopefully we busted this morning at BIG to help practices really start to think about how to implement this. It's a great conversation. It's a great space to be in if any of you out there are looking to get more involved in the IG space. Make sure to make it next year. GP