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ODs must remain experts in refractive care
 Michael D. DePaolis |
I was recently at an American Legion baseball game when one of my patients laced a double into left-center. His father, also a patient, yelled across the bleachers, “Must be the good work of his eye doctor.”
While we had a good laugh – there is obviously a lot more to hitting than simply seeing the ball – his comment did remind me of a fundamental fact. Despite optometry’s tremendous advances, we are very much, in the minds of our patients, synonymous with seeing clearly. In short, we are still refractionists.
As a profession, we have worked long and hard to be much more than refractionists.
We have expanded our formal training, commit a lot of time to continuing education and embrace new technologies, all in the spirit of being recognized as primary eye care doctors.
We practice what we preach. We monitor patients with diabetes and communicate with their primary care physicians and endocrinologists. We routinely remove corneal foreign bodies and provide other emergent medical eye services. We carefully diagnose and treat glaucoma, ocular surface disease and other chronic eye disease states. Because we do these things routinely, it is understandable why we view our profession as we do. However, it is equally important that we embrace our patients’ perceptions and understand their wants and needs, which often include refractions.
Optometry has always been – and should strive to remain – the experts in refractive care. With today’s advanced autorefractors, fully automated subjective refracting systems and refracting aberrometers, we are able to take refracting to a new level. While these technologies will not render the phoropter obsolete any time soon, it is clear we are entering an era in which the phoropter might no longer be the gold standard, especially for our patients with significant higher-order aberrations and complex refractive errors.
My point is simple: While we view refractions as just a small part of what we do, it is an essential service from our patients’ perspective. For this reason, we must be fully engaged, embrace new refractive technologies and remain the experts in refractive care … even if we are not necessarily performing the refraction. Now, that is a topic for another editorial.