VIDEO: Multidisciplinary strategies for managing myopia

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It will be incumbent upon eye care practitioners if they choose to take care of myopic children and choose to offer myopia treatment, that they are well-schooled in that arena.

It’s not as if somebody could just decide tomorrow to just start doing it. They should be sure that they have the equipment necessary. For example, they should be able to measure the axial length of the eye; if they can’t, I personally don’t think they should be in the business of myopia treatment in this day and age, because eye growth is so important to monitor. So we should all get in the habit of knowing who in our community can perform myopia control, is educated about it. I won’t really say specializes in it, but certainly is qualified to do it and refer, if we don’t feel that we ourselves are qualified to do it.

So that’s kind of the interdisciplinary — whether you’re referring, you know, optometrist, ophthalmologist or vice versa, within ophthalmologists, between optometrists. I would say all of that, the key is that somebody had the appropriate expertise and the appropriate setting and equipment in their office to do so.

The other thing that we’ll see coming I think though, as more different modalities are approved for myopia, is that we’ll see some logical combining of treatments. So a child might wear a multifocal contact lens during the day and then put in a drop of low-dose atropine at night. We don’t really have studies that tell us whether those effects are going to be additive, or whether a second treatment of a different modality is going to make any difference. But I think that will happen in the hands of practitioners when we have more FDA-approved methods.