optoblog.com

Academy is always great. It’s the best meeting, but then again, I’ve never been to SECO, ARVO, or even the national AOA. There is some cool news coming out of CIBA. They now have a quarterly replacement SiHy lens for extreme powers and fitting parameters that they call O2Optix Custom. The toric and pediatric aphake versions are supposed to follow next year.

Jimmy Bartlett began his lecture by saying, “Thank you all for being in this room. I can tell you all must be into drugs…”
What a comedian.

I also attended the famous Drs. Melton and Thomas’s lecture. I can’t get enough of them. They are my idols. Drug reps shouldn’t even bother coming to my office. It’s Melton and Thomas that they need to convince. They’re the ones that write the eye doctor drug bible.

There is an Indian Health Service recruitment booth this year at AAO. Usually the IHS just spends the money for that at SECO. The other recruiter I noticed was Wal*Mart. IHS is better in my opinion as long as you are willing to live in remote areas.

I did sign up for InfantSee. I’ll have to make another post about why. I haven’t changed my mind. It’s more about marketing than socialism.

I’m sorry my AAO report is lame. The days are packed with CE and the nights are filled with finding a good place to eat and relaxing. The next on is in Tampa in October. I won’t be going because it’s too far away from me and it’s during a pretty busy time. I think I’ll hit the Utah AOA in June in Park City. I won’t be going to the national AOA in 2007 because Boston is too far away. Anytime they have these things in San Diego or Denver I’ll go. I wish they would think about Salt Lake City, Portland, or Seattle for a change.

By the way, if you are in Denver and stay at the Downtown La Quinta motel on the first level, you might experience what I did one night at 3 AM. I heard a horn honk just outside my door, so I grabbed my glasses and gun and dashed to look out the peep hole. (Okay, I didn’t really grab a gun, but I’m just emphasizing that I was in ready/alert mode quickly.) I see his black car pull into the space just next to mine. Some guy gets out and pounds on our door (right as I was staring at him through the peep hole, kind of startling), and then he knocks on the other two doors next to us. Then he starts yelling “Call the Poh-leece. Call the Poh-leece.”

I didn’t call the police, because I wasn’t aware of any danger (other than possibly him). Plus, he could have just gone around the corner and used the office phone himself. Also, as soon as he said it, he got back in his car and left. weird. It was over almost as soon as it started.

I guess the moral of the story is…make sure you stay at the convention hotel?

I’m going to be in Denver blogging about the American Academy of Optometry meeting. I would be interested in doing some podcasts featuring interviews of other optometrists, even if you aren’t a presenter or otherwise famous eye doctor. Call me at 435 2136800 if interested.

Acuvue sponsored a podcast by two teenage girls named Heather and Jonelle. No optometrist should ever listen to it. It’s audience is other teenage girls who have nothing else to do except listen to strangers talk about themselves. Weird.

But the fact that Vistakon marketing did this gives me pause. It was short lived with just five episodes. At no time does Episode 5 even mention Acuvue, but I can’t say for sure since I couldn’t stand to listen to all of it. What is interesting is that they are using podcasting to market direct to consumers, specifically teenage girl consumers.

Did Acuvue marketing dept. not consider a podcast for an eyecare professional audience because eye doctors aren’t generally known to be tech savvy; therefore, eye doctors might never listen to it? I guess their reps already talk to all the eye doctors when they make their rounds, so a podcast might not be necessary for them. But I wouldn’t mind listening to some top eye doctors discuss issues relating to eyecare practice.

Dr. Meldrum was my evolution professor at Idaho State University, and he was interviewed on NPR. The question isn’t whether you believe in Sasquatch- it’s whether the scientific evidence points to the creature’s existence. Dr. Meldrum’s research, as I understood it from the class lectures, related to moldings taken from foot prints and the study of these casts. Dr. Meldrum says the way the foot articulates, or moves during the stride, isn’t consistent with people making fake footprints in the mud.

An interesting thing he mentions is their failure to analyze DNA from presumed hair samples of Big Foot.

The famous, grainy Patterson film of Big Foot is now over 40 years old. Surely a spoofer would have let it leek or boasted about putting one over on the rest of us.

I want to believe- er, accept the evidence; however, are there any other incidences of never before discovered mammals yet to be classified zoologically, especially in a developed country?

However, if the individual is really the spawn of Satan, he would be wily enough to avoid detection. . .

Books from Readers Digest and others have been around to aid non-physicians in diagnosing their condition and see whether they need to visit the doctor’s office.

Well, why pay for a book when you could just Google your symptoms and come up with a diagnosis?
UK doctors fed key terms into a Google search and a top search result contained the correct diagnosis 68% of the time.

I tried it with red, itchy, stringy discharge, and sure enough: allergy eyes.

But then I tried red, painful, light sensitive, and that contained the full spectrum of differential diagnoses. I think one would have to have a medical background to know what key terms to search for in the first place.

So, I’m still going to tell my patients that they should come in for an exam instead of just Googling. 😉

Drs. William D. Mathers, Frederick W. Fraunfelder, and Larry F. Rich from OHSU Ophthalmology dept. published a letter to the editor in the current issue of Archives of Ophthalmology stating that their research leads them to believe that contact lens wear is more risky than LASIK.

We here in the optometry community are calling B.S.

Arthur B. Epstein, OD, FAAO wrote the following in his recent e-mail journal Optometric Physician (Volume 6, Number 41, Monday, October 16, 2006):

Despite recent issues [regarding Fusarium], the reality is that contact lenses remain among the safest forms of correction. Soft lenses have been in use for more than 30 years.

Dr. Joseph T. Barr and the staff of Contact Lens Spectrum in their CL Today e-mail newsletter from October 15, 2006 had this to say:

Some quotes from the highly-regarded authors of the aforementioned piece include, “If one assumes,” “estimated,” “extrapolated,” “was not specified,” “calculated,” “laser surgery will become safer,” and “look forward to further investigations of these risks.” It seems much of what is concluded is based on conjecture. They also say, “the risks of refractive surgery vs. contact lenses cannot be compared directly.” Those of us who have tried to do so know this. So why do we keep trying?

I would like to add is that these OHSU doctors should probably do a peer-reviewed study instead of a letter to the editor before scaring the entire nation.

I would encourage everyone to read the entire excerpts from Dr. Barr and Dr. Epstein.

By the way, why are they still doing e-mail newsletters? Haven’t they ever heard of RSS and site feeds? Site feeds can be linked to for reference. E-mail newsletters may be hard for people to find the archives, if archives exist at all.

I think we all knew that it’s a bad idea to do keratometry and corneal topography after performing gonioscopy, at least if you want accurate, reliable readings. But what if you just did gonio and you now need good K readings? Now what?

A recent study took a look at how long it takes before you can reliably get a consistant K measurement after having done gonio. They found that the autokeratometer doesn’t care if the patient has had gonio or not. The Sim-K from the topographer would like you to wait 20 minutes.

I wish I had thought of this study. I could have gotten my FAAO for this. Pretty sweet and easy. The only thing I would have done different would be to add a control group that didn’t get any gonio, but still repeated AutoK and Topo just to see how much variability exists between measurements.

You’ve heard of “wife beater” type shirts. Well, thanks to those crazy Hollywood trend setters, we now have wife beater sun glasses. You know those humongous sunglasses that are now in style? Yes, the ones bigger than your head like these or those.

I’m not normally prone to conspiracy theories, but I’m pretty sure these became so en vogue because they’re perfect for the battered wife to wear after a hard night at home. Instead of people encouraging her to get help, they just won’t know! I think it’s somewhere in the Bible that “[Elephant-sized sunglasses] cover a multitude of [husband’s] sins.”

So I guess it won’t be long before we’re all wearing jumbo sunglasses for style instead of a joke.

I’ve mentioned the Family Health Radio podcasts before. They had another eye-related podcast the other day about computer vision issues.

Again, I’m pleased that they respect optometry by saying “see your eye doctor.”

Well, another multi-million dollar settlement against a LASIK surgeon. This time it’s against an awarded TLC ophthalmologist.

TLC isn’t one of those Sunday comic laser centers. And I don’t think an eye doctor managing a pre-op LASIK patient would just miss a keratoconus problem since computer-assisted analyzation of cornea topographical maps helps catch almost all of those. And if a 9 page informed consent document, a video, and doctor counseling doesn’t count for anything, then maybe the only criteria is whether or not the individual likes their outcome.

Anyone for LASIK surgery?