Thinking like a doctor… not only as it pertains to optometrists
One short anecdote I forgot to mention at the RAM. My friend Denh was talking to Dr. Gordon, a staff doctor over at OCLA about ocular disease. It went something like this:
“Dr. Gordon! How much disease do you see at OCLA?!”
“Oh we see quite a bit, I guarantee you’ll learn a lot if you come here”
“Awesome! The more disease the better. We just learned about Trachoma in class yesterday, about ARLT’s line it was fun!”
:Chuckling: “A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.”
I thought it was interesting what Dr. Gordon said, but he is right on the money. How many times do I expect to see Trachoma in the United States in my lifetime? Possibly ZERO times ever. It should very rarely be on my list of differentials. Inclusion bodies from Chlamydia, possible, but not Trachoma. So why do we learn it?
Some will fault optometry school, saying what’s the point of teaching all this “junk” information. Or mention that in a private practices someone shadowed, they never do phorometry on every single patient – so they’re mad that opt schools make us waste our time.
My opinion is that the point of optometry school is to learn as much as possible so that if I ever run across it, I can make the appropriate call. Definitely, it would be financial suicide to do 2 hour exams on all our patients when we graduate, but for now it is academic suicide to not practice all the skills we’ve been taught and to do a thorough (this is the emphasis, not speed) exam.
