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Banning O.D.s Solves Nothing

If there's one lesson we learned in adolescence, but in the heat of battle forget, it's that when we write an emotional note, it is best to wait a day or two before sending it. The note sent hastily is just the note that will come back and kick us in the keester. And that, my friends, is why you are not reading my original text.

I wish our representatives at our Academy had paused before their recent decision to ban optometrists from attending our national meeting. A day or two to cool off after the political loss in Oklahoma would have let them consider other tactics instead of this petty response.

We have won many political battles over the years, but this time we lost. Now, unless overruled, the battle for optometric surgical privileges will shift to setting standards for training, so that's our appropriate focus. We have to regroup and determine the place and time for the next engagement, not impetuously make a decision that adversely affects many of our members.

Our Academy is miffed because some optometrists testified that they had attended the same courses as ophthalmologists (true) and so were trained to perform surgery (not true). The Academy meeting is where we teach surgeons, not where we make surgeons. That's a residency. Our political response is that simple, and that's where we need to be gently firm.

Restricting Education is Always a Bad Idea

Restriction from education has never been a positive development. U.S. soldiers are dying to eradicate the Taliban so that Islamic girls can attend schools; others escorted young Americans into Southern segregated colleges only a few dozen years ago. Universal education is the greatest product of freedom, while restriction of education has been the stigma of every evil empire in history.

The Academy membership is supportive of appropriate political action, but to ban educational opportunities for our optometric colleagues is a policy that should have been considered less impulsively, and one that should be reconsidered immediately. We who grew up in the sixties remember civil disobedience. I bet the Academy will be surprised by how many badges they sell this year to "Allied Medical Personnel" and by how well-trained they seem to be.