..........
Last edited:
So what is your plan now?
So sorry to hear you are going through such a tough time. I hope you find the path that brings you happiness and prosperity, Waapo.
Would you say it was the institution itself that contributed to some of the feelings you have now? Or was it in general the rigor of a first year curriculum?
You make some good points but at the rate you're going you are just using OP's misfortune to advance your own agenda and express your own feeling about the field. Lenscrafter's business management strategy and your personal struggles in the field are totally unrelated to the subject at hand.And ... corruption is rampant. Some places will even pressure you to fudge your final visual acuities just so patients can get referred for cataract surgery earlier than what Medicare would normally allow. So, there's that, too. Oh, and if you don't comply, you'll be fired because there are lots of unscrupulous ODs out there waiting to snatch your position right out from under you!
So yeah, it's now getting hard just to earn an honest living.
You make some good points but at the rate you're going you are just using OP's misfortune to advance your own agenda and express your own feeling about the field. Lenscrafter's business management strategy and your personal struggles in the field are totally unrelated to the subject at hand.
Also I'm disappointed that you tried to attribute your classmates' unstable career to her developing and dying from stomach cancer. There is close zero evidence in scientific literature to support your statement. As a medical professional, please refrain from making uneducated statements like this. It's damaging to the image of our field. Thank you
Lenscrafter's business management strategy and your personal struggles in the field are totally unrelated to the subject at hand.
How am I defending lenscrafters? I said it's unrelated to the subject at hand. In my limited exposure to this field I already have very little positive things to share about corporate optometry. I'm not defending them, nor am I trying to say your experiences aren't legitimate. My first line is "you make some good points..." In fact, I feel it is necessary that there be open dialogue and many means of communication between the leaders and experienced ones of the field and us younguns.One question for you: Why are you defending Lenscrafter's? The only ODs who would defend that company would be those who are satisfied working with them (and there are some who genuinely are) and those employed within the upper-level management of Lenscrafters who find forums like this to defend their beloved corporation. Any optometry student (as you claim to be from your profile information) who defends them is simply naive and cannot possibly know that which they are defending.
Anyway, you brought up my personal struggles in the field and I'm glad you did.
It's sad that Americans have become so shallow and materialistic that they judge the success of another person solely upon the amount of total income that person has attained over a lifetime. I may have not had great monetary success in Optometry, but I am very proud of my Optometric Career. I made an honest living (and ironically that's the cause of my lack of monetary success).
Every MD office I've worked for was committing Medicare fraud, and they milked the government for a LOT of money and got rich off it. It's really, really, really common. I didn't turn in the first because they forced me to sign a nondisclosure agreement. The second office - I have no solid proof or smoking gun. The other doctors were doing the deed and I was kept out of the loop on that because they knew I wasn't cooperating.
The MDs and ODs together defraud the government by doing unnecessary cataract surgeries. Medicare won't pay for a cataract surgery unless the best-corrected visual acuity is worse than 20/40, usually around 20/50 give or take. Now, OD's get a co-management fee (I believe it's 20% cut) payable by Medicare. They refer a patient for surgery, get 20% of the Medicare reimbursement and the MD gets 80%. Now, an MD often pairs with an unscrupulous OD, either as a referral source or as someone employed by them, who will deliberately fudge the refraction. That way, the best-corrected acuity meets Medicare guidelines for cataract surgery and no one is the wiser.
The MDs defraud Medicare also by performing unnecessary blepharoplasties, overtreating glaucoma or having an excess of suspects, and performing unnecessary anti-VEGF injections. The blephs are billed by deliberately fudging a confrontation field, allowing an old patient to fall asleep in the visual field machine, then doing another field with eyes taped open. You make money on glaucoma by visits and tests so you over-diagnose the suspects and bill out for each test with a separate office visit, have them return quarterly (and this is actually now mandated for the first year), and then the fraud comes in with this process NEVER ending. At some point, a patient should be removed from the suspect list if after ten years no test has ever changed! OD's defraud in this area, too. One OD in Idaho, I believe, went to prison for having too many glaucoma suspects. They caught him because they monitor vital statistics and he had something like 50% of his practice being glaucoma suspects when the national average is around 20 percent. He got on their radar, failed the Medicare audit and went to prison for 5 years. The MDs defraud with regard to the injections in terms of repeating injections in eyes whose best-corrected are worse than 20/400. That is, performing injections to improve vision in an eye that is functionally blind and will never improve. Yet, the government pays for that injection anyway. The moral thing would be to STOP at that point.
You'll see patients ADORING these MDs because they get early surgeries, free lid lifts, but they're used as pawns in this whole scheme. It's been like this for years! I was shocked at my first closed-door office meeting with only the doctors, staff excluded, and the MDs whom everyone, even me, adored revealed themselves to be inhuman POS. The whole ophthalmology business does general exams just to sift though the masses and find surgical candidates. That's how they make money. They see patients a pieces of meat. It makes me sick! We place our trust, our lives, in these people and all they want to do is milk, milk and milk those paying for your care so they can sip cocktails in Tahiti!
My career was lackluster because I refused to cooperate with Medicare or any other insurance fraud. I ran an honest business and I cared about my patients and I'm proud of that. I have nothing to apologize for.
Believe it or not, even some optometry schools are a scam. People see a profit to be made in optometric education and seek to take advantage of you and it's not fair! I've been involved in the hiring process for an office, for an OD, and I've made asked job candidates to do an eye exam for me on a real patient (under my license) and then I'd check their work. I was not impressed by the candidates I've encountered from the new schools. They're not teaching properly! They exist for the tuition money. One girl from one such school couldn't refract, couldn't chart. She was a full-fledged OD, too, not a student. There was a different OD who had graduated from UC Berkeley who I wanted to hire who was VERY impressive, but she had some issues with her VISA and ended up working in Canada. I have nothing bad to say about UCB. It's the only OD school I'd recommend.
Getting back to the original topic, if you're a sensitive person, you won't be able to handle this profession. At some point, it will crush your spirit.
I am on this forum under the assumption that any reasonable person who clearly sees what this profession is about would never venture into it and even if I manage to become a full-time (I'm part-time at the moment) Interior Decorator or enter another field, I ethically feel I must still pop in time to time to warn people away. No one should have to go through what I went thorough. It's been 22 years of Hell.
I don't regret these years. I've learned a lot, grown as a person. Optometry has taught me exactly who I am, and I really like that person. Unfortunately, this profession doesn't reward honesty and integrity anymore.
Anyway, to the original poster or anyone who is of a very sensitive temperament: one approach is to force yourself to do the opposite. Try being a military optometrist first. You'll have to go through boot camp and then you'll have to learn how to "suck it up" at work, or they'll discharge you. If you're mentally fit, you'll adapt. If not, you'll be discharged. Period.
Other than that, my best advice is to pick a profession that's commiserate with your temperament and talents. Best wishes.
The MDs and ODs together defraud the government by doing unnecessary cataract surgeries. Medicare won't pay for a cataract surgery unless the best-corrected visual acuity is worse than 20/40, usually around 20/50 give or take. Now, OD's get a co-management fee (I believe it's 20% cut) payable by Medicare. They refer a patient for surgery, get 20% of the Medicare reimbursement and the MD gets 80%. Now, an MD often pairs with an unscrupulous OD, either as a referral source or as someone employed by them, who will deliberately fudge the refraction. That way, the best-corrected acuity meets Medicare guidelines for cataract surgery and no one is the wiser.
.