The profession is expanding. the people who feel like optometry is dying are not using their OD degree to its full potential. there is plenty of room in disease management and vision therapy. perhaps we are shifting from refraction and frames sales as financial fodder, but there is plenty of opportunity for medically oriented optometrists. HTN, DM, GL, VT, TBI, etc are all growing fields. stop asking 1 or 2 and stop posting inflammatory sentiments.
Look, I'm not on here to ruin the day of any OD student, you guys get pounded enough. But you need to realize that you have not one ounce of reality before you get out of school. Do you honestly think you're going to hear the truth while you're in school? Do you think your professors are going to "warn" themselves out of a job? I used to teach in an OD program, I never uttered a word of this stuff to my students, because all it would do would be to cause me headaches with senior administrators and other faculty. When you're in a cushy academia gig, the last thing you need is some guy telling students that they made a bad decision by entering optometry.
And upon what evidence do you base your statements that "there's plenty of room in disease management and vision therapy?" Who is telling you this? We have about 40,000 ODs right now, and we'll be adding about 1,500 to that number every year, once all the new schools are up and running, even accounting for retirement. If half the ODs in the nation decided to convert to the medical model, as you say, and stop asking "1 or 2," the result would be that about half the ODs in the nation would go out of business in a matter of weeks, due to an inability to keep their doors open. There is not enough ocular disease, my friend, to keep the trillions of ODs in this country busy.
The idea of vision therapy is great, except there's just one problem - no one wants to pay for it. Insurance won't pay for it, and mom won't pay for it, so you're left with one option, give it away free, or do what ophthalmology does - prescribe pencil pushups. You're about the 100 thousandth person who's thought of VT as their golden calf. It doesn't happen.
As for ocular disease management, good luck with that. The fact is, the vast majority of what nearly ALL private ODs do, is refract. If you visit some of the heavily medical OD offices in this country, they still make their money on normal patients. I don't care how many coding and billing seminars you go to, in which someone tells you that you can bill your dry eye patient for $4K in services every time he comes in for a visit, it doesn't happen very often. Most people's eyes are distinctly normal, despite the fact that we've come up with 1,000 tests so we can fill up an exam with exiting cards and dials to annoy patients.
I hate to burst your bubble, chief, but it sounds like yours won't be popped for a while anyway. Keep your head down and try to find a spot on the lifeboat, but don't look at VT as your path to freedom; it isn't. As far as disease management goes - super, learn it, and learn to code for it, but don't expect that to save you either; it won't.
Nothing I post on this site is "inflammatory;" it's the truth, and it's real. If you don't like to hear it, that doesn't make it "inflammatory," that just makes it unpleasant. Our liberal educational system has created a nation of young people who are largely incapable of accepting that things are not as they wish. Bad things happen, and your decisions are not always the right ones, despite what your professor/teacher in a crinkly, long skirt, large multi-colored beaded necklace, and a silk scarf, with a pencil-restrained hair bun, may have told you. There are right answers and wrong answers. There are good career choices and bad ones. You'll need to make the best of what you chose.
I really feel for you guys - you know everything, but you don't know anything.
