Eye Health Solutions

The title of this post is a great question. As an optometrist I did not think I would ever work from home but here I am listening to webinars, doing blog posts, and research from home. Ultimately we need to get back to seeing patients and delivering top quality eyecare. The answer to the question in the title is never. Our reality has been fundamentally changed and this was from a virus which although deadly, has a relatively low mortality rate. Imagine a virus such as H5N1 (avian flu) that has a mortality rate of 60%. Remember that one, it is still out there..... We can't live our lives in fear, we can only control what we can control. Hopefully we learn from this and we are better prepared down the road if something more dangerous or something similar comes along. To relate this back to eyecare and our office, I don't think you will ever see a kids play area or magazine rack again. Honestly, I would hope you do not see those in any office waiting room. We have removed ...

Well, it seems like eons ago when I did this  previous blog post . In re-reading that who would have thought we would end up where we are now. A couple quick things to comment on. In a  recent study  it was shown that the virus is not transmitted in tears. This study was only 17 people but was very well done. None of the 17 had traces of the virus in their tears. Now to be clear you can still inoculate yourself through the mucus membranes of the eye but new tears do not seem to shed virus as far as we know currently. The second thing to comment on is signs of conjuctivitis or "pink eye" associated with the virus remain very low, at about 1%. In the office we have installed breath shields on our microscopes and changed how we interact with patients to minimize chance of contamination. We are fortunate that our office is not a place where sick people go and we do not have the aerosol issues that our dental colleagues have to deal with. There is always risk, and we w...