What is an Optometrist? Well, an Optometrist, also called a Doctor of Optometry, we are
primary care eye doctors. We diagnose and treat vision problems, eye disorders and related
conditions. We prescribe contacts and glasses and help educate people and counsel them when
it comes to different eye surgeries, whether it's refractive surgeries like lasik or through
cataract surgery, glaucoma surgery, we help counsel them for their surgeries and do a
fair amount of pre and post-op care for patients who have surgery. A typical day for us involves
staying in kind of a dimly lit room looking at some letters and using microscopes to evaluate
patient's eyes. And we see a number of patients throughout the day and it's kind of a one
on one interaction with patients. So that is the bulk of the day. We'll talk to them
at length about their particular eye problems and how to make them better and then we'll
help coordinate the care for the patient where there involves calling other doctors to find
out the results of other tests, or help schedule them to other doctors for other further work
ups or just guide them over to our optical and our staff will help them pick out some
glasses and get that coordinated. We'll also, we might even send them over to our contact
lens service and have the folks in our contact lens area talk to the patient a little bit
more about different styles of contact lenses. Our, so generally our responsibilities are
just to ensure that the patient sees well and to make sure that they don't have any
kind of eye health condition that would keep them from seeing well throughout their lifetime.
So that in general is what an Optometrist does.