Almost everyone who is interested in opthalmic optics has learned to deal with refractometric and binocular problems.
But if it is true that welfare and civilization ask for a greater and greater commitment, the real optometry cannot be addressed to just for the solution of these simple problems.
When optometry is spoken of, everybody wants it to be developed within its own category, but the overall impression is that these categories are striving to obtain something which actually they do not know in depth, ignoring the essence which classifies and defines it.
It is legitimate to claim for what one has studied for and can be treated in no superficial or simply empiric way.
It is exactly from empiricism that contrasts among categories originate, which believe that optometry can be reduced to lenses prescriptions and to the spotting of the right balance between the action of both eyes as far as accomodation, convergence and lateroversions are concerned.
All this would appear as reductive to those who would have to attribute optometry to one category or another.
In theory, an optician should not necessarily know the pharmacodynamics of an eye-drop, as well as an oculist is not obliged to know the optical dynamic of a correction or, at least, is not obliged to deeply know the effects which that correction produces on the sight, even because the lenses thickness, index of refraction, pupillary distance, etc., are not measured by the oculist, but by the optician.
Usually, the oculist just finds out the macro-optical effects putting the lenses in front of the patient’s eyes during the test, and it has been proved that these lenses are not equal to those which will be used in the final glasses.
But the above-mentioned parameters are those which alter the spectral components of the radiation beams reaching the eye, and therefore alter even the components which form the “information packet” for the visual realization.
This entails a different vision. Is it better? Is it worse? Of course it is different! So, the alteration is certain.
And now comes the question: who will solve the micro-optical effects of this prescription?
In the present days, chromatic information has acquired a greater importance: for graphic work at the computer, street billboards, fast-vehicle driving, sports results depending on vision, vision in microgravity, at school, etc.
Who owns sufficient experience and knowledge regarding this visual aspect?
If the prescription should report all the parameters required in order to have a perfect correction, the expert should spend more time working out these parameters (supposing that he can do it!) than visiting the patient.
This is the reason why the optometrist represents an essential figure; he could allow to spare time and be sure that the prescription will be at its best.
It has often been said that many ocular diseases are found during a visit for the prescription of lenses, and so it would be better if the prescription would be done by the oculist instead of the optometrist, since the latter could be unable to spot them.
A solution which would make everyone happy could be to create a law according to which if the optometrist, having examined a patient with the tools at his disposal and being able to ascertain eventual ocular diseases, failed to see them and therefore did not report them to the oculist, he could be judged civilly and penally responsible for that.
Automatically, everybody who describes themselves as oprometrist in spite of not being so, would pay for their deficiencies.
And probably, at this point, they would be the first to abandon the idea of an optometrist career.
Source Luce e Immagini, edited by Prof. Sergio Villani
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