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The Complete Guide to Becoming An Optometrist
The real numbers on pay, the actual day-to-day work, and whether you have the temperament for a career in primary eye care before you spend a decade and six figures on training.
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Does a Optometrist Actually Do?
You are in a room that is ten feet by ten feet. The lights are dimmed. You are sitting in a rolling chair that has seen better days, and in front of you is a patient you have known for six years. You are peering through a slit lamp — you will forgive the jargon in a second — and you are looking at the patient's eye. The slit lamp is essentially a microscope mounted on a table, and it shines a thin, bright line of light into the eye, letting you see the structures at the front of the eyeball in startling detail. You are checking for a scratch on the cornea, a thin film of cells over the colored part of the eye.
You find it. It is small, a faint streak, and you have seen a thousand of them. You tell the patient he has a corneal abrasion, likely from rubbing his eye with a bit of grit under his finger, and you prescribe an antibiotic drop to prevent infection. You tell him to keep his eye closed as much as possible for the next 24 hours. He thanks you, you hand him a paper copy of the prescription, and you walk him to the front desk. You have exactly six minutes before your next patient is in the room, and you spend them charting.
This is the core of what an optometrist does, and it is a very