Don’t Forget the Basics!

Abstract

Practice of optometry has changed significantly in the past two decades, particularly in highly dynamic areas such as contact lens practice and other highly interdisciplinary specialties of optometry and visual sciences. As a result, eye care practitioners (ECP) deal today with an increasing amount of imaging and analysis equipment that allows us to improve our understanding of the ocular structure and function as never before. The present issue of Journal of Optometry offers some good examples of how important are technology advances in our everyday practice.1,2 Furthermore, don’t miss the next Special Issue of J Optom devoted exclusively to this matter. However, technology will hardly replace an ECP to establish the bridge between the coldness of data and the subjective complains,2–4 in order to orient treatments to improve each patient's visual skills to develop his/her activity in an increasingly visually demanding environment.5 Indeed, the ECP should always keep feet on the ground and don’t ignore the basics of our scientific and clinical specialty to better understand how the gift of vision interacts with the surrounding environment and do our best to make such an interaction to run as smooth as possible. With no doubt new technology allows us to provide our patients with newer and better solutions for their visual problems, but again we have to bear in mind the basics of the examination of the visual mechanism to understand how the visual system decides which eye prefers for certain visual tasks,6 which basical anatomical parameters to consider to improve the understanding of clinically relevant measures as intra-ocular pressure,7 or how the visual system makes use of efficient working principles to expand its visual capabilities beyond the theoretical predictions of optics.8 Our success as professionals in the field of health sciences will relay in our ability to apply technological advances in order to better understand the clinical meaning of data obtained and how it fits in the patient complains, and ultimately provide patients with the best preventive strategies, diagnostic tools and treatment plans.