Curious as to what you think students want from Optometry?
I think you mean to say that most will end up working commercial or in a "box" (walmart?)....but, take a look at pharmacists...almost 90% of the profession is commercial!
ODs are allied health professionals...it is stupid to expect the same benefits as medical professionals...I definitely believe most pre-opts know this, so I presume they know what their getting themselves into by being an OD.
ODs are doctors. You go to school for four years, plus residency in some cases, and you spend upwards of 200K on just the doctorate, not to mention the undergraduate schooling. If you want to go through that and think of yourself on the same level as an RN or an OT, then you're right, you probably will be happy in a box acting as a spectacle prescription printer for an optical company who needs an OD in the chair to make it legal. There's nothing wrong with getting an RN. They've gat one of the toughest and most important jobs in health care, but RNs don't make the decisions, the doctor does.
Most preops envision themselves in private practice. I can say this because I've interviewed countless OD hopefuls and I asked every last one of them what they hope to do with an OD. If you think your peers are eagerly awaiting Walmart careers, you don't know them very well.
Gregory Mendel said:
Maybe your personal situation is altering your opinion about Optometry??
My personal situation, as I've said many times, is what triggered my desire to really look into and understand the inner workings of the profession, something I don't think you can do thoroughly until you've been an OD for a while. I'm looking at the profession as objectively as possible. If it were just "me," there wouldn't be so many older, very successful ODs out there saying "Yeah, optometry was great for me, but with everything that's happened to it, I don't think new grads have a decent shot at what I have been able to achieve in my practice."
Gregory Mendel said:
Also, dentists are surgeons...they are superior to OD's in terms of specialized skills, as such they will have less problems due to supply/demand....
They are superior in terms of doing
procedures that pay well and haven't been hijacked by cheap insurances yet.
They are not superior in terms of offering specialized skills. Dental school and optometry school are both 4 year programs and you'd be pissing off a lot of OD students if you said to one of them that their ride through grad school was easier than their DDS counterparts. Their position on the health professions ladder, well above optometry, has nothing to do with them having more skills than ODs, it's that they have skills that are not being undermined by their professional organizations (the AOA), crappy corporate-disguised insurance plans (VSP, Optum, EyeMed, etc), and massive infestation by corporations (Walmart, Sam's, Americas Worst, Sterling, etc). For now, you can't go into a Costco and get a crown for $100.00. That's what we do as ODs in those places. We give our services away, practically free, so a corporation can pull the "cha-ching" bar on the register a few more times a day. The profession has been commandeered by corporations that have no interest in providing healthcare, they just want to sell materials and they always need a warm OD body to do it.
Given the massive oversupply of ODs and the impending increase in the rate of OD production due to the new schools, there will be no difficulty in finding warm bodies to run their script factories. That's where the profession is heading, ODs as spectacle Rx printers. If that's what you want, then an OD will be a marvelous fit for you.