Actually I've been on SDN since 2002 (under a different name). My views of optometry were vastly different back then. I was very much pro-optometry and even got into some pissing matches with some OMDs while defending my profession.
Since then, I've seen the light. I've been beaten down by patients, insurance companies, my professional organizations, and all my competitors, who have
doubled in my relatively small city since I started. I've had the chance to talk to hundreds of ODs. I originally came on just to voice my one opinion. Then a host of high school, and pre-OD and OD students came on to say I was crazy and a loser and a failure, etc.... when in fact, I have a very successful private practice, started cold a few months after I graduated. I started with absolutely ZERO patients and built it up on my own (despite what idiot Obama says). BUT, and this is the crux of my concern, it's a practice that I could not possibly build today if I had to start over from scratch.
So I only felt it necessary to show them that I am right in my assessment. And try to point out that a person acutally doing the job is ALWAYS more knowledgable than a person looking at it from the outside.......be it a bridge builder, an airline pilot or even an optometrist.
It pains me to see, what I believe to be, terrible mistakes being made by young people that have their whole life ahead of them. Most have the ablity to do better and go farther than optometry will allow them to go. It is very much a dead-end job now. There are virtually no chances of upward mobility. Their starting pay is likely to be the highest pay they can hope to achieve in their career now. Their life will be that of a nomadic optometrist moving from one 10 x 10 foot doc-in-a-box location to another, working feverishly for a high school graduate that just moved from the garden shop to the optical.
Unfortunately, it seems many, many of the generation Y crew seem to know it all. They can do no wrong. They can think no wrong. Everything has been handed to them so they believe all they have to do is go through the motions and it will be.
I'm only here to tell them optometry has changed almost 180 degree from what it was when I graduated and before. We have many more players in the game. Powerful players that crush the little ODs and make life much harder than it should be for a well-educated doctoral-level individual.
I'm fully aware that the know-it-all will not listen. But there are some that will read what we write and investigate a little more and decide that optometry is not what they thought it was. I would have given anything to have the internet when I was a college student. There is so much more infomation available now. When I was interested in optometry school, I could not log onto their website and learn everything. I had to go down to the local library and look them up in the old microfish rolls. It took hours to go through it all. I did not have varied opinions. All I had was a few old local ODs that graduated in 1958 and 1969 to talk to.
So if I stop just one or two people from making what I think is a mistake, I've done my job here. For the ones that are dead-set on going to OD school, nothing I or anyone else can say will change their mind. We are not talking to those people (unless they insult us.