Orthokeratology

And so we talk it, we talk preventative, but we don't act it.

So Newton was big on the, on the Ortho-K thing, which at the time was my avenue into myopia control.

We didn't know why.

We didn't know why it worked, but it did.

Having ophthalmology in our corner, you know, having medicine in our corner.

They were not.

They were, you know, "Ortho-K, oh my God." You know, that, "What are you doing to, you know, you're bending a cornea." And I heard this from optometry students, by the way.

"But they're, you know, you're destroy-- it, it's not safe." You know, my pediatric ophthalmologist would, would try to scare my patients.

Mm-hmm

... and I am all in on all the modalities, um, and I'm really all in on Ortho-K because it's been such a big part of our lives, and it's been one of the big hallmarks of our practice, so-

Yeah

...

I'm pretty stoked.

Yeah.

Yeah, and what the topic you've brought for us today is Ortho-K as a passive income, which I think is a, is, is an incredible topic.

I don't think a lot of doctors think about Ortho-K as passive income, and so I'm, I'm really excited to kind of like dig in deep on, on this.

I do.

Yeah, I think that I think ortho K is part of that process that evolved our thinking somewhat because we do tend to think in terms of depth, our initial, you know, one of our main ortho K lenses that's out there is all micron depth based, you know, and so that that created an evolution of thinking.

um i think that scleral fitting has also pushed that along and i think we get back to the end of the day as we get comfortable looking at elevation maps for ortho k and for sclerals we go back and look at our cornea maps and think to ourselves why aren't i looking at elevation data for my corneal lens fits too i mean now that i understand it better it's a truer representation of the cornea when you look at elevation rather than curvature Curvature, really, no, you know, that there's a great, there's a great deal of slope in an area, but is that slope coming down a mountain or is that slope going down a cliff or going down into a gutter? You don't know.

It just means that there's a lot of curvature happening here.

It could be that the cornea is going very steeply up and back down again, or it could mean the cornea is going very steeply down and back up again.

So I really do kind of have you know, any options available based on the child.

I might think that they're 12 and they play baseball and they would love Ortho-K, but then as soon as they start thinking about sleeping in a lens or the parents are worried about it, we have MySight as a fallback.

If we have another child who just does not want to wear contact lenses, we have Atropine or we have the myopia control glasses.

So I really try to have a conversation We're actually so with the patient than the parent.

You just were not treating them like that.

So I would challenge and push back to be like, those people if you're under 60 thinking talking about selling and you're gonna have to go back into work be slow to slow down find a way to fine-tune the existing office and see how can you pull it out because I rarely hear the doctors that are more specialized talking about being burnt out because they found a passion and now the passion is feeding their life and it's feeding their life and they're able to actually operate and perform and live life the way they would truly enjoy so look at the specialties in optometry and maybe you can turn that side business and a side piece into the main thing right? Could you bring a doctor in to do your regular annuals and you just focus on vision therapy? You focus on myopia control, ortho K.

Use that main practice to feed the specialty parts of the practice.

Could you do scleros or specialty contacts full time, right? Could you find a way to do another type of business within optometry and still enjoy it? Because I lecture, I get to go around and I see different offices and I meet different docs and I look everybody up and I try to stay connected and engaged with everybody as much as possible.