Welcome to Optometry Simplified.
In this weekly newsletter, I've curated the best resources to help you grow personally and professionally.
My mission is to find what's best for my patients and my practice.
Here's what I've found...
Links I Liked
Most ODs have a sales allergy. I do too.
But having a plan and practicing it has helped me overcome my hypersensitivity. True to form, Donald Miller and his podcast guest recently discussed a great framework for selling without sounding pushy. The meat of it starts at ~15:30. Listen for some excellent questions to use with your patients. The StoryBrand Podcast
DEWS III and dry eye management simplified. Music to my ears.
Cory Lappin, OD, simplifies the DEWS III diagnostic formula here. Paul Karpecki, OD, Ben Gaddie, OD, and Marc Bloomenstein, OD, simplify a lid-centric diagnosis and management plan here. Read them both, and you'll have most of what you need to start or improve your dry eye practice. Review of Optometry
Protecting your practice starts with understanding your biggest risks.
PPP Practice Risk Assessment helps identify potential compliance, billing, HR, and operational gaps that could be impacting your growth and profitability — before they become bigger problems.
Research I'm Reading
What can we recommend beyond increased time outdoors to prevent myopia?
Perhaps omega-3s and vitamin D, says a new review that explored dietary factors and specific nutrients in the prevention of myopia in children and adults. Journal of Clinical Medicine
Deep Thoughts
A couple of months ago, I wrote about using AI without losing your clinical mind.
I introduced Evidence-Based Medicine as the framework, unpacked the three pillars, and made the case for specific tools as genuine research partners. If you haven't read it, start there.
The question I left partially answered was the one I want to resolve here: Is AI actually going to take your job?
Yes, I believe it will take your job... if you let it.
You will let AI take your job in two ways: by yielding your authority to it or by ignoring it.
Unfortunately, both approaches lead to the same place: bad medicine and suboptimal results for our patients.
The first way of yielding to AI as the authority is what I touched on in my previous newsletter. You stop forming your own impression first. You start ratifying conclusions rather than reaching them.
The automation research is pretty detailed on what happens next: skill quietly erodes, often without awareness, until the moment you need it most, and it isn't there.
Rather than AI being subservient to you, you become subservient to it and lose your ability to reason and apply your clinical knowledge and experience in the complexity of patient care.
The second way doesn't get talked about enough: you ignore AI entirely. You assume the tools are overhyped, the learning curve isn't worth it, and your current approach is sufficient.
But the clinician who opts out (or buries their head in the sand) isn't neutral; they're exposed. Literature overload is real. Your cognitive limits and biases are real. And the technologies reshaping eye care, oculomics among them, are being built with or without your participation.
So what does the alternative look like?
It looks like using AI in a complementary way by filtering what it gives you through the still-relevant framework of EBM: quality research, clinical experience, and patient preferences. Not replacing any of those pillars. Strengthening them.
That complementary relationship is what I believe excellent eye care looks like going forward. And it only works if you stay in the driver's seat. The moment you yield your clinical authority to the tool, you lose the judgment that made you the expert in the first place. The moment you ignore the tool, you lose the ability to grow with an ever-expanding evidence base.
Using AI well demands a greater understanding of the literature, not less — including its gaps, its biases, and what it cannot yet tell us.
AI doesn't lower the bar for clinical thinking. It raises it.
Your choice.
Can you do me a favor? If you found any of these resources helpful, share this newsletter with one of our colleagues!
See you next week!
--Kyle Klute, OD, FAAO