As an addicted eater, I enjoy creative food. Unfortunately, where I come from, creativity often means something like upsizing the French fries. But my surprisingly sophisticated foodie children, and my wife’s insistence that we not eat at the same old sports bar every Saturday, has expanded my horizon—and by horizon I mean my waist size. Food can, then, be a blessing and a curse, kind of like our profession at times. 

Optometry is full of small bites, or tapas. When the table’s full of crazy-good things, don’t judge the whole meal by the one crappy, deep-fried stick of the chef’s favorite creepy crawler. 

You see, there seem to be a lot of unhappy optometrists. Lawyers used to be the only ones discouraging people from going into their profession. Then they got into their expensive cars and drove away. But, as a rule, optometrists were happy and loved to mold bright, young patients into OD wannabes. My own optometrist, back in the day, showed me his Jaguar XKE, and I suddenly became acutely interested in serving my fellow man.

Surely you love what you do, don’t you? People admire and need us—assuming, of course, it’s covered by insurance. 

I know there are yucky tapas—like when patients decides after 25 years of awesome care that you must be stupid because you don’t want them to over-wear their contact lenses—but mostly our little dishes are wonderful. 

In fact, optometry is so wonderful they’re opening a new school every 300 feet. You may not know this, but everyone deserves a personal optometrist, and soon we’ll have enough to make it happen. If you are my only patient, I’ll take really good care of your eyes... until they start assigning a different doctor to each eye. When that happens, I hope I get the good one.

My little hometown is two square miles, and in a 10-year period it spawned five successful eye doctors. Okay, one was just an ophthalmologist, but I counted him too. That’s a steady parade of inspired young people. 

How many young people do you inspire in your practice? Do you only serve up the fried green slime, or do you show them what you can do with a slice of Kobe beef and a fresh pepper? In my 35 years of practice, I have recruited one prospect. He’s in school right now and he’ll be great. Just one, but I know a lot of retired chemical engineers, and they don’t want to graduate optometry school in their 80s.

But I almost always brag about optometry, even though I don’t own a Jag. Wish I did; it would be an amazing recruiting tool. 

Optometry may not be as sexy as, say, proctology, but I think we provide a wonderful service. We protect the function of an organ system that is, in every way I can think of, just as important as the organ system proctologists protect. 

Since they are determined to open 40 million optometry schools, we should make sure they get the best possible students. Look at it this way: 40 million schools x 30 graduates per year (minus the occasional slacker who goes into web design) = over a 100 million voters each year to support changing optometry laws so nobody has to refer to a specialist to epilate an eyelash. That’s huge!

So, quit bellyaching about optometry! Get in the kitchen and serve up your best tapas every day. You take care of optometry and it will take care of you.