optometrists - page 2

As Anton Chekhov once said: If it’s not essential, don’t include it in the story. What would the great Russian novelist and playwright make of recent movements in Florida’s seemingly never-neverending Eyeball Wars between ophthalmologists and optometrists? “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off,” Chekhov wrote in 1911. “If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”…

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For nearly two decades, Tallahassee was the front line of an epic battle — the so-called “Eyeball Wars” — between Florida’s optometrists and ophthalmologists. On one side were optometrists — college educated to provide diagnoses and correct vision problems — fighting to perform surgery and prescribe medications beyond topical ointments and creams. Ophthalmologists, supported by the influential Florida Medical Association, argue that optometrists lacked sufficient credentials and training as medical doctors to perform such intricate procedures. After years of legislative…

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