SB129 language only allows specific in‑office laser and eyelid procedures. These in‑office procedures DO NOT include major surgeries like cataract surgery, retina surgery, LASIK and more.

Doctors of Optometry have been performing in‑office laser and in-office eyelid procedures since the 1990s. The argument that only MDs are supposed to perform these procedures ended more than two decades ago. 

Every US Doctor of Optometry school in the USA teaches and trains optometrists for in‑office laser and in-office eyelid procedures. In addition, every Optometrist that qualifies to perform in‑office laser and in-office eyelid surgery procedures has been certified by experts including by ophthalmology.  It's time to update the Ohio Practice Act to the 21st century. 

Doctors of Optometry have been performing in-office laser and in-office eyelid procedures for decades. Ohio is late to adopt such a law. Ophthalmologists published an article in 2018 that proved patients would have to drive nearly 2x further by limiting these in-office eye procedures to only ophthalmologists.*

JAMA Ophthalmology 2018

In-office laser and in-office eyelid procedure certification is a major endeavor. It requires:

• 4 years of Doctor of Optometry school
• Evaluation and management of thousands of patients
• Years of training in ocular disease and treatment
• Three board examinations
• Performance proficiency examination

Clearly this is impossible to accomplish in only one weekend.

MDs in Ohio have fought against the ability of Doctors of Optometry to care for their patients since the 1980s. In that time, MDs have tried to stop Optometrists from:

• Dilating patient’s pupils.
• Prescribing eye drops for pink eye and glaucoma.
• Prescribing oral medication for eye infections and inflammation.
• Performing in-office procedures to treat eye infections, inflammation and other conditions.

MDs try to convince the public and legislators that their care is the only one that should allow these medical procedures despite there being zero evidence of ill-effects of optometric care over the past four decades. The entire Optometry profession has been built upon personal eye health and vision care for the betterment of society. This is why the public prefers Optometrists for their personalized eye health care.

This mistruth can be traced back to Oklahoma and a situation in which one optometrist had performed more laser procedures than a full practice of multiple ophthalmologists in the area. Opposition MDs used this information without context, writing a paper that suggested the optometrist performed more procedures because they had to repeat a procedure multiple times on the same patient. This was not the case, but without context, the MDs were able to exploit the information.

In fact, nationwide data shows that 13x more Ophthalmologists required patients to have three procedures compared to similar situations when the procedures were performed by Doctors of Optometry.