Dr. Ben's Blog

Apples and Oranges

Glass­es are offi­cial­ly IN! I don’t think any­one would dis­agree with that point. Frame styles from yes­ter­year are mount­ing huge come­backs (kind of like those golf shirts with the lit­tle croc­o­diles on them). For­tu­nate­ly, the lens optics of yes­ter­year are history.….……or maybe not.….……

Pre­scrip­tion glass­es are heav­i­ly adver­tised at extreme­ly cheap prices on TV, the inter­net, and on bill­boards. There are, to my knowl­edge, two pos­si­ble ways for this to work. Num­ber one: bait-and-switch. Num­ber two: anti­quat­ed optics behind the lens­es. As our under­stand­ing of optics gets bet­ter and bet­ter, lens­es uti­liz­ing old­er opti­cal man­u­fac­tur­ing tech­niques get pushed off to Asia and sold to the West­ern World for cheap. They are then placed into new­er frames and marked up accord­ing­ly. “2013” lens­es are made with wave­front guid­ed tech­niques pio­neered by some of the bright­est PhD’s on the plan­et. They can con­ceiv­ably cor­rect for high­er order visu­al aber­ra­tions we don’t even ful­ly under­stand how to test for! Tru­ly, it’s an excit­ing time to be in glass­es! The prag­mat­ic truth behind the dri­ve for lens­es with supe­ri­or optics is the mar­ket: the Baby Boomers all need mul­ti­fo­cal lens­es to meet their needs for increased ranges of clear vision. Old­er peo­ple aren’t just read­ing and watch­ing TV. They’re stay­ing in the work­force longer and sit­ting in front of com­put­ers, and we are able to bet­ter meet their needs with lens­es made through the use of con­tem­po­rary optics — get what you pay for.

Being in busi­ness for our­selves affords us the abil­i­ty to call all of our own shots, and one of those shots was a promise we made a long time ago: stay­ing cur­rent — always. We choose not to bait-and-switch, and we refuse to make use of anti­quat­ed optics with our lens­es. We demand the best for our patients and choose our prod­ucts accord­ing­ly. We do not go back in time with our lens optics to push quan­ti­ty and turnover. Peo­ple already have enough options for that game with­out us join­ing in. Instead, we focus on qual­i­ty and the indi­vid­ual needs of each patient, one at a time. Put sim­ply, if we were in the phone indus­try, we would choose to car­ry iPhones and not bag phones (remem­ber those?).

Posted in Dr. Ben's Blog, Eyes & Art