By now, you’ve all heard about the record-breaking Annual Meeting figures from San Francisco; 212 new Fellows, more than 5,800 registrants, 48,079 hours of continuing education credit, and rumor that it was the biggest single optometric meeting ever staged. What those numbers don’t tell you, however, is about the little spine-tingling moments that occurred throughout the meeting. Here’s what I heard and observed.
A large room was packed with scientists and clinicians (identifiable because they were laughing at Tom Norton’s oldest jokes) as they hung on Jane Gwiazda’s every word during her first public presentation of the COMET 2 results. The heroic work, completed through the auspices of the ophthalmology-optometry joint venture, the Pediatric Eye Disease Investigators Group, showed a modest (0.25 D) difference in myopia progression in low myopes with high accommodative lag and near esophoria when corrected with progressive addition lenses.
Gil Pierce from Ohio told me that his nearly best moment at the meeting was a hallway conversation with a former student. The student related how compromised she felt in her current position where she was being discouraged from engaging in public health education of her patients about their general health problems. He assured her that she was living up to her training and to the Academy’s pursuit of excellence in persisting and continuing to teach her patients about their diabetes and hypertension.
At the AOF luncheon, Don Korb praised Kelly Nichols’s recent work as the chair of the International Meibomian Gland Dysfunction Work Group for the Tear Film and Ocular Surface Society. He said her work made him proud to be an optometrist, as he pledged $25,000 to the AOF to support work in dry eye. The room swelled with pride.
Joan Stelmack was disappointed that she couldn’t get into the standing room only session presented by Thom Freddo, “Understanding the Clinical Significance of Common Retinal Lesions,” but that means that many attendees were treated to Thom’s world class teaching. Better luck next year, Joan!
Steve Eyler, co-chair of the Merton C. Flom Leadership InSight Program, introduced each leadership training session with the vision, “The Academy. Leadership is taught and expected here.”
The Optometric Glaucoma Society premiered Joe Lovett’s film, “Going Blind” on November 15 to an appreciative crowd of researchers and clinicians dedicated to helping the very patients portrayed in the film.
Kovin Naidoo simply stunned the record-breaking Awards Program crowd with his description of his anti-apartheid activities in South Africa and challenged the assembly to help him and Brien Holden with the modest sacrifice of the many to help stamp out preventable blindness worldwide. At the same event, watching the impeccably well-spoken and brilliant Prentice Medal awardee, Earl Smith, tear up when he acknowledged the influence and support of the Academy was a spine-tingler of the first order.
Plan right now to attend Academy 2011 Boston (October 12-15) and every Annual Meeting thereafter. The Academy: it’s where optometry’s best spine-tingling moments happen.
