President-Elect, Bernie Dolan, and I had the distinct pleasure to represent our American Academy of Optometry at the 2012 meeting of the European Academy of Optometry and Optics (EAOO) in Dublin, Ireland last weekend. The EAOO’s mission is “Shaping Optometry and Optics across Europe.”
While I did a quick turnaround trip, as in the crazy, post-trip declaration, “I went to Ireland for the weekend,” Bernie took the opportunity to investigate his geneaology. He is Irish on both sides of his family, and he toured the country to visit long-lost, never-before-met, cousins countless-times removed, pronouncing them friendlier than San Francisco Bay Area relatives he sees all the time. I spent available leisure time touring the Jameson and Guinness factories and feeling like the people on the buses and streets looked a lot like me.
The meeting itself was fascinating. It numbered 210 registrants and had familiar sessions like invited speakers, submitted papers and posters, case reports, and workshops. Our Academy co-sponsored the opening reception, overlooking the verdant, 80-000+ capacity rugby and hurling stadium, Croke Park. I spoke to an enthusiastic, friendly crowd of optometrists from all over Europe plus a few hearty Americans about our Academy’s current upward spiral on all fronts. People fondly recalled our international meetings in Interlochen, Munich, and Copenhagen.
We met people with all kinds of connections to US optometry. I met optometrists bearing Master’s degrees from Salus University and European faculty members with training time spent at Indiana University, and talked about interactions with Pacific University, the University of Houston, and Nova Southeastern University.
Bernie and I attended a brilliant 3-D optic nerve viewing workshop co-taught by Fellow Julie Tyler. I watched a keynote speaker show an OVS-published graph from the National Eye Institute-funded Berkeley Infant Biometry Study that I’d also seen presented at Ohio State the week before. We applauded as the 2012 graduates from the Dublin Institute of Technology optometry program received their certificates from a new Irish governmental appointee in charge of Primary Care. (The graduating class comprised almost all women, and they looked a lot like the students I visited with in April at the Illinois College of Optometry; there were just more redheads among them.) I was enthusiastically greeted by Fellow and President of the EAOO Roger Crelier and Fellow and European Council of Optometry and Optics President, Armin Duddek, who has already made his plane reservations for our Phoenix 2012 meeting.
There are some differences, though. Fellowship in the EAOO is different from our own FAAO distinction. It is an honorific designation, and only 11 people worldwide have received the honor. Its Secretariat (administrative office) is housed in the British College of Optometrists. There are far fewer biology-oriented scientific presentations than at our Annual Meeting.
As all different languages swirled the air at the coffee breaks and meals, I found myself marveling at our professional similarities rather than our cultural differences. Suddenly, I was transported to past Disney meetings in America and found myself humming this little tune (sing it quietly in your head or aloud in your office or car to the tune of It’s a Small World but run the risk of then humming it all day):
It’s a world of myopes and a world of tears.
It’s a world of squints and a world of … beers.
It’s so much that we share that it’s time we’re aware
It’s Optometry after all.
It’s a small world after all. It’s a small world after all …”
