What’s the Harm?

As ophthalmologists, we sometimes see things that are harmful done by non eye care professionals. The issue is that there are many practitioners who are primary care providers. They have about the same amount of time of training to treat the whole body as some of us do for just one little part of the body (for example, I spent 5 years of training after medical school was over to do my work as an ophthalmologist and internal medicine training is commonly 3 years long). So, it stands to reason that primary care providers cannot possibly know everything about everything, because they’d be in school forever. However, I think it is important that we remember that none of us should ever do harm to a patient, even if it is because we don’t have in depth knowledge. That’s why I was happy to see that a cornea colleague sent a letter to the editor in a non-ophthalmologic journal to dissuade primary care providers from giving numbing eye drops to people with eye pain. Even if the eye pain is from a traumatic eye scratch, which presumably will get better quickly, numbing eye drops are a bad idea. Ophthalmologists have seen so many patients whose eyes have been destroyed by numbing eye drops that we need to make sure that everyone knows the harm that they can cause.