(light-hearted music)
Welcome to "Hadley Presents."
I'm your host, Ricky Enger,
inviting you to sit back, relax,
and enjoy a conversation with the experts.
In this episode, Hadley's Chief Program Officer, Ed Haynes,
interviews Dr. Mark Wilkinson,
as we discuss visiting with a low vision optometrist.
Welcome to the show, both of you.
Thank you. Thanks, Ricky.
Dr. Wilkinson, thank you so much for being here.
And Ed, of course, it's always a pleasure
to have you on the program.
I know that you've been on a couple of them before.
So again, great to have you here.
Dr. Wilkinson, if you don't mind,
before we jump into Ed's fantastic list of questions,
can you just give a brief intro
about who you are and what you do?
So I'm an optometrist,
and I'm a clinical professor of ophthalmology
at the University of Iowa
in the Department of Ophthalmology there.
At the University of Iowa,
I run the vision rehabilitation service.
So, in the past we used to call it low vision,
now we call it vision rehabilitation,
because we take care of people with
a wide variety of different types of vision problems.
And we'll talk about that more as we go.
I'm also the chair of the Low Vision Subcommittee
of the National Eye Health Education Program,
or NEHEP, which is part of NEI.
And I've been using the resources
that are available through Hadley for some time now,
and find they have excellent resources that are available
to all the people out there with vision problems.
Well, we certainly love to hear that,
and we appreciate you for that.
We thought we would ask you to be on the program,
because I think a lot of times,
people who are experiencing vision loss
are just in the situation where
they're not sure where they should turn,
what they should be doing,
both to protect the vision that they have,
and then to be able to use that more effectively,
and just get an idea of what's going on.
And so there are so many different types
of doctors and specialties,
and wanted to invite you on
to just talk about what it is that you do,
and how you can assist people.
So with that, Ed,
I know you've got a great list of questions,
so why don't we get started on that?
Well, thanks Ricky.
Dr. Wilkinson, again, thanks so much
for being with us today.
And just to give you a little background on myself,
although I work for Hadley
in an administrative capacity,
most of my life I spent in the kitchens
and living rooms of people with vision losses
of vision rehab therapists.
So, I sort of have come at these questions
from that perspective.
And I'm gonna assure you know,
that for an older adult who's lost their vision,
either with glaucoma or macular degeneration, et cetera,
but one of the hardest things to get them to do,
is to persuade them to see yet another doctor.
They've always, they've been to a bunch already.
So what do you say to folks who say,
"Why should I go see yet another eye doctor
when everybody else has told me
there's nothing that can be done?"
What do you say to them?
Yeah, so I think that's one of the great frustrations
that we have is that people will say
there's nothing that can be done.
And it would be sort of like saying
to somebody who lost a limb or something like that,
"Well, there's nothing you can do."
Instead of going for rehabilitation for prosthetics,
for those different things.
So I tell people, you know,
if you're able to see
all that you wanna see at this point, great.