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(light-hearted music)

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Welcome to "Hadley Presents."

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I'm your host, Ricky Enger,

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inviting you to sit back, relax,

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and enjoy a conversation with the experts.

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In this episode, Hadley's Chief Program Officer, Ed Haynes,

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interviews Dr. Mark Wilkinson,

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as we discuss visiting with a low vision optometrist.

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Welcome to the show, both of you.

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Thank you.
Thanks, Ricky.

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Dr. Wilkinson, thank you so much for being here.

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And Ed, of course, it's always a pleasure

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to have you on the program.

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I know that you've been on a couple of them before.

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So again, great to have you here.

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Dr. Wilkinson, if you don't mind,

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before we jump into Ed's fantastic list of questions,

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can you just give a brief intro

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about who you are and what you do?

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So I'm an optometrist,

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and I'm a clinical professor of ophthalmology

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at the University of Iowa

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in the Department of Ophthalmology there.

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At the University of Iowa,

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I run the vision rehabilitation service.

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So, in the past we used to call it low vision,

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now we call it vision rehabilitation,

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because we take care of people with

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a wide variety of different types of vision problems.

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And we'll talk about that more as we go.

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I'm also the chair of the Low Vision Subcommittee

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of the National Eye Health Education Program,

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or NEHEP, which is part of NEI.

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And I've been using the resources

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that are available through Hadley for some time now,

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and find they have excellent resources that are available

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to all the people out there with vision problems.

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Well, we certainly love to hear that,

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and we appreciate you for that.

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We thought we would ask you to be on the program,

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because I think a lot of times,

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people who are experiencing vision loss

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are just in the situation where

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they're not sure where they should turn,

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what they should be doing,

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both to protect the vision that they have,

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and then to be able to use that more effectively,

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and just get an idea of what's going on.

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And so there are so many different types

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of doctors and specialties,

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and wanted to invite you on

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to just talk about what it is that you do,

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and how you can assist people.

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So with that, Ed,

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I know you've got a great list of questions,

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so why don't we get started on that?

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Well, thanks Ricky.

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Dr. Wilkinson, again, thanks so much

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for being with us today.

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And just to give you a little background on myself,

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although I work for Hadley

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in an administrative capacity,

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most of my life I spent in the kitchens

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and living rooms of people with vision losses

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of vision rehab therapists.

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So, I sort of have come at these questions

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from that perspective.

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And I'm gonna assure you know,

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that for an older adult who's lost their vision,

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either with glaucoma or macular degeneration, et cetera,

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but one of the hardest things to get them to do,

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is to persuade them to see yet another doctor.

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They've always, they've been to a bunch already.

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So what do you say to folks who say,

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"Why should I go see yet another eye doctor

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when everybody else has told me

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there's nothing that can be done?"

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What do you say to them?

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Yeah, so I think that's one of the great frustrations

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that we have is that people will say

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there's nothing that can be done.

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And it would be sort of like saying

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to somebody who lost a limb or something like that,

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"Well, there's nothing you can do."

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Instead of going for rehabilitation for prosthetics,

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for those different things.

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So I tell people, you know,

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if you're able to see

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all that you wanna see at this point, great.