Optometry

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Introduction

One may ask what exactly is an optometrist and what do they do? Optometrists are the doctors that provide eye care. In their job, they examine patient’s eyes in order to determine if there are problems like farsightedness. As treatment they can prescribe glasses/contacts or other care like vision therapy or low-vision rehabilitation. (bls.gov)

History

Currently, 168.5 million US citizens use glasses or contact lenses, which means 75% of the adult US population has seen an optometrist (topoptometricschool.com). That’s a vast amount of people who have encountered in some aspect with the business of optometry. Before plunging into the vast history is optometry, it is first important to understand exactly where it originated from. The word, optometry, comes from the Greek language. Opto which means sight and metron which means measure are the two Greek words where it originates from. (topoptometricschool.com) Many ancient Greek philosophers like Ptolemy, Euclid, and Aristophanes wrote about the use of a sort of extremely simplified version of vision enhancement, but it was not at all very practical in use (Goss, David A).

It was actually not until the late 13 and early 14th centuries till vision enchantment actually came into practical usage. Bacon talked about lens, but never implemented a design. It’s unknown who made the first lens, but spectacle manufacturing businesses began in the 1300s in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands using leather and wood. On from there, the laws and physics of vision magnification was theorized and discovered by certain scientists like Snell with his law of refraction and Newton with his study of how light works. (Goss, David A).

Though all these past events and people are impor...

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....net/patient.html>.

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"History of Optometry - Discover the History of Optometry." Top Optometric Schools - Find Optometric Schools and Colleges. Top Optometric Schools. Web. 1 Mar. 2010. .

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"Optometrists." U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Web. 5 Mar. 2010. .

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