Viewpoint: Embracing new tech

I was chatting to an optometrist the other day who was reminiscing about ‘the old days’. It made me realise just how far this profession has come clinically in the past 40 odd years. He reminded me that it was really only at the start of the 1980s that optometrists began routinely checking intraocular pressure.  

The thought of carrying out Goldmann routinely was a bit extreme, so the use of ‘palpation’ was the norm. Look it up if you don’t know what it is. Visual field testing involved the patient looking at a white button in the middle of a black cloth and indicating when they saw another white dot coming in from the side. Retinal viewing was via a direct ophthalmoscope, coined ‘the guessing tube’.