NOA 2023: Moving into modern myopia management techniques

Brianna Rhue, OD, FAAO, FSLS, presented a talk entitled "Myopia: Now and how" at National Optometric Association 2023 Convention.

Video transcript

Editor's note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Brianna Rhue, OD, FAAO, FSLS:
Hi, everyone. I am Dr. Brianna Rhue I practice here in South Florida, which is about 20 minutes away from the NOA conference that we're at here at the Westin in Fort Lauderdale beach. And excited to be here both as a vendor for Dr. Contact Lens as well as presenting on myopia, one of my other passions, on now and how we can do this and bring this to our clinics and to our patients.

So the treatment of myopia has changed really extravagantly over the last 10-15 years. So graduating in 2009, really, nothing was on the radar of myopia in the United States. In other parts, in parts of Asia, Australia, New Zealand, they were really into this. So MiSight, as Coopervision, was actually prescribed in 2009. But yet me graduating in 2009, still didn't really understand that there was anything to do for myopia, or to help these little eyeballs not progress.

So now that we have some FDA-approved lenses that have been on the market for multiple years, it's really changed. So we have a pharmaceutical method with atropine or low-dose atropine that we can treat, not FDA-approved yet but coming, and we also have soft multifocal or dual focus contact lenses as well as ortho-K. So ortho-K has been recently FDA-approved with the Abiliti software through J&J as well as some other lens options that are coming—again, not approved yet here in the US, but in other parts of the world. And so it's a really progressive, exciting topic and exciting area that we can really touch our patients lives and, and change them.

Pearls of myopia is you really can't dabble in myopia management. It is something that you do need to have a passion for. So whether it's dry eye, myopia management, scleral contact lenses, the medical side of your practice, the business side of your practice—so a pearl to take back is really that it's a team effort. It starts with you coming to this conference, learning what you can education-wise, and then bringing it back into practice that your staff wants to know where you were, they want to know what you learned. And that's sometimes where we fall short. We go back into the clinic, we get busy, we get into our, you know, what we've normally been doing with our routine. And so it's about how you want to differentiate yourself and differentiate your practice.

And one thing to take away is, in my presentation, we talked about just ChatGPT right. So things are really progressing. I typed into ChatGPT: What do I do with my kid that has myopia? And it was these eight bullet points that was written for, you know, in 20 seconds for a parent. So parents are getting educated differently, whether that's on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, going to ChatGPT and asking for recommendations. And these recommendations are spot-on. And so it's really this collective being that we need to be there for our patients. They're going to come and ask me for these treatments, and we need to be up on it. We took an optometric oath to do so, to stay in front of our patients, to stay in front of technology, to stay in front of innovation, and really take care of our patients to the best of our abilities.

Yeah, the NOA is a great conference to come to; very tight knit group of doctors, very warm and welcoming to everyone in the community. For them to—for us all to kind of be in this broader vision of success and innovation and abundance together. So it has a really good energy for it. Lots of friendly faces, lots of new faces, but they really are very innovative and very progressive group of doctors, so excited to be here.