After the eighty-three year old lady finished her annual physical examination, the doctor said, "You are in fine shape for your age, Mrs. Mallory, but tell me, do you still have intercourse?"

"Just a minute, I'll have to ask my husband," she said.
She stepped out into the crowded reception room and yelled out loud:

"Bob, do we still have intercourse?" And there was a hush .
You could hear a pin drop.

Bob answers impatiently, "If I told you once, Irma, I told you a hundred times...What we have is... Blue Cross!"

The CD-ROM's are currently being duplicated and will be shipping soon.
There are three OD CD-ROM's and three for staff... but many, many of
the staff courses are perfectly suited for OD listening, as well.
Great material. Each CD-ROM features a built-in MP3 player with PDF
handout viewer. All the MP3's are also properly ID3 tagged so you can
dump them to your iPod (yuck) or your Zune (cool), or other MP3 player
(Zens are acceptable, I guess...). In fact, the software includes
functionality to copy directly to iTunes or any folder on your drive
or portable player.

Is Twitter worth pursuing as a practice management tool? That's been a big question on the List this week and the opinions are mixed, as you might guess. One Listee said said yes, emphatically in that he already has over twenty followers after only setting up his account during the past week. What is Twitter, you ask? It's basically a web service that allows you to post 140 character "SMS-like" messages which are posted to your Twitter account and forwarded to all your "followers". Celebrities, politicians, and corporations love it because they can feed out information to their thousands of followers. Some celebrities have hundreds of thousands of followers. How many followers would you have to have to make it worth doing for your practice? I have no idea. I think I smell a poll coming...

See http://www.twitter.com

I promise I won't turn this blog into a joke blog...but two jokes with at least a tiny bit of "eye" relevance is too good to pass up. ~ Walt

= = =

The IRS decides to audit Grandpa, and summons him to the IRS office.

The IRS auditor was not surprised when Grandpa showed up with his attorney.

The auditor said, 'Well, sir, you have an extravagant lifestyle and no full-time employment, Which you explain by saying that you win money gambling.

I'm not sure the IRS finds that believable.'

I'm a great gambler, and I can prove it,' says Grandpa. 'How about a demonstration?'

The auditor thinks for a moment and said, 'Okay. Go ahead.'

Grandpa says, 'I'll bet you a thousand dollars that I can bite my own eye.'

The auditor thinks a moment and says, 'It's a bet.'

Grandpa removes his glass eye and bites it. The auditor's jaw drops.

Grandpa says, 'Now, I'll bet you two thousand dollars that I can bite my other eye..'

Now the auditor can tell Grandpa isn't blind, so he takes the bet.

Grandpa removes his dentures and bites his good eye. The stunned auditor now realizes he has wagered and lost three grand , with Grandpa's attorney as a witness. He starts to get nervous.

'Want to go double or nothing?' Grandpa asks 'I'll bet you six thousand dollars that I can stand on one side of your desk, and pee into that wastebasket on the other side, and never get a drop anywhere in between.'

The auditor, twice burned, is cautious now, but he looks carefully and decides there's no way this old guy could possibly manage that stunt, so he agrees again.

Grandpa stands beside the desk and unzips his pants, but although he strains mightily, he can't make the stream reach the wastebasket on the other side, so he pretty much urinates all over the auditor's desk.

The auditor leaps with joy, realizing that he has just turned a major loss into a huge win.

But Grandpa's own attorney moans and puts his head in his hands.

'Are you okay?' the auditor asks.

'Not really,' says the attorney. 'This morning, when Grandpa told me he'd been summoned for an audit, he bet me twenty-five thousand dollars that he could come in here and pee all over your desk and that you'd be happy about it!'

Don't Mess with Old People!!

With all the talk about nationalized healthcare coming our way in the USA, the question was recently brought up on how Optometry might fare. Would it be like Optometry in Canada? And if so... what does that really mean? Peter Rozanec, OD from the frozen North clarified the situation by giving us this brief synopsis, very well written, I might add.

In Canada, we have largely the same 'competitive' pressures as you do. Chain stores, online distribution of products, etc. but no HMOs per se. In Ontario, we are still waiting for our TPA regulations to go through (I believe this fall), which will permit a very wide distribution of topical meds including glaucoma treatment and some oral meds (eg. antibiotics). We have very good relationships with OMDs here (much better than 10 or 20 yrs ago), including the recent enactment of a collaborative commision on managing glaucoma patients across this country. Ontario is Canada's most populous province, with approximately 12 million inhabitants.

If Obama uses some of our 'game plan' here, I doubt you have much to fear. Having said that, I don't see wide changes in how many US ODs will practice even if our game plan were to be fully enacted in the US. Most optometrists here do well, and have a very comfortable
standard of living compared to our American colleagues according to my observations (as I travel often between our countries). As always,
IMHO."

Canadian Listees Peter Rozanec, OD and Glen Chiasson, OD have just announced their new podcast "IOP - International Optometry Podcast". Two episodes have been published. You can find them on iTunes by searching for "optometry", or you can subscribe by using the following RSS feed:

 http://www.prozanec.libsyn.com/rs

In a recent issue of Art Epstein's eJournal "Optometric Physician" he outlines why he feels that board certification in its current proposed form doesn't make sense.  There has already been a firestorm of controversy around his comments. If you've not subscribed to the Optcomlist, you might want to do so just to follow this discussion. For those of you who have not read Dr. Epstein's article, here's the link:

http://www.revoptom.com/email/op_041309.htm