Join us for an episode with Dr. Sherman Tung, one of only 150 optometrists globally with an FIAOMC Fellowship and a leading expert in Myopia Control Treatment.
Dr. Tung shares his journey to building a successful myopia management practice in Vancouver, revealing how the Topcon MYAH played a crucial role in his growth. He offers valuable insights and actionable data for practitioners at every level, covering when to initiate treatment, how to interpret key metrics, and effective strategies for attracting new patients to a myopia management program.
A special thanks to Topcon Healthcare for supporting this episode.
Learn more about Topcon and the MYAH: https://topconmyah.com
https://www.myopiaprofile.com/company/topcon
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One Of The Most Specialized ODs In Myopia And Ortho-K In The World: ‘Myopia Is An Axial Length Disease’, ‘Prevent Future Diseases Instead Of Reacting To Them’ – Dr. Sherman Tung
Welcome back to another episode of Canada’s number-one optometry show. Thank you as always for taking the time to join me here. I’m super excited to have you. As always, I have a big request right off the top. If you get any value from this episode or if you have from any previous episodes, please do share it. Put a screenshot up on Instagram, put a link on LinkedIn, text it to your friends, and let them know we’re having these conversations so our profession can continue to grow and our colleagues can continue to improve their practices.
I am here with a return guest, my friend, and a wonderful doctor, Dr. Sherman Tung. We will be diving into Ortho-K and myopia management. We’ve had a lot of myopia conversations over the last couple of years, but we’re going to take a deep dive. We’re going to see it from the eyes of a true expert. We’re going to spend a little time talking about one device in particular that can help elevate your myopia management practice, which is Myah from Topcon.
I want to say a big thank you to our partner in this episode, Topcon Healthcare, for supporting this and I’m excited to get this content out there. It’s going to help a lot of people. First, thank you Dr. Tung for taking the time, and thank you for giving up your beautiful office. We are in iLab Doctors of Optometry in Vancouver. Beautiful office. Thanks for giving us the space. I appreciate it.
No problem. Thank you for having me.
Before we dive in, I got to do a little intro. Dr. Sherman Tung, I know you’ve been on and people might have heard you before, You truly are an expert in this space. You’re the owner of a specialty practice where we are today. You graduated from ICO, you’re residency-trained. Beyond that, you’ve even become an expert specifically in myopia management through the AAOMC, which I’m sure we’ll touch on, getting your certification, the IACMM. Beyond that, becoming a fellow in ortho-K with the FIAOMC. Talk about alphabet soup. That’s a lot of letters.
That specialty, that fellowship specifically puts you in a special small group, 155 people in the world who have that specialty. Very few people. I’m glad to have you in the conversation here to share your expertise. Let’s rewind the clock a little bit. I said this to you earlier. You didn’t wake up with a specialty. You weren’t born with the specialty in myopia management in the fellowship in Ortho-K. How did this develop? Where did this passion come from? What’s the why of myopia management for you?
I did my research in ocular disease and that’s all I knew. When I came back to Vancouver, I continued doing a lot of ocular diseases. It was not until when I had twins as a dad that I started paying more attention to pediatric care. That’s when I had that light bulb where the majority of all the ocular diseases that you see in seniors can be prevented if you’re treating them reactively like macular degeneration, and cataracts. You can prevent that from happening at a younger age during the myopia.
As long as their axial length doesn’t grow, the chance of having all those eye diseases will be reduced. That’s where my passion came is having my kids and switching over to more of the pediatric care and that’s where my passion comes in. I thought it was going to be very hard to make that switch, but it’s not because once you have that passion and you can see the need for it and how it can prevent all those diseases you know that my why is still there, that I’m still helping people.
That’s a good point that you made. I didn’t even think about that. You think you get residency trained in a specialty, ocular disease, and then you lean into that. Most of the stuff we’re doing, not to take anything away from our friends and colleagues in the ocular disease who are retinal specialists and glaucoma specialists and all of that, they’re doing very important work but they’re treating an existing disease.
What if we can somehow intervene and prevent any disease or some disease? Of course in myopia management, that’s what we’re trying to do. With myopia management, you’re potentially preventing some other diseases down the road. That’s a good point. We’re here in this beautiful office that is a specialty office. You gave me a little breakdown earlier.
You said maybe only 20% of your patients are in primary care, and 75% and 80% are in specialty care. Most people listening, myself included, are the flip. The 80%, 90% of what I do is primary care and a little bit of what I do is specialty care. I want to see if you could lay down a little bit of foundation for someone who wants to get more into myopia management or specialty in general, how do you start to build that brick by brick, and if you rewind in your mind your career and how you started to do that a little bit.
That’s a loaded question. I had to go back quite a bit. You’re not that old. It has only been a few years. The first thing you want to do is look at your practice, and I do enjoy primary care. I still do a little bit of primary care. Once you see where you can help someone, one of the things that was frustrating is that I couldn’t keep helping people beyond primary care. I wanted to see what more I could do. There are not a lot of people that offer specialty care. That’s where we first opened our office as pediatrics.
We mostly focused on vision therapy and we focused on myopia control. We did that. Once you start doing that, I realized very quickly that you cannot do specialty care using the same primary care models. You do have to have that mindset. We have to change a little bit. For example, once you start doing specialty care, everyone is going to be talking. They’re going to be coming in. When we started with myopia control. I started with the most basic stuff.
As people grew interested, I wanted to learn more. If you have that passion to learn more, then you’re going to be investing your time in learning the science and investing in the technology. Once you go, it becomes a snowball. Once I hit that 50-50, I didn’t have that much time to do mostly primary care. That’s the part where I took a dive and did more specialty care.
Don’t underestimate the power of passion! It fuels learning and drives progress in myopia management.
You naturally feel like you got to a tipping point where you knew or you felt like it was time to lean into specialty more and less primary care that naturally happened. Let’s speak to me here. Let’s say I want to get more into specifically myopia management. I keep building to a point where I get that feeling or should I do something now well ahead of time, like I go all-in to my opium management or am I going to be hitting some roadblocks if I do that?
Everyone is going to have their own comfort level. You always want to look at your own comfort level, but it’s like stocks you have a market and you’ll know when to go. Once you have enough patience and you start noticing, all this specialty care needs more time, they’re requesting, then you will sit back and look at your business as if you’re a business owner. You’re going to be like, “I think this is what I want to do and that’s probably your time that you’ll know.”
You’ll naturally get to that. Something you said made sense and resonated with me is that like, for a little while there I was leaning into the dry eye, I wanted to develop that side of our practice, probably for about 3, 4 years up until about last year, that was my focus and overlapping last few years, and now I’m leaning more into myopia management.
Experience what you said as you start to see more patience, then you want to learn a bit more because then you’ll see a case that’s at the edge of your knowledge, you want to learn a bit more about that and then you naturally start to grow your expertise in that space. When would you suggest somebody go look into the AOMC or look into getting certified in myopia management or even beyond that and fellowships and that thing?
When I first started there was not a lot of myopia education. There was not, so everything I had to learn on my own. AOMC was great because they have something called a bootcamp and that’s how it got me started. They taught you every single basic thing like it all went from what are the risk factors. If you have one parent what are the chances of you having myopia?
It teaches all the different options and then also goes into what technology can help you and it’s all in one section. That’s how it got me started. If someone wants to learn more about myopia, I think that’s a good start. There are also other programs where they’ll have some mini-courses or a masterclass. That’s something where you can start.
That’s one thing I haven’t done yet and I’m leaning towards. This year was a little crazy with conferences and things, but next year I think is on my list as I have to start leaning into going to attending myopia management-specific conferences. Not taking in a lecture at some other conference, because that’s when you end up bumping into and rubbing shoulders with people who have a high level of knowledge like yourself. The hallway that happened is not just about dry eye or business or whatever. They are about myopic conversation management specifically. I feel like you’d naturally absorb more information.
That’s how I started.
I encourage other people to do that, but I’m going to start to look into that next year. Let’s get back into your practice. You’ve naturally grown it, and along the way, you’ve had to acquire technology that’s going to help you grow it. There are a lot of different toys out there. I want to lean into a good chunk of what we’re going to talk about axial length. I feel like axial length is a gray area. Let me say what I say in my lecture. I’ve had the immense pleasure of not exactly sharing the stage but being on the same stage as Dr. Tung once.
I went after him, which was not ideal for me. Anyway, I do a more intro-level talk. If you want to get into myopia management, I call it the myopia startup. Here are steps 1, 2, and 3, how do you get into it? I know your lectures are much more complex, but one of the things I say in there is, that you don’t need axial length to start, but it’s something you want to get as soon as you can.
As time went on, I found myself changing that phrase a little bit more and more to almost like you should probably get it right in the beginning. That’s where I’m at now. If I’m talking to someone who’s getting into myopia management, the sooner you get it, the better. If you cannot afford it on day one, fine. I’m not going to say you shouldn’t do myopia management, but the sooner, the better. Would you agree? Do you feel differently? Let’s lean a bit more into axial length now.
The Importance Of Axial Length In Myopia Management
I think anybody is about to spend money on equipment. That’s how we feel. We have to justify to see if it’s worth our return on investment or if it’s something that we do need. We all love buying new toys. When I’m looking at it in hindsight, I wish I even got mine earlier in the beginning. If I am an expert, I should get one. Now looking at it, I rely on it so much that if that machine breaks down, I’m in trouble. How I make all my decisions now is based on axial length, like how aggressive my treatment is going to be, or whether should I start treatment or not.
Like every single brand-new practitioner, we don’t know where to start. Now whenever I look at a patient, you can look at the prescription. When I started myopia management, the first piece of data I looked at was axial length. That will help make my decision to know what type of treatment I’m going to start. That’s the first thing I do. If my staff is like, “I did all the myopia,” “Did you do the axillary length?” That’s the first piece of data that I looked at first.
That’s good to know. We’re going to come back to that in a second. I still do that. I’d look at both things, the refraction, but I look at them in the other order. To talk about axillary length a bit more broadly, and then we are going to dive into the Myah, why you chose that, and how that has impacted your practice.
You’re suggesting now if somebody like myself or maybe even an earlier stage practitioner starting to get into myopia management, you should look at axial length as being your primary data point and then refract one B thing or if not equal, they should both be looked at at the same time. Otherwise, for a long time, it was refraction and then if I have it, I’ll look at axial length. That’s going to start to become one of our top data points now.
I tell my patients all the time like, “My child’s minus one or minus two.” I think in the future it’s going to be like, what’s your child’s axial length? Is it 23.2? Is it 25? The future is going to be like that.
That’s funny to think of, but it makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of us and a lot of our parents and patients are data-driven or they like numbers. They’re always asking, what’s my number? What’s this? What’s my pressure? This is easily or quickly going to become one of those data points that they talk about a lot. This is one of these metrics. We’ve established axial length, very important.
Probably if you’re going to get into myopia management, one of the first things that you should invest in is some biometer axial length. Today we’re specifically talking about the Myah. We both have it. I have the Myah in my office. You have it here as well. There are multiple machines available. How did you come around to the decision of picking Myah versus others?
The first thing why I liked about Myah was there’s a small footprint. My office is not that big, so having a small footprint was very important. The other reason why I also liked the Myah was because there are extra functions to it. One of the functions is the meibographer. We do start to do a little bit of dry eyes. One use that I was able to use with the meibographer in the Topcon was we do have lots of teenagers and when they start to take Accutane, it does affect the meibomian glands.
By doing baseline meibographies, we’re able to see before and after pictures. If we do notice the meibomian glands are shrinking, we will contact the doctor and see if there are other treatments that they can use. One of the things I love about Myah is they also can do topographies. For example, you can screen for caracolus cases. If you have a patient like me, I’m on the fence, but I don’t want to send it out to a specialist. You can detect those right off the bat. If you do simple RGB fits. There’s software where you can design the lens by sending it to the lab and they’re able to design the lenses for you.
I like all those features or added benefits of meibographer, but going back to the results and the diagnostics and the way you’re talking about that, the growth curve I found is super helpful. A lot of parents, you have young kids and I have young kids, when you go to the pediatrician, they always show you growth curves, height, and weight, what percentile you are in. People were used to seeing that information. We wanted to show it on the screen.
We’ll probably show a screenshot of it somehow, but when you have these curves that show what percentiles you can show where your child fits in that, plus “What’s your axial length today? What’s the rate of growth or change?” The other line that I like is it’s flat, which means it’s not changing. All these data points are flat. That’s nice to be able to show parents as well. I never thought about printing them out. That’s a nice point too.
I started out printing them out first, and then it got to the point where I saved them as PDF files, and then I emailed them to the parents.
Do you send it to the parents?
You save it as a PDF file and then you email it to the parents and they love it.
I would love that too. I’m going to start doing that. When it comes to the Myah and interpreting the data from a practitioner standpoint, if I’m looking at it, if I’m new to myopia management, what are some important data points I need to keep in mind threshold points or things like that, that’ll help me determine if or when to initiate treatment?
The great thing about the Myah is that it does a nice printout. The first thing that I usually look at is the first number that you will look at on the right-hand side column, it’ll tell you what the chances are of them developing myopia and high myopia. You’ll see the letters M and HM. That’s very, very useful. The second piece of information you want to look at is what percentile the child is. Most parents understand percentile. If you’re in the 95th percentile for the longest eyeball, that’s not very good. If you’re in the 20th percentile, that’s good. Parents understand that. The higher the percentile, you have to be more aggressive with your treatments.
Another data point that you should look at is the number 23.85 millimeters. If that is 23.85, that’s usually what researchers think is the tipping point where they might be plain or still, but all of a sudden it’ll become very myopic and that number is very important. The next important number that you can extrapolate from the data is 26 millimeters. If your axial length is longer than 26 millimeters, then the a chance of you having retinal detachment, glaucoma, or cataracts. All the risk will be much higher. If I was looking at that data as a beginner, those are the data that you usually look at.
Key Axial Length Data Points For Practitioners
Let’s talk about workflow. You have a busy practice here, with multiple exam rooms, multiple doctors, and multiple specialties. You mentioned the fact that you have a device that’s got a smaller footprint. I’ve seen where you have it and it fits nicely in your space. When it comes to your myopia management patients or any patient, even primary care, where do you start to implement the Myah on your average patient? Where does it fit in?
Can I show you a history of how we started? Usually in the beginning, when we start with any myopia control console, a brand new patient, we will always do a baseline axial length. We educate parents on what the options are, and what’s going on. We always start with the axial length first. We show them this is where your child rests and this is what our plan is going to be.
Our goal is to make sure that it follows this curve or make sure that the rate of change is stable. That’s going to be our goal. Whatever plan we’re going to be doing, that’s going to be our goal. They understand it’s not about changing the prescription, it’s about the accident. I stressed to them, that the reason why we want to do it is so then they don’t get these eye diseases or lower the risk of having eye diseases.
Once they buy it and understand that, that’s where we can start the progress. After that, anytime we do the treatment plans, we will do an axial length on every single patient, every single visit. Therefore, they can keep track of how their progress because their parents are spending money and time, so you want to make sure we are on the right track. If it doesn’t fall on the right track, then we have to find out why it’s not or how to find a different solution. That’s why it’s so helpful with the axial length.
I used to do it only for my myopia. If it’s a child who comes in for a regular exam, I usually don’t do it. During this time, I found out that it’s more valuable for patients. All children should be getting it done. That’s what we’ve been implementing on all our kids’ exams that we’ve been doing. I can give you an example of this case. As I was doing axial length, this is how I learned along the way. I’m still learning today. I’ll give you an example. Parents are minus 5, but the child is plus 50.
How old?
Let’s say they are six years old. The first thing used to be spending more time outdoors. That will be about one year. The number one question that the parents ask is, “What are the chances of my kids having it?” We’re like, “We could do axial length. Do you want to do one?” That’s when we’ll do the axial length. I find out that they’re at the 85th percentile. I used to be like, “Let’s come back.” That doesn’t make sense. That’s the next part. Why is it so high but their prescription is not very high?
That’s when I started looking at their case and both of these types of kids will have very very flat cases. They’ve been compensating. That’s why sometimes they get mad because next year they come in they’re minus 150 or minus 2 and they’re like, “I could have done something earlier.” That’s where you can start them on anti-myopia glasses, you can talk to them about atropine, or they can continue your outdoor time but maybe double it. How I treat the patients is completely different.
Even the conversation you’re having with a parent before implementing any treatment. Now you’re saying, “Look at this data,” because if we didn’t have axial length, we’d say, “He’s plus 50. He’s good.” Now it’s like, “Excuse me, his axial length is high. He’s technically already myopic in a sense. You’re waiting for the refraction to change at that point, or he’s super high risk for becoming myopic. Let’s do something about it.”
That’s a very different conversation than like, “He’s plus 50. He doesn’t need glasses.” That’s a good point and that’s where axial length is going to start to uncover a lot more for us. You were saying in that case, in the past, you might have only done it if you felt like it was needed or something you felt was a bit suspicious, but plus 50, you might not have done it on that kid. Now you’re doing it on every child?
Yeah.
From what age would you say roughly? Is it as long as they’re able to get their head in the machine?
I’ve been using axial length on every single child now. The great thing about it is if a kid can sit for autorefraction, then most likely they can sit in for the Myah. The Myah is very innovative. It’s not scary. It’s looking through a green dot. It’s easy and they can see the whole thing. It’s easy for the kids.
Hypothetically, if a child came in for a routine eye exam primary care patient, that child, eight years old or whatever, would get the axial length done, even if they’re coming in without any necessary complaints.
Yeah because it also allows me to keep track. The more data points you have, the better. Let’s say ten years old. It’s like, “What was it when you’re eight years old>” It’s better to have more data.” It’s like your fondness photos like, “There’s nothing wrong with your fondness.” It’s good to have a baseline photo and then you can compare it down the road. If you don’t have that baseline, it’s hard to compare.
That’s a fair point. I find myself stuck in the middle there, so I’m not doing it on every child right now, but based on your feedback, I think that’s something I’m going to try to start doing now. We have the Myah. This is the technology that we’re using as far as growing our myopia management practice as well.
I’ll usually see the child for their routine exam. If I feel like there’s something suspicious, I’ll have them go back into the axial length or on the next visit, if they’re coming in for a consultation, then I’ll do it there. I want to maybe start to do it on every kid. Even if they’re plus one and you’re at low risk of becoming myopic, it’s still helpful to have those data points over time. I think that’s valuable.
You’re telling me a little bit earlier about some interesting cases that you’ve seen. I think you’ve liked the child that you were hypothetical, you were telling me about, you had something similar to that where Myah helped you uncover the axial length. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about that. In some of these cases in practice, you found having the Myah having axial length has been helpful.
Axial Length In Uncovering Cases And Monitoring Treatment Efficacy
That one I talked about. I’ve seen it more and more often in my office, pre-myopes where by doing the axial length, you can change how you treat. The other thing is sometimes you’ll see some treatments like one more thing that that was very helpful at that time when I was doing a lot of ortho cases is I was again, basing it off on, “You can see very well, you see 2020.” I’m assuming that your axial length is stable.
If there’s no changing your prescription, then everything should be fine. After I got the axial length, I could see, “You are very stable and sometimes you can see the axial length decreasing a little bit.” One of the reasons why is because the choroid is getting thicker. It’s giving them more protection. When you show that to the parents, they’re like, “It’s coming down a little bit?” Don’t get too excited over that.
At the very least you could say stable.
A little bit of improvement and you know that they have extra protection. You know it’s working. Another thing is that you get a lot of refractive noise. Let’s say, for example, the kid forgets to wear the contact lens, and ocular lens that night. They’re coming in, they’ll see 2030 or 2040. Is it getting worse or not? You only see this patient every three or four months. How can you tell? You cannot. By measuring the axillary, that’s also very, very valuable. I know you missed last night, but luckily your axillary is still stable. Please don’t miss that main night but at least the parents will feel a little bit more sure that it’s not getting worse. If they’re seeing 26, they do, “Can we come back the next day?” That takes a lot of time to check, a chair time.
Don’t let refractive noise fool you! Axial length reveals the true story of myopia progression.
If you didn’t have axial length, you would have no way to prove to them that it’s working like it’s okay, then you’d have to bring them back, “Wear your lenses tonight, come back tomorrow or the day after and we’ll recheck it and that’s more chair time.” OrthoK seems like a place where axial length is extremely valuable because you cannot refract anything. Ideally, if it’s working, refraction should be zero, and you should be seeing 20-20, so how are you monitoring axial length?
I know not to take anything away from anybody who’s been doing Ortho-K for decades. We didn’t have access to axial length as easily as we do now. It wasn’t as easy to monitor it, but it seems extremely valuable and a great way to prove that the treatment is working. To go a slight tangent there about the choroid, I’ve slowly been reading a little bit more about that as well, like thickening choroid or a thicker choroid is protective. Thinner choroid is a higher risk for myopia management. Do you want to touch on that a little bit again for our friends who are tuning in and who are maybe interested and haven’t heard much about that?
The choroid: a key player in myopia. Research is uncovering its protective role. Exciting times ahead!
We still have to do a last study on it. From what we can tell, usually if you have a very high axial length, anything that’s over 26 millimeters, your core is usually thinner. It’s not as stable. Therefore, sometimes your treatment might not be as effective if it’s over 26 millimeters. When you start seeing coming down, we all learned that axial length doesn’t decrease. Now they’re doing more research on if there’s some way that we can make the core thicker or better blood perfusion, maybe we can stop the progression. That’s where they’re doing a lot of study on. Now, for our patients, we let them know that we can slow it down. If it does stop or get better, we say, we have to do a bonus.
Red light therapy, is that something that’s being explored in that core space or is that separate? I know we’re taking a tangent, but we’re talking about it, I thought it’d be interesting.
I came back from Vision China. I was speaking there. The red light is very huge there. It’s that I think it works. It’s just they have to make sure it’s safe and we want to make sure that we don’t burn the retina. For now, I think it’s very promising. As OCT also develops, you can also measure the corroid and how thick, but that’s more advanced. I think a red light, someone who cannot control it very well, I think that’s an option.
With the choroid and the axial length, is it we’re still not sure if is it like a chicken and egg. We’re not sure which is causing which, like the axial elongation is going to result in the choroid being thinner or the thinner choroid is causing the axial length elongation. We’re not sure which one’s coming first.
I don’t think we’re sure.
Educating Parents And Patients About Myopia Management And Axial Length
Interesting area of research though. Either way, measuring your axial length is going to be very valuable in that scenario. I know we’ve talked about you showing the data to parents and patients. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how that conversation goes in the beginning when you’re educating a parent about which treatment to go with. What does that sound like for you usually? I know you do a lot of Ortho-K. I have sent you Ortho-K patients. I joke in my presentation like, “I send you Ortho-K, you send me Starbucks gift cards. It’s great, it’s a win-win.” If you could give us a little bit of high level, how do you talk about axial length? How do you get them to wrap their head around which treatment is a good option for them?
The main thing is you have to explain to the parents what’s going on. You have to tell them we do have to go over hyperopic defocus, and myopic defocus, and explain that to them. The second thing is as the eyeball gets longer, show them a demonstration, like a tissue paper or a balloon that stretches, Everybody will know that as your eyeball stretches, it’s not good. The next part is you show them your kid’s data.
That’s where the data points are so friendly because if you show them the curve, where the kids know like 95% they know that’s not normal. That saved me a lot of time. Once you do that, then now they’re worried. You let them know. We want to make sure that your kids can still see, but how do we slow down those signals? That’s the part where I go through all the different treatments. You have an idea, most of their parents will come in the rain and know what they want, but some they don’t know. I always go over all the options, always all the same four options and they’ll decide. They will always ask me, which one do you recommend?
Empower parents with knowledge! Show them axial length data and growth curves. It makes all the difference.
If they’re a good candidate for Otho-K, great but sometimes they’re not good candidates for Otho-K. If you have a four-year-old, then you probably have to go with glasses first or maybe they’re only minus 50, and they cannot do OK lenses. That’s where you have to go over all the options like the pros and cons of each one. Each of my consoles will take about an hour or five minutes to an hour. They do have the time with me to go over all that. If they are interested in doing OK lens, then we can go do topography and also do training on the same day.
On the same day, you start right there and then.
They have an idea. We prepare the parents that if they want to do glasses, then the optician will be ready to take over for the glasses.
Any other insight or wisdom you’d like to share with us about somebody interested in getting into myopia management? How they might be able to start dabbling more, getting a better experience in it?
I think probably preached to the choir already. I think the first thing if you believe in anything, is that you have to understand that myopia is an axial-length disease. That’s number one. Number two is that if you believe that the axial length is the most important part, then that’s how we’re going to treat it. If you believe in that, I think you’ll know which treatment to do. I think you can dabble in the beginning, but it’ll be very quickly.
Once you start getting 2 or 3 patients and they start talking, you have to be prepared because once you get enough momentum, it will get busy. That’s what happened to me. I first started like, I was interested. Earlier you said you did one of the OK lens and once the parents get excited about it, they get to tell all their parents. That’s one great thing about myopia control is that everyone talks, especially at soccer games and that’s where most all my referrals are coming from.
Sports teams and that thing. That makes a lot of sense. I appreciate that insight and that extra little bit of wisdom there. Let’s not forget, this is an ocular disease. I think many of our colleagues are wrapping their heads around that now. It’s not a refractive condition. It’s an ocular disease. It’s an ocular disease of axial elongation. If that’s the disease, we have to measure axial elongation to know where we are, so we can then treat that condition.
If you’re going to get into axial elongation measurement, then this is the device. The Myah is the device. For you and all experts at your level of expertise, this is the device that you’ve chosen to bring into your practices and help you excel and practice the way you want. It sounds like this is a very important specialty in general for us to consider getting into. The Myah seems like the right device for us to lean into that specialty as well.
Concluding Thoughts And Recommendations
I wanted to go back to what you said. I fit one ortho-K patient. Number one, officially I fit last month and she came in today for her one-month follow-up and it was a great success. It was lovely to show all the details and she was seeing 20/20. I appreciate you from afar have inspired me. Even though I’ve sent you patients now, I probably won’t be sending you anymore. Only the complex ones. You’ll get the complicated ones.
My goal why I do these podcasts is I want to be able to educate other people. There’s enough myopia for everyone. You cannot do all of them. The more we share information, share education, the more we treat myopia. I think that’s going to be the future. As long as everyone is treating it, I’m happy. As long as you can get your eye exam anywhere as long as you get an eye exam, I’m happy. That’s why I’d like to share my knowledge about myopia and make sure that everybody is treating it instead of thinking it’s a refractive problem.
What would you recommend for somebody who’s trying to get more knowledge, more expertise, and more confidence in the area of myopia management to start practicing it more? Where would you recommend they go to learn more?
Nowadays we have lots of resources now. How I started with the AAOMC through the Vision by Design. There was like a boot camp where you could learn the basics. Now you also have my Myopia Profile. That’s a good website with lots of information. I know that Topcon Healthcare also is going to put new stuff up. I’m very excited to learn more about that because I’m always constantly learning. If you put the time into it to learn it, the resources are all there. You have to put the time into it.
Thank you. I appreciate you being so generous in so many ways, the space here for us to record, your wisdom, your knowledge, and everything like that, being open to sharing it so we can all get better. Our profession can get better. I think it is the big one here that we both agree on. I’m sad I won’t be getting Starbucks gift cards from you anymore. I might send you one every year so I can get one from you. Thanks again. I appreciate this. This has been amazing. I’ve learned a lot from talking to you.
I hope everybody has learned. I think you’re probably going to have to rewind and go back and listen to different parts of this conversation so you can absorb or take some notes from what Dr. Tung was sharing. Thank you again, Sherman. Thank you to our wonderful friends at Topcon Healthcare for partnering with us on this episode to create the technology to allow our practices to grow and our profession to elevate. Thank you to everybody tuning in to Canada’s number-one optometry show. I’ll see you in the next episode.
Important Links
- Dr. Sherman Tung – LinkedIn
- Topcon Healthcare
- Myopia Profile
