Who to "see" when you are having eye problems

Recently, I've had a number patients come in to see me after having gone to their primary care physician or to Urgent Care for various eye problems. They were not getting better from the treatments prescibed by these other docs and the patients were now seeking help from me. Unfortunately, their conditions had been completely misdiagnosed. And that's why they were not getting better in a timely manner. Some examples include:

(1) The urgent care doc who put one of my patients on a sulfa eye drop medication even though she knew the patient was allergic to sulfa. Not only does this fall under the category of 'know what's in the medication that you are prescribing', but most if not all eye doctors haven't Rx'ed a sulfa medication in well over a decade.

(2) A primary care physician who thought the patient had a scratched cornea, when in fact, the patient had a corneal ulcer (imagine a canker sore on the front of your eye!) Corneal ulcers are potentially a blinding condition and require a much more rigorous treatment course than do scratched corneas.

I could go on and on.

In many cases, the delay in proper treatment resulted in a bigger problem which ultimately required a longer and more dramatic treatment courses to resolve. Thankfully, in these and many other cases, I've been able to rectify the issue even when the initial diagnosis has been incorrect.

Moral of the story: When you have an eye problem, go 'see' your eye doctor. Afterall, they specialize in treating that which is ailing you!