I just stumbled upon this journal, I am going to introduce myself as Megan a mom of a child with a prosthetic eye (she lost her eye to retinoblastoma at 15 month and now is three and a half years old). Her Rb doctor directed me (and all of his enucleated Rb patients) to an awful ocularist. One doesn't need a license to practice or anything in Florida-heck, even I could call myself and ocularist here. Well since we knew nothing about prosthetics, we trusted our specialist to lead us in the right direction. Come to find out, this man is putting prosthetics in children's sockets that are so big even he needs a metal surgical instrument to remove the eye. He also managed to enlarge the eye by adding base wax at every appointment and shove the eye back into her socket without looking at it and send us on our way. If we tried to ask questions-he was flippant and defensive. She was plagued by discharge and what we later found out, infections. We also found out the eye was so big that the antibiotic drops could not effectively reach the socket.
We have been seeing a new and wonderful ocularist for a while now and my daughter now has a new prosthesis made by him. It is different in feel and very well done (even though he worked off her old shape as to not "shock" her with something completely different). I am not convinced her old eye wasn't a stock eye that was then painted.
So I guess my questions are how did you find out who was up to date and who was not? I mean, our former "quack" of an ocularist is an associate member of the ASO-which means he has taken some classes with them, but to what extent? Obviously as a mother, I am very upset this man even can still practice and he has the biggest practice in FL-seeing 150-200 patients a week. (he is also the only ocularist in FL that works with insurance companies.)
That comes to the last thing I was going to share with you about HMOs. We got a gap exception to see our new ocularist. You need to call your doctor and have them put in the request to the insurance company. It didn't pay for all of the $2000, but most of it.
Ocularists/eyes
We have been seeing a new and wonderful ocularist for a while now and my daughter now has a new prosthesis made by him. It is different in feel and very well done (even though he worked off her old shape as to not "shock" her with something completely different). I am not convinced her old eye wasn't a stock eye that was then painted.
So I guess my questions are how did you find out who was up to date and who was not? I mean, our former "quack" of an ocularist is an associate member of the ASO-which means he has taken some classes with them, but to what extent? Obviously as a mother, I am very upset this man even can still practice and he has the biggest practice in FL-seeing 150-200 patients a week. (he is also the only ocularist in FL that works with insurance companies.)
That comes to the last thing I was going to share with you about HMOs. We got a gap exception to see our new ocularist. You need to call your doctor and have them put in the request to the insurance company. It didn't pay for all of the $2000, but most of it.