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Acuvue sponsored a podcast by two teenage girls named Heather and Jonelle. No optometrist should ever listen to it. It’s audience is other teenage girls who have nothing else to do except listen to strangers talk about themselves. Weird.

But the fact that Vistakon marketing did this gives me pause. It was short lived with just five episodes. At no time does Episode 5 even mention Acuvue, but I can’t say for sure since I couldn’t stand to listen to all of it. What is interesting is that they are using podcasting to market direct to consumers, specifically teenage girl consumers.

Did Acuvue marketing dept. not consider a podcast for an eyecare professional audience because eye doctors aren’t generally known to be tech savvy; therefore, eye doctors might never listen to it? I guess their reps already talk to all the eye doctors when they make their rounds, so a podcast might not be necessary for them. But I wouldn’t mind listening to some top eye doctors discuss issues relating to eyecare practice.

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Dr. Meldrum was my evolution professor at Idaho State University, and he was interviewed on NPR. The question isn’t whether you believe in Sasquatch- it’s whether the scientific evidence points to the creature’s existence. Dr. Meldrum’s research, as I understood it from the class lectures, related to moldings taken from foot prints and the study of these casts. Dr. Meldrum says the way the foot articulates, or moves during the stride, isn’t consistent with people making fake footprints in the mud.

An interesting thing he mentions is their failure to analyze DNA from presumed hair samples of Big Foot.

The famous, grainy Patterson film of Big Foot is now over 40 years old. Surely a spoofer would have let it leek or boasted about putting one over on the rest of us.

I want to believe- er, accept the evidence; however, are there any other incidences of never before discovered mammals yet to be classified zoologically, especially in a developed country?

However, if the individual is really the spawn of Satan, he would be wily enough to avoid detection. . .

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Books from Readers Digest and others have been around to aid non-physicians in diagnosing their condition and see whether they need to visit the doctor’s office.

Well, why pay for a book when you could just Google your symptoms and come up with a diagnosis?
UK doctors fed key terms into a Google search and a top search result contained the correct diagnosis 68% of the time.

I tried it with red, itchy, stringy discharge, and sure enough: allergy eyes.

But then I tried red, painful, light sensitive, and that contained the full spectrum of differential diagnoses. I think one would have to have a medical background to know what key terms to search for in the first place.

So, I’m still going to tell my patients that they should come in for an exam instead of just Googling.

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