School of Optometry opens permanent clinic in Mexico

After about 10 years of sending students to Guanajuato, Mexico to provide free eye care to residents, the School of Optometry opened a permanent clinic in the city last spring. \nThe Guanajuato Eye Care Clinic, in partnership with the Mexico's Department of Infant and Family, began seeing patients in February, said Douglas Horner, assistant professor of optometry. \nThe DIF works with indigent citizens, or those earning less than $1,000 per year, according to the School of Optometry's Web site.\nStudents can complete their 12 week optometry rotation, seeing patients at a low cost. An eye exam and pair of used glasses cost about 48 pasos, or about four to five dollars, said Shital Sheth, a fourth-year optometry student.\nEvery spring, the IU chapter of the Volunteer Optometric Services to Humanity travels to Guanajuato for a week-long trip, examining patients the DIF sends to their station by bus, who sometimes travel up to six hours to get to the station. About 30 students help to provide about 600 to 800 people a day with much-needed eye care, Horner said. \nHe said with so many people in need of eye care, opening a permanent clinic made sense.\n"It seems like the right thing to do," he said. "Why not go where the patients are?" \nHorner said students get an excellent chance to see many different eye care problems and diseases they might not have been able to see otherwise.\nSheth was among the first group of students to complete a rotation in Mexico. She said she saw patients with extreme cases of eye disorders, and in one case, an entire family was diagnosed with the same form of cataracts.\nSheth said one child in this family, a boy about 8 years old, told her all he wanted was to be a painter. He was unable to see colors, and because treatment was postponed so long, he had no chance to restore color to his vision, she said.\n"You know that if you were in the States that would never happen," she said.\nSheth said about 12 patients are seen every day at the clinic, which provides similar exams to those done in the United States. All the equipment at the clinic is IU optometry equipment, and drugs are provided by both IU and the DIF.\nJulie Wieskamp, a third-year optometry student and president of the IU VOSH chapter, has traveled on the missions trips, and said the experience is overwhelming.\n"My first year was probably the most rewarding because you work in the dispensary you can tell the difference you make in their lives," she said.\nThe dispensary is a room set up for the mission trips filled with boxes of used glasses. Inmates from a prison in Illinois catalog donated glasses, and IU students enter the prescriptions into a database in Bloomington. When patients' prescriptions are taken in Guanajuato, a pair that closely matches their measurements are given to them. \nHorner said 8,000 pairs of glasses are taken to Mexico on the trip every spring, and the leftover pairs are left at the clinic for distribution.