Why Do Eye Doctors Abbreviate Everything?

You may have already noticed this. Everything we do has to have an abbreviation of some sort. Almost every procedure we do can be shortened to mostly a 3 letter abbreviation (SBK, ICL, PRK, RLE). It really can make deciphering the lingo of optometrists and ophthalmologists pretty challenging! But it doesn’t stop there! When you show up at the eye doctors office, they will measure your VA (visual acuity) and MRx (manifest refraction), check your IOP (intraocular pressure), perform a SLE (slit lamp exam) and potentially a DFE (dilated fundus exam) 😦! No wonder nobody can understand our notes!

So where did this come from? Back in the day before computers, notes were all done by hand (hard to believe, right?). One trait of ophthalmology and optometry is that we like to collect lots and lots of data. Just as an example, we measure your prescription via automated means, measuring your glasses, through a refraction and then a dilated refraction (and even then sometimes measuring it over contact lenses). In short, we have lots of data to collect. Because of this large amount of data, if we wrote everything out, eye notes could be pages and pages long and require double or triple the amount of time to write. Nobody wants to read a such a novel! So by abbreviating everything, eye notes can fit neatly on a single page and take much less time to write. And once you learn the language, quicker and easier to interpret as well!

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