Comments on: Can Eye Doctors Be Colorblind?

By: Looking at the Dominant Eye | Go Inside Magazine

Looking at the Dominant Eye | Go Inside Magazine — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 17:57:47 +0000

[...] all see with a preferred eye. Our dominant eye focuses on an object and our other eye provides the necessary angle to give us [...]

By: David W. Boles

David W. Boles — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:41:00 +0000

That’s a great story, liminal, thanks for sharing it with us. I’m not sure I’d want a colorblind MD for any sort of diagnostic work. Are MDs required to inform us they are colorblind? I don’t think so. Should we start asking?

By: liminal_life

liminal_life — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:53:42 +0000

Colorblindness is an interesting condition. At first it seems quite trivial, but the sum total of all the little inconveniences adds up quickly. I don’t know much about colorblind doctors, but it is nearly impossible for electrical engineers to be colorblind, because circuit components are labeled with stripes of color. I work in a chemistry lab with a colorblind man, and he can’t see the color changes that accompany many chemical reactions or read litmus paper. Before I met him I never really appreciated the extent to which society and the natural world encode information in the form of color.

By: David W. Boles

David W. Boles — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:52:34 +0000

Well done, Katha! Women seem to have excellent color perception while men generally do not.
I agree — I think I’d want my MD to be able to visualize the entire spectrum. I don’t think relying on texture is enough for cogent diagnoses.

By: Kathakali Chatterjee

Kathakali Chatterjee — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:01:58 +0000

Hi David,
All my answers were correct in the test – I did well!
I won’t be confident to know my eye doctor is color blind, to say the least..

By: David W. Boles

David W. Boles — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:53:54 +0000

Here’s an interesting article, Gordon:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1313448&blobtype=pdf
I would still think you’d want an MD that did not have colorblindness because there are surprises and things you cannot know that come in a variety of colors.
One guy I knew with the yellow colorblindness trained himself to recognize shapes and associations based on the “brightness” of the color he could not perceive. Lots of emergency notifications on the road are in yellow so the color he could not see became the warning he had to always watch to catch.
One day he called me into his office and pointed to an area on a piece of paper he was reading. He was indicating a box on the paper and asked, “Is that yellow?” When I confirmed it was, he nodded his head and moved the paper into several different planes of view before his eyes to try to give the area a new shape and form. He thanked me and told me it was a new requisition form he’d never seen before.

By: Gordon Davidescu

Gordon Davidescu — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:45:14 +0000

Excellent point, David. I didn’t even think about that. I suppose that would disqualify someone from doing just about any kind of surgery – isn’t that why they can’t be in certain branches of the military as well? Naturally I base that last question on something I saw in the movie “Little Miss Sunshine”

By: David W. Boles

David W. Boles — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:38:22 +0000

I agree about knowing the right answers, Gordon, but what about in surgery or diagnosis? Yellow is a serious color when it comes to an ailing body and I know several people who are unable to “see” yellow — that color is invisible to their eye.

By: Gordon Davidescu

Gordon Davidescu — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:46:53 +0000

I did quite well. I would think that for the most part, a color blind eye doctor would do okay so long as he or she knew “the right answers” as it were. Then again it would get tricky once the patient would ask, “Well what do you see?”