Oral Medications

Most all states provide optometrists some prescriptive authority for oral meds. It's time for us to embrase these drugs as part of our armamentarium.

The gentleman with orbital pseudotumor who was treated with oral prednisone as standard -of-care...	The young girl playing in the woods who encountered poison ivy was treated with oral prednisone 40mg twice daily, then stopped...
The man's internal hordeolum was non-resolving until treated with oral cephalexin (Keflex) 500mg bid x 1 week...	The woman with primary HSV, afflicting both her corneal epithellum and her eyelid tissues, who was treated with oral acyclovir and artificial tears...
The lady with hyperacute bacterial conjunctivitis and preseptal cellulitis responded rapidly to an oral fluoroquinolone along with adjunctive topical fluoroquinolone...	The patient with herpes zoster improved nicely with oral valacyclovir and artificial tears...

These cases at left represent a token sampling of the patients we have treated with oral medicines over the last 20 years. It should be profoundly obvious that oral medicines can be immensely helpful in managing a number of select eye diseases.

Optometric physicians and their patients are enjoying the huge benefits of topically applied medications. Now it's time to fully embrace a different route of administration: the orally administered medicines. So that we can put this subset of drugs in perspective, realize that the internist must master hundreds of medicines; we only need to master a baker's dozen (give or take) to treat the vast majority of ophthalmic diseases.

Let's look at them by category.