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The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

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Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#101

Post by mixmastamyk »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #92
mbg721 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vision checks have also changed a lot in the last five years or so. I have a pretty strong prescription and always used to do rounds of reading charts and "A or B", and now there's a machine that scans my eyes and gets it very close to right, with an adjustment or two at the end.

12 years ago, I walked into a second hand eye glasses shop in India and they had one of these machines. It was amazingly effective. I felt duped by all the optometrist appointments asking me about A or B.

Duped, because they are doing it the old-fashioned way?

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#102

Post by jjeaff »

JCM9 wrote: post #94
skybrian wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting new glasses is different from screening for eye diseases, though it's typically done at the same time. I doubt a GP would have the special equipment they use for screening? It's pretty specialized. Apparently the need for this gets more important as you get older: https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/health-wellness/health-...

Many optometrists don’t do much more than use a hand held scope to look into your eyes. I’d imagine most GPs either have that on hand already or could get it easily. It’s not like you need an MRI machine in the office to do an eye exam. Yes some office have fancier equipment, but here it’s unclear if that’s actually better for patients and public health or just a way to bill more. Doing a basic exam and then referrin…

I have been to maybe a half dozen different optometrists over the last 25 years and they have always used several expensive looking machines to screen for eye disease. Most frequently a machine that uses a puff of air to measure the pressure in your eye and more recently, a machine with a bright light that gets detailed imagery of the vascular structure on the back of your eye.

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#103

Post by kfprt »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #58
kfprt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glasses are a huge ripoff due to the industry being a monopoly with no help from the government.

There are some online retailers that have pretty good prices.

Spare a link or two?

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#104

Post by busymom0 »

I understand why things like drugs we inject in our body need to be regulated. But I don't understand why hearing aids need to be regulated this way and even need a prescription. It's either "hey I can hear well and it fits my ears well" or it's "it doesn't help me hear well".

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#105

Post by colordrops »

JCM9 wrote: post #55

There are a number of healthcare areas in the US that have been protected by regulation, but it’s increasingly unclear if this is good for patients, consumers, or public health at large. The increasing sentiment seems to be probably not. Vision care is another area I’d expect to see more changes and disruption coming down the pipeline. Vision care is very important and advanced cases require special skills, but it’s…

In china you can get prescription lenses at a local market without any involvement of a medical professional, at extremely cheap cost. There isn't much evidence that this is causing negative medical outcomes.

On the flip side it used to be very easy to get antibiotics without a prescription there. I'd be surprised if this is still the case.

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#106

Post by FemmeAndroid »

tristor wrote: post #84
xmprt wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One pretty big (and relatively unknown) law is that your doctor needs to give you your vision prescription so you can buy glasses elsewhere (usually for much cheaper). I think a lot of them get around this by letting you look for glasses while waiting and not telling you that this law exists.

The bigger issue is that a prescription alone is not enough to order new glasses, you also need pupillary distance measurements in order to ensure the lenses are ground correctly. Many many optometrists will not provide these, only the legally obligated prescription. While for most people who have minimum prescriptions you can use a phone app or similar to get a rough PD, for anyone with serious prescriptions even mi…

This happened to my wife just last month. I was very frustrated when I saw that she hadn't received a PD, but I didn't realize that this is a frequent and intentional decision at this point. Extremely frustrating.

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#107

Post by adam_arthur »

bastardoperator wrote: post #72
kristofferR wrote: post #7

Contact lenses next? It's amazingly stupid that I, as a tourist, who knows exactly what types of contacts I need, may need to get a US prescription for contacts.

How are optometrists supposed to make money if they don't sell you services and glasses from their showroom?

How are people supposed to make money when we have machines producing all these goods!

Maybe your post was sarcasm though :)

That's the economic progress of humanity. We automate, and jobs that were once valued are no longer needed.

Easy to look at a specific instance and fight against the change, but in the long run it's better for everybody.

Glasses/Vision in particular costs hundreds more than it needs to. Glasses could be produced and sold at $10-20 bucks if regulations were eased. What is the material cost to produce these? You can get reading glasses in grocery stores for a few dollars.

I'm fairly well off and even I feel bad paying over a hundred dollars for some of this stuff. Imagine all the lower earners/poor that pay hundreds of dollars for glasses for no reason other than protectionism.

The entire eye exam can be automated very easily (and I believe already has). Would be easy to have machine learning algorithms that can diagnose problems from the image of your retina scan. I really don't think it'd be that difficult, if it doesn't exist already.

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#108

Post by jjeaff »

tshaddox wrote: post #26
kristofferR wrote: post #7

Contact lenses next? It's amazingly stupid that I, as a tourist, who knows exactly what types of contacts I need, may need to get a US prescription for contacts.

Is this really a problem in practice? I've always had a valid prescription when I buy glasses, but at the glasses store I just flash them the prescription on my phone for a few seconds. It's a PDF on official looking letterhead, but I don't think there's any verification. I suppose it's probably not the best idea to fake an eyeglass prescription, but it certainly seems like it would be very easy to do.

There isn't any verification. They certainly don't call the optometrist to verify. Not saying I've done this, but one could submit an old Rx and change the date in Photoshop as well as the name and number of the doctor and buy contact lenses or glasses online just about anywhere. Theoretically, of course.

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#109

Post by LocalH »

throwawaysea wrote: post #24

Middlemen and gatekeepers are all over our medical industry. When I travel I am always surprised at how much easier it is to get drugs outside the US. Many prescription drugs here are over the counter elsewhere and much cheaper. I hope we start removing prescription gatekeeping more broadly, so I can stop paying hundreds for performative office visits that offer no value. It’s also a big time sink just to get some mu…

Capitalism (as a life goal, rather than one of many tools in a toolkit) is what makes all that possible. If can insert yourself in the middle of a transaction, and do that long enough, then you can get pretty entrenched to the point where people just expect it to be that way.

I maintain that, if automobiles were invented today, the horse-and-buggy industry would be able to successfully fend them off, based on the path regulatory capture has taken in the last 150 years.

Re: The FDA wants you to be able to buy a hearing aid without a prescription

#110

Post by mikeInAlaska »

tristor wrote: post #84
xmprt wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One pretty big (and relatively unknown) law is that your doctor needs to give you your vision prescription so you can buy glasses elsewhere (usually for much cheaper). I think a lot of them get around this by letting you look for glasses while waiting and not telling you that this law exists.

The bigger issue is that a prescription alone is not enough to order new glasses, you also need pupillary distance measurements in order to ensure the lenses are ground correctly. Many many optometrists will not provide these, only the legally obligated prescription. While for most people who have minimum prescriptions you can use a phone app or similar to get a rough PD, for anyone with serious prescriptions even mi…

My local optometrist uses a $99 Enshey (check amazon) IPD measurement device. I guess if I was ordering glasses for my entire family (we do), it would probably be worth it.
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