The Optometrist’s Rise to Power in the Health Care Market,or “It’s Optometric Physician,to You”

Abstract

Optometry and ophthalmology have often clashed over scope-of-practice issues. Optometry has won many of these battles and has significantly increased its professional power. While many researchers have analyzed methods of professional empowerment, even in eye care, this study specifically investigates how rhetorical strategies in a field’s professional texts might influence that empowerment. Optometry mobilized itself and elevated its professional status in part through a successful rhetorical campaign beginning in the 1960s. A rhetorical analysis of optometric texts from the 1960s and 1970s reveals (1) the regular use of agonistic, martial rhetoric and (2) not only more serious content but also more serious rhetoric, serving to upgrade the field’s scientific credibility. Through this rhetorical strategy, viewed through Burke’s ideas about rhetoric’s role in identity and division, optometrists constructed an image of medicine as an antagonistic other and used it to unify their members and convince politicians, health providers, and the public that they were qualified for heightened professional responsibilities.