Dr. Rae Huang, OD received her Masters in Vision Science and her Doctorate in Optometry from the SUNY College of Optometry in Manhattan, where she graduated with honors as the President of the Beta Sigma Kappa Optometric Honor Society. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Boston University, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude with a double major in Biology and Psychology. Dr. Huang has two private practices in Boston and Newton, MA.
Dr. Huang specializes in preventative eye care techniques such as Orthokeratology, in which she designs contact lenses that correct patient’s vision while they are sleeping, so that they can see all day without glasses or contacts. These lenses also prevent nearsighted prescriptions from getting worse by acting like a retainer or braces for the eyes. Dr. Huang is passionate about fitting these eye braces on children to prevent their prescriptions from becoming nearsighted due to digital device use, which is predicted to cause half the world population to become nearsighted by 2050. Since increased nearsightedness can increase a patient’s risk of cataracts, glaucoma, retinal detachment, and myopic macular degeneration, she believes that these lenses can help prevent the incidence of these eye diseases in the future as well.
Dr. Huang educates patients about these preventative eye care techniques on her blog and on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube under the handle @preventativeeyecare.
Hi, my name is Dr. Rae Huang, OD and I knew that I wanted to be an eye doctor since I was 12. My mother, Dr. Haiyan Gong, MD, PHD, is a world renown ophthalmologist who gets invited all around the world to talk about her research, and she used to take me with her. She resides in the world of academia, where she is very well published. I should know. I have been proof reading her publications for spelling and grammar mistakes since elementary school because English is not her first language.
As far as eyes go, she is the most knowledgeable person I know. And growing up with her I couldn’t help but absorb some of that knowledge. When she was teaching anatomy at the New England College of Optometry when I was 8, I watched her saw open the heads of cadavers and label the cranial nerves with colorful pins. I practically grew up in her lab in Boston Medical Center, where the fridge was full of eyeballs in jars and I got to play with her fancy confocal microscopes and watch keratocyte cells migrate to heal wounds in the corneal epithelium. I actually did a project on this and entered it in the Lexington High School Science fair as a freshman and won!
But the world of academia is small, and the general population doesn’t get their information from NIH studies. I learned this recently, when a company trying to come up with a new treatment for amblyopia (lazy eye) asked me to be part of both their doctor focus group as well as their parent focus group, since I am both the parent of a child with amblyopia as well as a doctor that treats it. The doctor focus group went great and the company really loved my insights as a doctor. But the parent focus group was awful. I was alarmed to learn that most of the parents were getting their medical advice from parenting blogs. So I was trying to explain to the rest of the parents why they should look for double blind peer reviewed studies when it comes to the health of their children’s eyes when the mediator sent me a private chat message through zoom telling me to act like I’m a parent not a doctor because I was making the other parents feel bad.
But I kept trying to explain that even as a parent, I prefer to trust medical treatments that had gone through a peer reviewed study published by a reputable source. And the response I kept getting from all of the other parents was that they didn’t trust science and would rather make decisions based on real influencers sharing their feelings.
So I decided to start a blog. l currently have 2 eyecare practices in South Boston and Newton, and I am lucky enough to work other optometrists, who share my passion for preventative eye care. We have been spreading the word about preventative eye care one patient at a time, but I think now is the time that we should start expanding our reach. I am going to try to carve out some time in between seeing patients, managing my practices, and raising my 3 children to write a blog to educate the world about preventative eye care.
In the Press:
An Eye on Alumni: Dr. Rae Huang ’13 – SUNY College of Optometry (sunyopt.edu)
https://www.optometrystudents.com/the-abcs-of-treating-glaucoma-medically/
https://www.optometrystudents.com/american-academy-optometry-boston-2011/
https://www.optometrystudents.com/font-size-viewing-distance-on-smart-phones-students-at-suny-preform-study/