How an Optometrist Built “Braces for Your Eyes”

Dr. Rae Huang, OD believes eye care should prevent prescriptions, not simply correct them as they worsen. After her infant son develops a rapidly progressing prescription that threatens vision in one eye, the Boston optometrist begins a years-long mission to rethink orthokeratology. She teaches herself to custom-design hard contact lenses, tests 24 iterations, invests heavily in patents, and builds what she calls “braces for your eyes.” But bringing preventative eye care into an industry built around glasses and contacts creates a new challenge: how does she protect her life’s work while getting it into more hands? Dr. Huang explores myopia prevention, the risks of the current standard of care, self-funding innovation, and her vision for shifting eye care from correction to prevention.

Key Takeaways

• Why Dr. Huang believes preventing myopia should begin with a child’s first prescription.
• How her son’s vision crisis pushed her to teach herself custom hard contact lens design.
• Why she redesigned her orthokeratology lens 24 times over roughly a decade.
• How self-funding patents and FDA approval allows her to protect the mission behind her innovation.
• Why her larger legacy is shifting eye care from correcting worsening prescriptions to preventative eye care.

Notable Quotes

• “I prevent prescriptions instead of correcting them.”
• “Think of them like braces for your eye.”
• “The best prescription is no prescription.”
• “It’s my life’s work.”
• “We can actually prevent these prescriptions from happening before they happen.”