My family had been going to Dr. Lew for a couple years now, back when she was at Borel. We were happy with our annual checkups, and were glad to move with her when she opened her own shop. They have a very nice office, and the staff seems to be very friendly and helpful. My sister went to optometry school with Dr. Lew and we originally became Dr. Lew's patient on her recommendation. We thought that she was someone we could trust. To cut to the chase, based on our more recent experience with her over the past 1-2 years, if I were to give her the benefit of the doubt, I would call her incompetent. My real feeling, however, is that she tries to push more expensive products onto her customers, even at the expense of being reckless with the optical health of my young daughter.
First she recommends CRT night lenses for my then-10 year old daughter. OK, fine. Some professionals don't approve of that for young patients, but we believed her that it would be OK and this would help prevent her vision from getting any worse. A very expensive option, both at the outset and with each follow up visit. After complaining about redness on a couple occassions and questioning whether the lenses caused it, Dr. Lew said the lenses were fine, and my daughter had "sun damage" to her eyes. Again, my daughter had severe redness in her eye, and this time, Dr. Lew noted that she had an abnormal occurrence of white blood cells in her eye, but again, it wasn't the lenses. When we told her that we were going to stop the CRT lenses, she then recommended that we switch to multi-focal contact lenses instead of dailies (again, a very expensive option, which we later were told by a couple optometrists and an opthalmologist, were not appropriate or necessary for young patients). After stopping the CRT lenses, my daughter went back to eyeglasses, and Dr. Lew assured us that her prescription had not changed, despite us commenting that my daughter could not see clearly with her glasses.
We ended up going to an opthalmologist (who saw us right away based on concern over what was going on) and she pulled in a corneal specialist to look at my daughter. In short, my daughter won't be wearing contacts for the near future (despite Dr. Lew's attempt to put her back in multi-focal lenses right away). She doesn't have "sun damage", and likely the WBC issue was caused by the CRT lenses. Needless to say, we have pulled our records from Winking Bee and will not be going back.
To summarize:
If it was up to Dr. Lew, my daughter would still be in CRT lenses, despite the repeated complaints about irritation and the diagnosis of having an abnormal growth of WBC in her cornea. To this day, I believe she would still try to convince us that there was nothing wrong with these lenses for my daughter, so we would still be paying the high annual and "fitting" changes. After determining that there was some issue with my daughter's eyes, instead of taking her out of contacts altogether, Dr. Lew wanted us to consider putting her into multifocal lenses, which other doctors do not recommend for young patients, but of course, they happen to be another very expensive option. Finally, despite wasting time and money with Dr. Lew and these CRT lenses, in addition to having some sort of corneal infection, my daughter's vision had changed significantly, another fact that Dr. Lew can't or won't admit. Either she doesn't know how to measure eyesight, or she flat out lied to us about my daughter's vision not changing. The opthalmologist and corneal specialist we saw were appalled at the recommendations and course of action she was taking with our daughter.
As I said earlier, either she is not competent or she is not suited for more complex optical issues, or she cares more about selling the more expensive products vs actually looking at what is working for or is good for the patient. Maybe if all you need are basic glasses or contacts, she could be fine choice as an eye doctor. Maybe your main concern is going into a nice, clean, friendly office, which they do have. But if you need more sophisticated advice, I would highly suggest that you a lot of research and receive second opinions, before following her counsel. Of course that is just based on my experience. read more
