Rand Paul, board-certified Ophthalmologist. But which board?

Shame on Rand Paul!!Please stop to see patient.You can not certified by yourself.I am not liberal but conservative and you are already to much.Please withdraw your nomination.

Taking Paul down in November is going to be easy…… just like with Angel!!

The National Board of Ophthalmology requires all doctors to be certified and be re-certified. The American Board of Ophthalmology has grandfathered older doctors that past the boards before a certain date. So you can pass your boards once and be done and not have to be re-certified.
I would rather have a doctor that must be re-certified periodically.

The gubermint gets their cut from the licensing fees. Doctors must be licensed to practice medicine. Don’t know if the gubermint take a cut from being board certified. Not all doctors are board certified.
Medicine changes through the years and what was common practice prior to 1992 may not be the best practice today. I prefer that my doctors maintain board certification and periodical testing should be required.

How can it be that Rand Paul doesn’t understand that you can’t certify yourself? How could he not understand the duty he owes to his patients?
It’s not good enough for the physician to feel that “he could be certified at any time.” Humans beings are frequently not the best judges of themselves.
Almost as dense is smartalek assertion that one can’t “have a judgement about this situation without knowing the answers” to his numerous mostly irrelevant questions.
It doesn’t matter. The patient is putting his eyesight and, potentially, his life in the hands of the physician. Asserting the credential is asserting that a knowledgeable, independent third party has reason to believe that the physician is competent.
The patient has the right to reply on that assertion. “I certify myself” doesn’t cut it. Anyone with less than an ideal outcome in this medical practice has a probable cause of action.
One has to wonder what precautions Paul’s liability insurance carrier took. They certainly have cause for concern. After this, professional liability insurance companies are likely to take a harder look at who are the certifying entities.
Among other things, Rand Paul really screwed up his business over this amazingly egotistical action; and likely will cause future difficulties for liability insurance carriers and their customers.

To CBA, who considers him/herself to be intellectually superior to those of us who are products of the modern education system– you’re not as smart as you think you are! As an ophthalmologist, I paid my $3k for the privilege of sitting for and passing my boards through the American Board of Ophthalmology (i.e. the REAL board), which is a non-profit organization that has NOTHING to do with the government (as CBA would surmise in his/her infinite wisdom) or some military-industrial complex or whatever conspiracy theory you want to believe in. Instead the aim of the ABO is to maintain a competency among residency training programs and the practicing community of ophthamologists. Rand Paul’s creation, the NBO, essentially functions as an alternative for ophthalmologists that cannot pass their boards (30% of us do on the first try and most who fail will fail again) and must find an organization to “certify” them so that they can participate with insurance companies. From the super-reliable internet grapevine, I understand that Paul did pass his ABO boards but allowed it to expire in 2005 under the principle that it is unfair for the ABO to “grandfather” ophthalmologists who passed their boards prior to 1992 (or 1993) while requiring post-1992 trained ophthalmologists to re-certify every 10 years. That sounds really fishy, because almost EVERYONE who passes their boards will pass re-certification. In my opinion, the current re-certification process is a low hurdle and functions only as a cash cow for the ABO. Something is missing here unless Paul is just a big idiot, which he isn’t if he completed his residency at Duke (a top 5 program) So if he’s not stupid, then he either can’t find a few hundred dollars under his sofa cushions to afford re-certification or there is an ethical or legal impediment that kept him from re-certifying with ABO and led him to make up his own board certifying club. I’m proud to see my colleagues find success outside of their field of work, but this…smells funny.