Complaint Review: America's Best

This is a story about a doctor who lied to a patient in order to push a certain contact lens.

For the longest time, I went to my family’s trusted eye doctor in my hometown. I started wearing contacts about 10 years ago, and went through a variety of lenses at first, working with my doctor to find ones that worked. I have eye issues, including mild astigmatism, that required working around. Additionally, I went on a course of Accutane that resulted in semi-permanent dry eyes, and began law school, which required near-constant screen and small-type reading.

Eventually, my doctor put me on Biomedic XC lenses, and they were like a dream. He recommended I remain on them, as they were the best solution for my situation. (This was arrived at after trying multiple lenses from different manufacturers.)

Fast forward to the present. I moved to Pittsburgh to work, and was in need of a new eye doctor. America’s Best was the default choice, as they were the only place that took my insurance downtown. I’ll gloss over the customer service, as that’s secondary to the story (but it wasn’t great – the staff decided the best time to train each other from scratch on filling orders for insurance and lenses was with a live customer, during the lunch hour).

I made a point of mentioning to the doctor that my old doctor had me on the Biomedic XCs, and those were the ones I wanted to order. His response to me?

“Oh, we have those – we just call them something different. We call them Sofmed 55s.”

It struck me as fishy, especially since he refused to make eye contact with me, but whatever. He’s the doctor, right?

I took home six boxes of them, only to discover that they are absolutely wrong for my eyes. They cause near-constant eye-aches, and I have come to dread putting them in (and I only wear them for about 12 hours a day and take them out every night). These were absolutely not the same lens.

Well, a quick bit of googling showed me – shocker! No “name change” for the XCs. In fact, they’re not the same lens at all! And, what’s this? America’s Best has often been accused of pushing the Sofmeds before?

I am beyond appalled that a doctor would make such a bold-faced lie to a patient, in order to do what… fulfill some sort of quota? I feel like I was taken advantage of, and I feel ashamed for being so trustworthy.

Some may find various ‘models’ of contact lenses to be interchangeable, but I do not, and I urge you not to patronize America’s Best, lest your eyes become mere fodder for quota-filling, too.