Meet Andrew Hendershot, MD, cornea and external disease specialist

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[Text on screen: The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
Andrew Hendershot, MD
Ophthalmologist, Anterior Segment Division]

Andrew Hendershot, MD:
My name is Andy Hendershot. I'm an ophthalmologist here at the Havener Eye Institute, and I'm a cornea and external disease specialist. I interact with a wide variety of people from CEOs to homeless individuals, people from all different countries. So it's kind of a very changing environment. I mean, day to day, you never know what you're going to get. It's a different experience every day. But the ability to help and give back and look back after a career and say, "These are the people that I've helped," I think is a very strong drawing point.

I think a lot of patients feel refreshed when their physician is upfront and honest with them and says flat out, "This is a bad infection or you have a bad problem. We're going to do everything we need to do to fix that." But I don't like to mislead patients or falsely, give them false hope.

When there is hope and we have every possible piece of equipment and machinery and treatment here we can, so we can help a lot of people that couldn't be helped elsewhere. But I think it's important to be very honest and upfront with patients. And I think customizing treatment plans to a patient's personality, I can have two patients that I'll see this afternoon with the same exact problem that we'll treat differently, whether it's because they do or don't want to have surgery or they can or can't do a number of drops a certain amount of time or a different surgical technique, one versus the other, depending on their ability to position or their ability to follow up or their ability to use drops.

I think the most rewarding part of any ophthalmologist work is being able to restore people's sight. We have medical students that rotate with us that obviously rotate with a whole bunch of different specialties. And on more than one postoperative day, I've had medical students with me that say, "This is really amazing that patients come in the day after surgery, they see better than they've seen in years or in their entire life." They've started reading the paper that morning or they come back a week later and they're able to read their Bibles and church, their hymnals. They can read their newspapers, they can write letters to their grandchildren again. So restoration of sight is pretty hard to beat in terms of rewarding.

[Text on screen: The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center]

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