Oh boy.
What if there was an optician training video out there, advocating the use of subconscious tricks to hard-sell you glasses? An entirely dodgy 1970’s concept to “program” your subconscious brain, used today by optician sales trainers to get you to buy things? Is that ethical? Or is that just straight up make-belief comedy?
Yikes-town, here we come.
Somebody may have to dig out the camera and make a video edit on this topic.
It’s hard to even pick a place to start, this is all too ironic and amusing and disgusting all at the same time. What do you say? Should we start with NLP and how while it’s fascinating, it’s also entirely pseudoscience, heavily discredited, but very consistent with the also-pseudoscience that is minus lenses for myopia control?
Or should we start with NLP and how Optometry Times is straight up advocating opticians to manipulate their customers by using subconscious “triggers” to get them to buy glasses?
Patients buy positive feelings. *blood boils*
Those guys, so preciously unaware. No shame at all.
Or should we just throw up our hands and go, seriously? Seriously, are you guys for real? You put videos on YouTube, you, Optometry Times, talking about some dodgy 70’s psychotherapy angle to increase sales? In public? Is that where we are now, not even trying to pretend you’re better than some pseudoscience cult?
How they don’t struggle keeping a straight face through all this, is the real mystery. But let’s talk NLP, for a moment:
What NLP Is
This is tricky. I actually semi-secretly (and irrationally) like NLP and various base concepts.
But not for some middle aged British optician to waffle on about how she’s going to help opticians sell more butt-ugly giant red plastic frames to unsuspecting customers.
Here’s Wikipedia on NLP:
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in California, United States in the 1970s. NLP’s creators claim there is a connection between neurological processes (neuro-), language (linguistic) and behavioral patterns learned through experience (programming), and that these can be changed to achieve specific goals in life.[1][2]
And here’s the hilarious part:
NLP has since been overwhelmingly discredited scientifically,[9][10] but continues to be marketed by some hypnotherapists and by some companies that organize seminars and workshops on management training for businesses.[11] There is no scientific evidence supporting the claims made by NLP advocates and it has been discredited as a pseudoscience by experts.[9][12] Scientific reviews state that NLP is based on outdated metaphors of how the brain works that are inconsistent with current neurological theory and contain numerous factual errors.[13][14]
Do you see the delicious irony?
An eye guru will seriously have to go home in a minute and get the camera for this one. They use an overwhelmingly scientifically discredited method to sell a myopia treatment that’s also been overwhelmingly scientifically credited with causing more myopia.
Oh and why would we be anxious?
You can’t make this sh** up. We can’t troll these guys any harder than they troll to themselves.
They’re pre-trolling. They’re totally double triple pre-trolling us. We got nothing, we can’t call them on their pseudoscience approach to myopia control. We can try, but they’ll just say “oh yea, how about we started the pseudoscience way before then, we use 70’s brain programming tricks to sell you on our product in the first place. Bam!”.
16th century “medicine” and 70’s psycho-tricks to sell it.
Where do we file this one? In our science section? Or where we keep the article on optometry straight up admitting that they cause myopia?
I just. Can’t.
You must go on Jake, you say. Power through it. Optometry Times isn’t quite done giving, just yet.
Calling Customers “Patients”
You really just want to say fukk you Optometry Times, on this one.
That’s just typical.
Call it what it is. It’s a hard sell. “Dispensing”, yea right. “Patients”, oh isn’t that just precious.
We’re not patients. They hope that we’re clueless consumers who are going to fall for their NLP tricks. Their “neuro-linguistic programming” attempts to make us buy some Chinese-made $5 frame for $100. We know their huge profit margins. Just stop trying to trick us with your shady, dodgy sales tactics, retail optometry.
The good news here is that if we really look at the whole industry long and hard enough, your darling eye guru is actually less dodgy than the mainstream. If we peel back layer after layer, it might just make more sense to trust an ex-banker with a largely imaginary beard, than NLP promoting sales opticians.
Wear it proudly, Jake. Your imaginary beard and your very real guru status.
Cheers,
Jake Deepak Chopra-stein, g.U. R.u.
