Dr. Roberto Battistella

"The path to becoming a competent practicing physician is an arduous and long journey...

Ophthalmology is about saving vision, but neuro-ophthalmology is sometimes also about saving lives...

There is no other sub-specialty of ophthalmology that relies as heavily on the ophthalmologist's skill in and use of general medicine...

The neuro-ophthalmologist is often the sub-specialty that others turn to when the etiology of visual decline is in question. They are often uniquely suited to provide a global and comprehensive perspective to any complex medical, neurologic, ophthalmologic, or neurosurgical case. A neuro-ophthalmology patient has often already seen 2, if not 3 or more other specialists by the time they arrive at our door...

What makes the neuro-ophthalmologist unique is not just the fund of knowledge, but the global holistic viewpoint of the integration and interaction of complex and systemic disorders on visual function...

We particularly enjoy the sense of satisfaction, medical accomplishment, and difference we can make in patient's lives when we are able to discover a diagnosis that has remained elusive for sometimes many years...

We learn something new every day about advances in other fields like medicine, surgery, radiology, neurology, or neurosurgery. We enjoy being comprehensive ophthalmology's connection to our colleagues in the medical world and interacting on a daily basis with consultants in multiple disciplines...

These ideas and observations have been our collective experience, and we are both very grateful to have chosen this path and to have been given the opportunity to study neuro-ophthalmology..."

Spitze A, Al-Zubidi N, Lam P, Yalamanchili S, Lee AG. Neuro-ophthalmology as a career. Indian J Ophthalmol. 2014;62(10):1013–1014. doi:10.4103/0301-4738.146007