'Doctor only' contacts spawn consumer ire

When Jane Holeywell tried to refill her 19-year-old son's contact-lens prescription, she was mystified that she couldn't find the lenses online or at Wal-Mart where she usually shops. She had purchased an initial three-month supply last year from the family eye doctor who wrote the prescription, but she didn't want to pay his high prices when the time came to reorder.

"Imagine when I discovered I couldn't buy them cheaper elsewhere," says the retired veterinary receptionist in Houston. It turned out that the Biomedics brand her son needed was available only through an eye doctor. In the end, Holeywell took a chance and bought a different, cheaper brand that a Wal-Mart salesperson assured her was the same as her son's Biomedics lenses.

Holeywell had stumbled upon a little-understood segment of the vision-care industry: so-called doctor-only, or limited-distribution lenses that are meant to be sold only through eye-care professionals. The manufacturers, including CooperVision, Hydrogel Vision and Sauflon Pharmaceuticals, sell these lenses only to eye doctors (or chains that employ optometrists, such as LensCrafters). Prices vary, but eye-care professionals typically charge more — often a lot more — than warehouse clubs like Costco, mass merchandisers like Wal-Mart and Web sites like Draper-based 1-800 CONTACTS.

Eye doctors say the practice is a positive for patients and encourages them to return more frequently to the office for needed checkups. Patients, they say, benefit from buying lenses from someone who regularly examines their eyes and instructs them on proper hygiene and lens care.

Some manufacturers say their doctor-only products have special features, such as higher water retention or greater comfort, says Dan Bell, president of the Contact Lens Manufacturers Association, a trade group that represents about 100 lens makers. "Those are marketing tools, and the marketplace decides whether those are real benefits or not," he says.

But the practice is sparking complaints from consumers and retailers, who say it's an effort to circumvent a 2003 law meant to encourage competition and make it easier for consumers to shop for the best deal. Under the Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act, eye doctors are required to hand patients a copy of their contact-lens prescription after an exam, whether they ask for it or not. Increasingly, consumers are finding that it doesn't matter that they can take their prescription with them, because they still can fill it only with their ophthalmologist, optometrist or optician.