Uncover Your Eyes: A New OSI Collaboration on Optometry and Mental Wellness

Uncover Your Eyes:
A New OSI Collaboration on Optometry and Mental Wellness

The collaboration reflects a growing attention to internal factors that influence external outcomes: stress, cognition, empathy, and their role in decision-making. These topics rarely appear in continuing education programs, yet for many optometrists they affect the workday as much as diagnostic tools or procedural training.

Behind the Mic: Dr. Meenal Agarwal

Agarwal, who runs three practices in the Greater Toronto Area, began the series as a side project. Her background includes work in myopia control, ocular disease, and refractive surgery, along with a steady presence on the speaking circuit. She has written and presented on burnout in independent care, with a focus on communication and leadership in independent care settings.

“I launched Uncover Your Eyes to challenge the status quo in healthcare,” she says, “blending my identity as an optometrist, entrepreneur, and mother into a platform that explores the hidden truths of health innovation and clinical culture.”

What Listeners Can Expect

Each episode is built around candid, unscripted conversations with professionals from psychology, neuroscience, and related fields. The discussions examine how emotional regulation and cognitive load affect clinical performance and leadership.

Her interviews often begin with an observation from daily practice (something noticed in patient care or clinic routines) before widening into research and expert commentary. Upcoming subjects include the link between diet and cognitive clarity, the neuroscience of patient rapport, and the impact of stress on diagnostic accuracy.

“Expect episodes that reframe everyday issues with tools you can apply in the clinic or beyond,” Dr. Agarwal notes. “Each guest shares insights that combine research with practical application.”

Mental Health Through a Clinical Lens

Rather than positioning wellness as a break from work, Agarwal sees it as embedded in professional competency. Mental health, she argues, is a clinical asset. It’s part of how optometrists lead, connect, and make decisions.

“I want ODs to embrace mental health as part of professional excellence,” she says. “That means self-advocacy, boundary-setting, and emotional literacy in clinic routines. Sensitivity isn’t a weakness; it’s a clinical strength.”

Her approach avoids prescriptive formulas, instead encouraging small shifts in how practitioners respond to patients, staff, and their own reactions. In independent practice, where care and business decisions overlap, this perspective serves both patient outcomes and professional resilience.

Vision, Neuroscience, and Better Clinical Care

From emotional literacy to visual pathways, the podcast draws a line between inner experience and clinical function. Dr. Agarwal explains, “Visual function is deeply entwined with neurological pathways and mental health. These insights help ODs better understand how cognitive strain and unresolved trauma can influence overall wellness—for both patients and practitioners.”

Recognizing that connection changes how care is delivered. It allows optometrists to identify when visual symptoms point to stress or overload, improving diagnostic clarity and guiding referrals. It also shapes the tone of an appointment: when communication is adapted and cognitive load reduced, patients are more likely to feel understood and to respond well to treatment.

Why OSI Group Chose to Invest

For OSI Group, this perspective aligns with the daily reality of its members. Many run multidisciplinary clinics, moving between clinician, manager, and mentor roles with little margin for reflection. Uncover Your Eyes offers a pause—an opportunity to think differently about the pressures that shape patient care and practice life.

By partnering the series, OSI extends its commitment beyond equipment, marketing, and training. It places equal value on cognitive and emotional literacy as foundations of care. The initiative also expands OSI’s investment in asynchronous learning, giving members content they can engage with in the short gaps of a busy day, whether between patients or on the commute home.

Bringing Care into Focus

"Emotional intelligence enhances every interaction," says Dr. Agarwal. "It builds trust and helps shift care from transactional to transformational."

Rather than draw sharp lines between clinical and personal life, the podcast blurs them. It asks listeners to notice how attention and emotion enter the room alongside the patient—and how presence, as much as skill, shapes care.

Uncover Your Eyes creates room for a different mode of learning: reflective and grounded in lived experience. For practitioners, it becomes a prompt to slow down and ask what excellence looks like in practice, in the ordinary but human work of showing up.

Where and When to Listen

OSI-partnered episodes of Uncover Your Eyes will be released throughout September. They will be available on major streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. OSI will also distribute listening links and reminders through its regular member communications.

Additional commentary and resources can be found on Dr. Agarwal’s Instagram and TikTok accounts at @dr.meenalagarwal, and on her website: www.drmeenal.com.