It Works at Work. Jay M. Cohen has heard it all at the clinic on West 42nd Street in Manhattan.
Patients vent about workplace frustrations, stalled careers and shattered dreams.
But Dr. Cohen is neither a psychiatrist nor a career counselor. He is an optometrist who treats colorblindness, a condition that affects about 12 million Americans, mostly men. And because colorblind people can usually perceive colors and have difficulty distinguishing only some of them, many do not even know they have the deficiency. Many patients Dr. Cohen sees at the color- vision service of the State University of New York's College of Optometry have failed the test for jobs that require normal color vision. For about three out of four of them, he said, the results come as a total shock.