No need to worry about Dr. Mindy Nguyen looking at her clients with a jaundiced eye — eyeballing her clients is her stock in trade.

A native of Vietnam, Nguyen grew up in the U.S. and was zooming in on a career as a physician before setting her sights on becoming an optometrist.

Nguyen, 30, decided to make the switch while volunteering for Chicago's Vision Rehabilitation Institute, where she was moved by the number of newborn babies with impaired eyesight due to their mothers abusing cocaine.

"And I gave up med school at that time," Nguyen said.

After four years of undergraduate studies, Nguyen enrolled in optometry school — another four-year regimen that led to a one-year residency. In April 2008, Nguyen put up her shingle in the Village Green shopping center. In addition to running Huntley Eye Care, Nguyen also teaches at the institute in Chicago and seeks to educate her Huntley-area clients on the importance of proper eye care. Equally important, she explained, is how a condition detected during an eye exam is presented to a patient.

"When a patient has, say, glaucoma — which is a blinding disease — if you don't do a proper job of telling the patient what they have and what they should do, you're going to have that patient not coming back because they don't know the severity of the condition." She says it's important that patients know the possible outcome if they ignore symptoms and put off further eye exams until it may be too late.

Nguyen says people who shrug off routine eye exams because they feel their eyesight is OK could be setting the stage for severe ocular disease.

"What happens is, you can have problems with eyes that do not affect vision," Nguyen said.

She said retinal detachment can occur without a patient realizing it because it occurs on the side of the eyes, not in front where most vision occurs.

She says the sole purpose of her clinic is to give her clients the best possible eye care — not merely to sell eyeglasses.