Community in Unity: Dr. Stern reflects on rewarding career

By Mary Ann Price

The Canton Citizen is pleased to partner with the Canton Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee to present “Community in Unity,” a monthly series spotlighting Canton residents of diverse backgrounds.

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Dr. Cathy D. Stern, DO, retired at the end of 2020 following a 40-year career of helping both children and adults with vision therapy and vision rehabilitation, treating students at Pappas Rehabilitation Hospital, working with athletes who want to be better at what they do, and maintaining a private practice.

Dr. Cathy Stern and her partner, Ann Hartstein

Two people in her home community in northeastern Pennsylvania influenced Stern in her career choice; one was a science teacher and the other was her sister. Stern was interested in math and science as a student. In middle school, she met Mr. Freedman, a teacher who didn’t use textbooks with his students.

“He would give us lists of questions and we had to look up everything,” Stern recalled. “You had to research everything. It really made me learn things. I never minded hard work. He made science interesting to me.”

Stern’s parents supported her interests and she grew up thinking that was true for others. “Later on I found it wasn’t so,” she said, noting that there were very few women among her classmates in the college of ophthalmology she attended and that not all of her professors were happy to see them.

Stern’s younger sister also had an impact on her career choice. She was born with cataracts, had a retinal detachment, and completely lost the sight in one eye before gradually losing the sight in her other eye. “It didn’t seem unusual to deal with the eye doctor,” Stern said. “It didn’t seem foreign to me.”

While she was a junior working on a bachelor’s degree in biology at Boston University, she met someone who was studying to be an optometrist. After talking to them, she realized that becoming a doctor of optometry would combine her interests in math, science and psychology; give her a chance to work with children; afford her regular hours; and let her start her practice after studying for four years. She went on to earn her degree from Pennsylvania College of Optometry, now Salus University.

Stern has worked as an optometrist, checking to see how well her patients see. For more than 20 years, however, her focus has been on using vision therapy and vision rehabilitation to provide successful learning and recreational experiences no matter how clear a patient’s vision might be. She works with both children and adults, and with people who have suffered a stroke or a brain injury.

Stern explained that her work with vision therapy and vision rehabilitation involves helping patients who may have strong vision but who have trouble following what is written on a line, or whose two eyes are not working together well, or who have difficulty with visual processing.

This can affect how they do at school, work, recreation, and with daily activities. “I work with someone to strengthen their skills, so that they see results,” Stern said. She helps patients to become better at judging depth and space, catching a ball, or going up and down stairs. She might treat a patient by having them look at 3-D images to get both eyes to work together, then work up to more complex images, and then to images that are getting closer to the viewer or farther away, to get the viewer to make faster responses. “We’ve given you much better stability and stamina,” she said.

Regardless of the visual strength of her patients, each one possesses the same thing: skills that are invisible and essential. “You want to have those skills available to you at the level you need when you need them, or you’re going to have difficulty,” Stern said. “These are foundational skills. You use them to read better, to do math better. I am giving you that advantage.”

She said that some of the special education students may have enough improvement to move out of programs or to be taken off of medications, while stroke and brain injury patients will do better in their occupational and physical therapy programs. “It guides our actions, our movements,” Stern said. “It’s my vision system telling my hands where to be.”

For more than 25 years, she has gone to Pappas Rehabilitation Hospital twice a month to treat students. “I am the only vision care provider they’re going to see,” Stern said. She checks students for the clearness of their vision, writes prescriptions and works to enhance their vision. She works with occupational therapists on how to present a new activity or work on an activity that has already been used. She also works with speech-language therapists on how to present visual material to students so that they will be successful in learning it.

Since retiring in 2020, Stern has spent most of her professional time teaching, mostly online, sharing her expertise with students in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

Stern met her partner, Ann Hartstein, in 1995 through a mutual friend. “Interestingly, it didn’t really go anywhere, but then we connected again a few months later and here we are,” she said. The couple enjoys cycling and traveling when they can.

Stern said that in her practice, she has used her life experiences to make sure that employees, patients, and others feel comfortable. “Being someone who has been part of a community that has felt they have to be a little more hidden, this is a safe environment,” she said. “I happen to be Jewish. In certain places and at certain times, it has certainly been an issue. It makes me more sensitive.”

In addition to her professional work, Stern was an elected town meeting member in Brookline, is active with the Lions Club in Canton, is the board chairman for Hillel Council of New England, and volunteers at the South Shore food pantry.

“Being gay is just one part of who I am,” Stern said. “I like to be doing. I’m always pretty busy with something. I’m just someone who has always wanted to help other people.”

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