Bradley Swaim Builds a Practice on Listening When Others Look Away

Bradley Swaim remembers the patient who changed everything. Not the routine cases or the straightforward diagnoses. The one who’d been dismissed by multiple doctors over months of unexplained visual symptoms. Nothing wrong, they’d told him. You’re exaggerating.

When the man arrived at the clinic where Swaim worked as an optometric technician, defeat had replaced frustration. He’d stopped expecting anyone to believe him.

“His story, while initially seeming unlikely, was consistent and sincere,” Swaim says. He performed a confrontation visual field test. The test took less than a minute but the results screamed what months of appointments had missed.

Brain tumor.

The patient’s relief wasn’t just about the diagnosis, it was about finally being believed. About someone taking the time to actually look instead of glancing at a chart and moving on.

That moment became the foundation for everything Swaim would build as a doctor of optometry. Not the advanced imaging equipment he’d later master or the clinical rotations at Greenville VA and Piedmont EyeCare. The real education came from watching someone dissolve with gratitude because he’d simply listened.

His father had shown him the blueprint years earlier. Growing up watching a parent practice medicine gives you a strange vantage point. Young Swaim saw the technical precision but also the other half that doesn’t show up in textbooks; the reassurance, the translation of clinical jargon into plain language and the willingness to sit with a patient’s fear.

“Patients don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” his father told him once.

Swaim carried that to Southern College of Optometry in Memphis, where he spent 2017 to 2022 accumulating credentials, training across Adult and Pediatric Primary Care, Cornea and Contact Lens services, Vision Therapy and  Advanced Ocular Disease management. He learned Laser Peripheral Iridotomy and Selective Laser Trabeculoplasty during clinical rotations.

But competence without character is just expensive machinery and healthcare in 2025 runs on metrics that rarely measure what matters.

“In today’s healthcare environment, it can be easy to become influenced by corporate metrics, productivity pressures, or business targets,” Swaim says. “I take pride in the fact that I have remained grounded in the core purpose of our profession.”

His greatest achievement, he says without irony, isn’t a title or procedure count. It’s consistent. The ability to place patient wellbeing at the center of every clinical decision even when that’s not the most profitable path.

The Education That Shaped a Bradley Swaim’s Approach

East Carolina University came first with a Bachelor of Science in Pre-Professional Health and Chemistry. Swaim graduated with a 3.9 GPA while tutoring organic chemistry. That detail matters because it signals something. He was already teaching before he had the degree, already translating complex material into comprehensible language for panicking students.

That skill became foundational. You can know everything about ocular anatomy and still lose patients in medical terminology.

The Southern College of Optometry gave him clinical vocabulary. The externships gave him real-world syntax. At The Eye Center at SCO, he worked with Dr. Borgman and others who modeled thoughtful, empathetic care. The Greenville VA rotation introduced him to veteran populations with advanced pathology, complex cases where textbook answers rarely fit.

A private practice in Charlotte added co-management experience alongside cardiology and neurology specialists. Different specialties have different priorities, different languages and navigating that requires diplomacy and the ability to hold multiple perspectives.

He absorbed the philosophy of Dr. Neil Gailmard, whose writing emphasizes building trust over chasing volume. Also studied the clinical guidance of Dr. Ron Melton and Dr. Randall Thomas. These weren’t just mentors, they were maps showing alternate routes.

Working as an optometric technician and assistant before becoming a doctor gave Bradley Swaim Optometrist a perspective most physicians miss. He did the pre-testing, patient workups, insurance procedures, contact lens fitting and scribing. He saw healthcare from the support staff angle, where you’re invisible to patients but essential to everything that happens. That experience left marks. Made him attentive to how the whole system functions, not just his role within it.

“A shortcut is often the longest road,” he says when asked what advice he’d give his younger self. It’s the kind of wisdom that sounds obvious until you’re exhausted on a Wednesday afternoon and cutting corners would save twenty minutes. Until you’re behind schedule and the abbreviated version would get you caught up. Until every small compromise whispers that just this once won’t matter.

But it does matter. The first time and the tenth time and the hundredth time. Integrity isn’t defined by occasional good intentions, he notes, it’s built through consistent actions, especially when no one’s watching. 

Defining Success Beyond the Bottom Line

Ask Swaim how he defines success and you won’t get the usual metrics. Not revenue growth or patient volume.

“I define success as the ability to create meaningful, lasting impact while maintaining alignment with one’s values,” he says.

Professionally, success means providing excellent care and earning trust. Personally, living in a way that is intentional, compassionate and enriching.

Intentionality sounds simple until you try to live it. Healthcare settings pull you away from intention constantly. Be it a schedule running late, an insurance denial, a patient arriving angry. You have to choose it again every morning, every patient.

Swaim believes physical movement and time outside are essential to mental clarity and his dogs help here too. They don’t negotiate about walks. They don’t accept excuses about being too tired or too busy. They exist entirely in the present moment and they drag him there with them, willing or not. Maybe that’s their real therapeutic value, not companionship, though that matters. Not even the forced exercise but the way they make presence non-negotiable.

He incorporates exercise and leisure sports weekly. Not just for physical health but to decompress and stay grounded, to return to clinical responsibilities centered, focused and able to give full attention to patients.

Balance is about practicing consistency, nourishing physical health and personal relationships to show up professionally as his best self.

The Clinical Philosophy Behind the Practice

Swaim is proficient with advanced diagnostic imaging technology like Optomap fundus photography, Humphrey Visual Field Analyzer, Keratography, Corneal topography and tomography. But technology is just an amplified intention. I believe imaging is most valuable when we review it together, making sure it clearly supports your story and what you’re feeling.

His training in ocular disease management and specialty contact lens services gives him technical range but range without judgment is just options without direction. Real clinical judgment requires the willingness to slow down when speed is expected, to investigate when dismissal would be easier. 

That patient with the brain tumor taught him important lessons. The diagnosis was found through a simple one-minute visual field check, choosing to address the basics rather than ordering costly tests that would have added expense without providing real answers.

“That experience has stayed with me,” Swaim says. “It reinforced that our greatest impact does not always come from complex procedures or advanced technology, but from listening, believing our patients, and being willing to investigate rather than dismiss.”

Knowing when to slow down requires more than clinical training. It requires what Swaim’s father modeled. The integration of technical competence with genuine empathy, science and service working together instead of competing.

Building a Career on Foundational Principles

Swaim’s approach to evidence-based clinical decision-making isn’t particularly revolutionary. It’s just medicine practiced the way medicine is supposed to work: continuous learning, patient-centered care and decisions reflecting both clinical priorities and the individual’s unique circumstances.

The revolutionary part is refusing to compromise those principles when healthcare systems actively incentivize compromise. He’s maintained his approach by staying grounded in purpose and leading with empathy, sound judgment and ethical responsibility even when those qualities aren’t reflected in quarterly reviews.

His community outreach work fits this framework. Vision screenings for underserved populations, expanding access for those who might not otherwise receive care. It’s not charity as performance or brand building, it is an extension of the same principle that governs his clinical practice. The belief that maintaining visual function is foundational to safety, independence and quality of life, that access matters, that some obligations transcend profit motive.

The work happening in exam rooms doesn’t make headlines. A Bradley Swaim Optometrist appointment won’t trend on social media. There’s no dramatic transformation narrative to package for marketing.

Just the steady accumulation of careful examinations, thorough explanations and treatment plans that reflect what’s best for the individual. Just a doctor trying to practice medicine the way his father showed him. The way that still works when you’re willing to resist pressure to do it faster, cheaper and more efficiently.

Doing it the right way, the first time, every time.

Even when no one’s watching.