Dr. David J. Babington, OD

A Family Optometry Practice Built Across Generations in Albuquerque

Dr. David Babington was born at Loveless Healthcare, where his father was the only optometrist on staff at the time. As the story goes, his dad came downstairs after the birth, announced "it's a boy," traded a high five, and went right back to work. That's the kind of practical, always on the job attitude David grew up around, and it's shaped how he runs things today.

His father opened the current practice in 1982, and David spent his childhood afternoons in the basement doing homework between filing paper charts for his mother, who ran the optical shop while his father handled the exams. By high school he was scheduling appointments and prepping patients. By college he was fitting contacts and selling glasses. The only thing left to learn was the exam itself, so he went and learned it.

That path from filing cabinets to the exam chair shapes everything about how the practice runs today. This isn't a business David studied from the outside and decided to enter. It's one he absorbed from the inside, room by room, over two decades before he ever wrote a prescription of his own. Even then, his father wasn't quick to hand things over. David assumed he'd take the reins the day he graduated optometry school, but his dad had other plans and sent him out to build experience elsewhere first, at a Walmart optometry counter and a year behind the chair at LensCrafters. The handoff became a slow, twenty year process, with his dad working a little less each year while David worked more, until the practice was fully his.

What to Expect from a Comprehensive Eye Exam

Walk in for a first visit and you'll fill out a thorough medical history, then move through preliminary testing that measures pressure, visual fields, and the basic optics of your eye. From there, David takes over personally. He'll ask which lens is clearer, one or two, again and again, dialing in not just a prescription but how you as a person prefer to see the world.

He's also checking for far more than your prescription. A bright light exam looks for glaucoma and other concerns, and the small blood vessels inside your eye can reveal early signs of diabetes or high blood pressure long before those conditions show up anywhere else in a routine physical. Patients who've been coming for years sometimes ask why the light feels new. It isn't. He checks every time, and most people simply stop noticing the routine parts once trust sets in.

A Doctor Who Lives What He Prescribes

David doesn't just fit contacts and glasses for a living, he wears them. He's a longtime contact lens wearer, he's had LASIK, and now that he's over forty, he needs bifocals himself, so the daily frustrations his patients describe aren't abstract to him. He knows what it's like to fight New Mexico's dry air with a pair of lenses that just won't cooperate, because he's lived it.

He's also not shy about the trial and error that comes with new lens technology. Early in his career he tried a pair of transition contacts designed to darken automatically outdoors. On his light colored eyes, they turned nearly black in the sun, and people would stop and stare, wondering what was wrong with his eyes. He tells the story on himself easily, a reminder that even the doctor doesn't always get it right on the first try, and that patience with new technology is part of the process for everyone, including him.

Specialty Contact Lens Fitting for New Mexico's Dry Climate

Contact lenses are where David's built his own niche within the practice. Bifocal, multifocal, and astigmatism fittings that other offices consider difficult have become his specialty, to the point that sales representatives now send him their own hardest cases from around the state.

The process is built around trial and follow up rather than guesswork. You'll leave with a set of lenses to test in the real world, not just under office lighting, and you're asked to call back and report how they perform while driving at night or reading a label at the grocery store. If something needs adjusting, it gets adjusted, at no extra charge, until it feels right.

Quality Lenses and Honest Fittings at Apple Tree Optical

The optical side of the practice, still known to longtime patients as Apple Tree Optical, is built around the same philosophy: care over convenience. The team, especially longtime optician Dionne, is known for being direct. If a frame doesn't suit you, you'll hear about it, gently but firmly, rather than being sent home with something that doesn't work.

That honesty extends to the lenses themselves. Progressive and no line bifocal lenses vary enormously in quality, and the practice intentionally starts where big box retailers stop, because a poorly made lens creates distortion that patients often blame on themselves rather than the product. Patients who've sat through a precise, hands on fitting, watching an optician mark and remeasure a lens until it lines up exactly, tend to describe the same feeling afterward: confidence that the money was well spent and the fit is right.

A Second Generation Practice, Built on Trust and Familiar Faces

Perhaps the clearest sign of what this practice values is how many patients arrive in groups. Entire families, sometimes three or four at once, show up together because grandparents, parents, and children have all been seen here across decades. David knows their names, their histories, and often their extended families before they even sit down.

That continuity now stretches into a third generation. David's son has spent the summer working the front desk and prepping patients, the same way David once did, and the practice already has letterhead ready for the day Babington and Babington becomes an official partnership rather than a plan.

Life Outside the Exam Chair

Away from the practice, David channels the same discipline into martial arts and endurance sports. He holds black belts in jiu jitsu, taekwondo, and hapkido, and describes rolling on the mat as a way to stop thinking about the business for a while and just focus on the moment in front of him.

He's also an avid runner. He completed the Pikes Peak Ultramarathon, fifty kilometers up and down a mountain, in about ten hours, and he's already signed up for a fifty mile race in January. Some of that comes from his wife, a serious athlete in her own right who has a habit of signing him up for races before telling him about it, including Disney's Dopey Challenge, four straight days of racing that build from a 5K up to a full marathon. When a friend called about running a fifty miler just three weeks after that, David's response was simple: he'd just keep running.

At home, that same energy goes toward his two kids. He shows up to watch his son's cross country meets and mountain biking, and his other child's soccer games, more as a supporter than a competitor himself. He and his wife have also made a habit of buying their kids any book they want, no restrictions, a small rule that's helped turn both of them into readers.