Corrective Laser Introduction

Hi everyone, this article is the first in my journey to learn as much as I can about corrective laser eye treatment prior to me (hopefully) being able to get my eyes lasered at some point in the future. Now the understanding of all there is to know about corrective laser eye surgery is not my only problem at the moment – while I learn I will also be saving up because this is not a simple process and is not too cheap – several hundred or even thousand dollars / pounds.

Now as I say I currently know next to nothing about laser eye surgery. So this is the start of my journey, if you know something about it yourself, you are probably best going over to my site as this is simply an introduction. Hopefully as my learning progresses, so will the site!

So what have i found out so far? Well there seems to be a particular technique called PRK (Photorefractive keratectomy) that is doing the process manually to some extent with the surgeon using the laser. This seems to be the first version of the process. This was then improved with a process called LASIK which came out a few years ago and is a much more automated process, although PRK does not use a knife!

Basically the shape of the eyeball (or cornea) is altered to change the focal length. Bits of it are burnt away by a cool laser.

There is another more advanced process called wavefront (or custom LASIK) which maps the contours of the eye a lot more fully to give you a much more rounded and focussed vision throughout the eye and particularly benefits those people with large pupils and very poor night time vision (even better than eating carrots!).

I myself have astigmatism which is going to have an effect on the type of surgery I can have, but hopefully the results will be a lot more spectacular for me – many of these techniques actually give you great eyesight as soon as the process is completed although there is some post operative time when you have extra sensitivity. The only other symptoms of note for most people after the operation are things like dry eyes and blurry vision – but these are rare (along with some other visual aberrations) and on the whole will correct themselves over time.

There is another process called LASEK, again this is an area I need to learn a lot more about in order that I understand it (I’m not even sure at the moment whether it is a mis spelling of the first one!). LASEK is much closer in process to PRK than LASIK is, the main difference being that the PRK procedure removes the top layer (epithelium) whereas in the LASEK process, the epithelium is lifted and replaced after the laser has done its job.

The benefits of laser eye surgery is that it gives a lot of people 20/20 vision or better. Now I’ve never really looked into what that actually means – 20:20 vision, so this is something else I am going to have to understand – there is also the possibility of getting better than 20 20 vision – I know that sounds weird to me too. A simple definition of 20/20 vision is that at 20 feet from away, a typical human eye can differentiate lines that have a spacing of 1.75mm. 20/40 vision is half as good whilst 20/10 vision is twice as good – although that is a bit of a rough description!

So why don’t you join me on my little adventure of trying to find out more about this crazy process of getting corrective laser eye surgery in an attempt to stop wearing glasses and contacts and be able to go outside in the cold and rain without steaming up or needing wind screen wipers for my glasses!