If you're tired of wearing glasses or contact lenses, you may be among the millions of people considering a new and increasingly popular alternative: refractive surgery to correct the curvature of your cornea. The surgery can correct farsightedness, nearsightedness and astigmatism, though it can't help you with presbyopia - the waning of your reading vision that usually starts when you reach your 40s.
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| Information On Lasik Eye Surgery |
In recent years the number of these surgeries has increased annually, from about 400,000 in 1998 to 800,000 in 1999 to about 1,000,000 in 2000. This burst of popularity is due partly to intensive marketing and partly to the surgery's effectiveness - it really does allow many people to get rid of their glasses or contacts. Surgery might be especially attractive if you work in a dusty job and wear contacts, or if you go in and out of doors a lot in cold weather and have to deal with foggy glasses. When swimming or water-skiing, glasses can be impractical or impossible to wear.
Yet this type of surgery has risks. If you're content with your glasses or contacts, you may decide you're better off not taking these risks.
LASIK surgery. About 9 out of 10 people who have refractive surgery will undergo a proven procedure called LASIK, short for laser-assisted in-situ keratomileusis (ker-uh-toe-mi-LOO-sis). This procedure is currently the gold standard for the surgical correction of nearsightedness. The entire surgery takes only 10 to 20 minutes, and the laser beam is generally used less than 1 minute.
Numbing drops are put in your eye. Then the surgeon uses a delicate cutting instrument called a microkeratome to cut a circular flap of tissue from the center of your cornea. This flap, still hinged to your cornea, is about the size and shape of a contact lens. The surgeon folds this flap out of the way and uses a special laser to reshape the layers of your cornea underneath the flap - removing one microscopic layer at a time. A computer, reading a topographical map of your cornea, directs the laser beam to remove tissue where needed.
The laser is known as an excimer laser, or cool laser, because it vaporizes tissue without causing heat damage. Rather it breaks down the molecular bonds. The light beam of energy is absorbed into the tissue being vaporized without harming the nearby lens, iris, retina or other structures of your eye.
If you're nearsighted the laser will trim away layers from the center of your cornea to flatten its dome shape. If you're farsighted the laser will trim away a doughnut-shaped ring to produce a steeper curve. And if you have astigmatism, the laser will smooth out the distortion in your cornea's curvature.
After this brief sculpting, the surgeon returns the corneal flap to its position over the treated area and places a clear shield over your cornea. You wear this shield overnight. The flap quickly reattaches itself to your cornea without stitches.
Photorefractive keratectomy. Another surgery used with equal success is photorefractive keratectomy (PRK). Instead of sculpting the inner layers of your cornea, the surgeon uses the excimer laser to reshape the outer corneal surface. After removing the thin, protective epithelial layer of the cornea, the surgeon flattens or steepens the corneal curvature. The epithelial layer grows back but conforms to the new shape of the cornea.
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| Information On Lasik Eye Surgery |
With either procedure you can expect to be in the doctor's office about 1 to 2 hours. Follow-up appointments are routinely at 1 day, 1 week, 1 month and 1 year. To find out more, you can check out Information On Lasik Eye Surgery.