To know how important eyes are for us, try to imagine being literally blind to everything around us as we lose our familiar touch with the world. A dark and unfamiliar world. This little demonstration should tell us the enormous difference good vision makes to our everyday life. Yet we have our sight problems, myopia, color blindness, blurring and eyestrain.
Now imagine a world where we can have perfect 20/20 vision, and everything around us looks exactly like it is. No astigmatism, no long short, no long sight. No ugly squinting, no peering closely at the fine print.
We look for new medical procedures to correct the vision imperfections: myopia or blurred vision, hyperopia and astigmatism. Combinations of hyoperopia and astigmatism are common. And the solution for all of these imperfections is glasses or contact lenses.
For many years glasses were prescribed to improve vision but they were messy and only increased the sight of the wearer. Contact lenses rode the wave of popularity and are still popular with people who wish to hide their vision defects without using glasses. Contact lenses now come in soft, rigid gas permeable and rigid contact lenses types.
Over the last few decades, LASIK is now the main surgery for American doctors treating myopia. Very recently, some laser manufacturers received FDA approval for laser systems for LASIK to treat myopia, hyperopia and astigmatism and for PRK to treat hyperopia and astigmatism.
Yes, lasik eye surgery involves manipulating the laser like a knife. Vision correction using laser eye surgery is a highly precise procedure involving the reshaping the cornea by working on the stroma, which is the middle layer of the cornea. A flap is cut in the exposed stroma and folded back. The procedure is called Photorefractive Keratectomy (PRK) is used mainly in Lasik eye surgery.
In lasik plus, the new lasers give excellent results to the patient. The patient is able to see without glasses in just a few days after surgery. What used to take hours using total anesthetic now takes less than a minute, thanks to the precision of the lasik eye laser.
