Since its approval in the United States more than 15 years ago Lasik has become one of the most popular elective procedures performed in this country with more than 700,000 procedures performed electively in this country alone. This is not surprising as it is also the safest elective procedure with an extremely high satisfaction rate. Other apparent reasons for its popularity are the desire of people to see clearly without the need of relying on glasses or contact lenses.
Despite Lasik’s safety and high success rate, the experienced Lasik surgeons at North Shore Eye Care cannot emphasize the importance of going to a highly trained surgeon. There are many nuances associated with this operation that can affect the excellent outcome that you expect. This all starts with the diagnostic evaluation of your eyes.
Your overall health, including the health of your eyes are important considerations as well as possible medications that you may be using. Depending on the health, shape, and thickness of your corneas, the main lens of your eye that is reshaped when performing Lasik, we can tell you if you are a good candidate for this procedure. If not you may still be able to have laser vision correction attaining the same excellent result with a PRK procedure.
Lasik involves reshaping your cornea under a thin corneal flap. The purpose of the flap is to leave the surface of your cornea undisturbed enabling you to see normally in good comfort the very next day. To increase safety we use the Intralase, an extremely accurate and fast femptosecond laser that can create a flap in a matter of seconds. The second big step in performing laser vision correction involves the use of the Visx Star 4IR variable spot laser that reshapes your cornea using wave front technology borrowed from NASA.
As mentioned above if you are not a good Lasik candidate you may still qualify for PRK using the wave front technology performed with the same Star 4IR laser. With this technique no corneal flap is created. In order to reshape the cornea with PRK, which stands for photorefractive keratectomy, the epithelial cells on the surface of the cornea must first be removed which results in a slower recovery period than Lasik, but with the same good visual result.
For those interested in learning more about Lasik the surgeons at North Shore Eye Care offer free daily evaluations as well as monthly seminars. Come see our new state of the art Lasik facility at our Smithtown location in Suffolk County.
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