No more bad vision, bionic optics will help humans see 3x better than 20/20 vision

As someone who has had LASIK and then needed an enhancement 1 year later as they didn't correct one of my eyes quite well enough, I wanted to chime in on this.

First, you may be correct in that it may or may not be possible to mitigate the effects of a LASIK surgery to try and make these lenses available to someone who has had LASIK. Since all types of laser eye correction are properly termed "ablation", they do what that term indicates. They are essentially lasing or burning away portions of your eye to correct "irregularities" or "aberrations" as they are often called. These aberrations are typically the cause of most folks' near/farsightedness or most kinds of astigmatism, so this causes an improvement in eyesight. Now, with the understanding that this means you are irrevocably burning away tissue off your eye(s), there is only so much that can be done to "correct" or "reverse" this. I know that laser-correction is in no way FULLY reversible, as that would infer replacing tissue that was burned away. And it may or may not be possible to re-use laser correction to put the eye in a state where this lens would be suitable.

Second, I wanted to also address the last few items that you mentioned.

While you are correct in that doctors will rarely, if ever, perform LASIK on a patient more than once, that's does not mean that laser-correction cannot be performed more than once. This is more a technical misunderstanding than anything. I will attempt to help clear that up here.

With STANDARD LASIK, they a special knife to create a small flap on the clear tissue of your eye, which they then fold over, out of the way for the laser correction to occur. This flap is then folded BACK over and given time to heal. This creates a flap that can generally be re-lifted within a few years if necessary for enhancements (or touch up laser corrections). After a few years, this may heal well enough that it cannot be re-lifted.

With CUSTOM WAVEFRONT-GUIDED LASIK,a computer-guided laser creates a tiny array of microscopic bubbles at a very shallow level just under the surface of your eye. This essentially creates a similar flap to STANDARD LASIK, which has the benefit of being much more precise and smooth, meaning the healing time is shorter. As with the STANDARD LASIK, they then fold the flap over and perform the laser correction. The upside of this is that the healing time is reduced due to the precision of the created flap. The downside is that there is zero option to re-lift the same flap for enhancements, as it heals SO well that it is often very quickly difficult to even spot the flap just a few months after the correction.

So how did I get an enhancement? Well, there's another type of laser eye correction called PRK! PRK... well, it's a tad more barbaric. :-P With PRK, rather than creating a flap at the front of your eye, they actually use a combination of a dissolving chemical liquid and what amounts to a tiny scrapey spatula-type tool to SCRAPE off the top layer of your eye. Now, they used anesthetic eye drops, so while it looked scary, aside from some pressure, I felt ZERO pain when they performed this. In any event, this type of surgery is typically only reserved for patients who have specific issues that make them bad candidates for LASIK, because the healing and vision improvement time is SIGNIFICANTLY longer than with LASIK. And I gotta tell you, days 2-5 post-op were BRUTALLY painful. It felt like I fell on the sidewalk, but instead of scraping my knee, I scraped my eye... That being said, it was mostly manageable with pain meds, and after day 5, things have been going great.

Anyway, I've been long-winded enough here. The point is that while you are technically correct in that doctors will rarely, if ever, perform LASIK more than once on a patient, that does not mean that they cannot get enhancement or "touch-up" laser eye corrections. It just has to be with PRK instead of LASIK! It's for this very reason that I actually had my procedure performed by a place that offers lifetime enhancements as necessary. :-)

Thanks for taking the time to read!

/r/worldnews Thread Parent Link - cbc.ca