Lasik Surgery Imagine Being Able

LASIK Surgery

Imagine being able to see your alarm clock clearly when you wake up in the morning. For patients with myopia, or nearsightedness, this idea is a dream, not the reality. To see the world around them they are dependent upon glasses or contacts -- sometimes multiple pairs if they struggle with seeing things close up as well as far away.

Or rather, this idea was a dream until the development of LASIK surgery, a revolution just as remarkable in the eyes of many as the development of bifocals. For some patients, the surgery has been described as life-changing because of the way it freed them from having to carry their contact lens cases on long business trips or worrying about contacts and glasses while playing sports. It even enabled some patients to join areas of military service from which they would otherwise be barred because of a lack of 20/20 vision. In contrast, others have described the surgery as life-changing in a negative fashion because they felt they were 'pushed' to get the surgery by ophthalmologists, and ill-informed of the risks, such as celebrity Kathy Griffith, an outspoken opponent of the surgery because of her postoperative complications (LASIK Commentary, 2011, Kathy Griffin).

Yet LASIK has certainly proved to be a life-changing surgery for some individuals who need 20/20 vision to perform their work, such as Air Force pilots. The U.S. Air Force felt confident enough to discontinue its policy prohibiting individuals who had undergone LASIK surgery from flight training and navigator training in 2011. "Under the old policy, a select-few pilots and navigators who had already graduated from flight training could apply to have the surgery and become part of an on-going study group" (Powers 2011). Eventually, this study found that good, successful surgical results were sound enough to allow patients to become pilots.

What is it?

LASIK is the acronym for "laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis" (Goldstein 2010). LASIK surgery is a type of surgery conducted on the human eye to correct deficiencies in vision. The human eye is not unlike a camera: "The cornea is a part of the eye that helps focus light to create an image on the retina" (LASIK, 2011, FDA). The cornea or lens is often imperfect in shape and contains refractive errors, causing vision problems such as "myopia, hyperopia and astigmatism" or combinations of these conditions (LASIK, 2011, FDA). Until the development of LASIK, glasses or contact lenses were the only ways to compensate for the eye's imperfections. But through LASIK surgery, the "precise and controlled removal of corneal tissue by a special laser reshapes the cornea, changing its focusing power" (LASIK, 2011, FDA).