LASIK is a powerful surgery that can free you from glasses and contacts forever. Millions of people around the world think that’s pretty life changing!
LASIK has a 96% success rate with patients, which is unheard of. That means if you go through with LASIK, odds are you will be living free from glasses for a long time. Keep reading to learn why LASIK will change your life for the better!
What Does LASIK Do To Your Eyes?
Understanding how we see is important before you can understand how LASIK works. First, light hits an object.
The light then bounces off of the object into our eyes. It first passes through our corneas, which focuses much of the light. Then it goes through our pupils and into our lenses.
The lenses stretch and adjust themselves to focus the light further. This then allows the light to go all the way to the back of the eyes.
It then becomes a perfectly focused point on our retina. The retina senses the light and our brain interprets the data into an image.
That is how vision works in a “normal” eye. Sometimes our eyes are not round. A shorter eye will have a flatter cornea and result in farsightedness.
This is because the light focuses after it hits the retina. Nearsightedness occurs when the eyeball is too long and the cornea is more pointed.
Astigmatism occurs when light focuses onto many points instead of one. With astigmatism, you can also be nearsighted or farsighted.
LASIK aims to fix refractive errors by reshaping the cornea. Surgeons use wavefront technology, which guides lasers to reshape and fix the cornea. This eliminates almost any chance of human error.
The cornea has many layers. During LASIK, the first layer of the cornea gets opened up with a femtosecond laser. The tissue remains connected so that it forms a sort of “flap”.
Then, using an excimer laser, corneal tissue is then removed from the thick middle layer of the cornea. The flap is placed back down and recovery begins.
The entire surgery usually takes less than 15 minutes per eye. You’ll never feel pain thanks to numbing drops administered before the procedure!
Is LASIK The Only Choice?
Sometimes LASIK isn’t right for a patient. That doesn’t mean that they are out of luck, though. There are other surgical options available for those who can’t get LASIK.
PRK, for example, is a procedure like LASIK but better for patients with thin corneas. If your corneas are too thin, undergoing LASIK and removing tissue becomes dangerous.
With PRK, there’s no flap creation, which makes it safer for those with thin corneas. Instead, a part of the top layer of cornea is entirely removed. The tissue grows back over time, though it somewhat extends the length of recovery.
Ready to find out if LASIK could change your life? Schedule a LASIK consultation at Ellis Eye in San Jose, CA today! Don’t waste another minute with glasses or contacts!
