Traditional Lasik or Custom Lasik?

LASIK surgery has gone through enormous improvements since it was first approved by the FDA in 1995. The biggest improvement was the application of wavefront technology. The preferred treatment is now Custom LASIK which uses wavefront technology to diagnose your two eyes. There are four companies that make laser systems to deliver Custom LASIK, and all are excellent.

Traditional LASIK diagnosis

In the early years of LASIK, diagnosis was done the same way it is done for your glasses prescription. You sat looking with one eye into an aperture while the eye doctor or his assistant flipped from lens to lens asking you to read the smallest line of letters you could see clearly. That floor-standing device bristling with lenses is a phoropter and is still used every day for prescribing contacts and glasses.

The early LASIK vision correction was based on the data gathered in this phoropter diagnosis. That meant that your LASIK treatment was by no means unique. A million other people had the same prescription as you did and received the same laser vision correction.

Custom LASIK diagnosis

No phoropter is used for Custom LASIK diagnosis. Instead, you sit at a wavefront machine such as the AMO / VISX WaveFront™ System. A light is shone into your eye and when it reflects back into the system it is recorded and measured. It is not the straight-beam light that went into your eye – it is now a wavy light modified by the microscopic contours of your eye.

Your eye information is expressed by the system’s computer as a 3-D colored map of your eye. It tells your LASIK surgeon what shape and pattern your two corneas have and that tells him how it needs to be changed for clearer vision.

Higher Order Aberrations

Traditional LASIK treats the three conditions of nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatism, putting that correction right into the eye’s cornea instead of into a pair of glasses.

· To correct nearsightedness the LASIK laser will flatten the cornea slightly

· To correct farsightedness the laser will steepen the cornea a little

· To correct astigmatism the laser will create a rounder shape instead of the more oval shape of an astigmatic cornea

Custom LASIK does that and more besides. It also corrects more subtle irregularities of the cornea known as the higher order aberrations. This is why Custom LASIK is about 25 times more precise than Traditional LASIK. Higher order aberrations are things like:

· Glare in low light conditions

· Halos around light sources

· Starburst (light scattering out from its source)

· Ghosting (faint second images creating double vision)

By correcting the minute corneal irregularities that cause these vision defects, Custom LASIK gives you improved quality of vision as well as more vision quantity. In other words, you will not only see clearly at more distances (quantity), but will see everything more clearly than you would have after a Traditional LASIK surgery (quality).

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Help answer the question about clearly lasik

What is the first thing you would want to see or do after having LASIK?
When satisfied patients realize they can see clearly without contacts or glasses, they have a “WOW” moment – something they can now see or do with their newly enhanced vision. What would be your WOW moment?

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Jennifer Kimberley -
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If you are considering LASIK as a solution to your vision problems, contact Northwestern Vision Correction Associates today to set up an appointment.