Lasik Surgery

LASIK is the acronym for Laser-Assisted in Situ Keratomileusis, a type of Refractive Laser Eye Surgery for correcting refractive errors like Myopia, Hyperopia, and Astigmatism. Millions of patients today choose LASIK as an alternative to wearing corrective eyeglasses or contact lenses.

Lasik Surgery is the latest high technology Eye Care Treatment in India. It is becoming very popular as in the USA and Europe during the last few years.

The Excimer Laser is a phenomenally accurate cutting tool with sub micron precision. It accurately reshapes the corneal structure thus changing its focusing power and eliminating the refractive error of the eye.

Preoperative Checkup:
Individual Planning for Customised Treatment
Your eye doctor will first check various parameters of your eye like

These tests will help to ensure that you are a suitable candidate for LASIK. You should discontinue contact lens wear prior to evaluation & surgery.

Soft Contact Lenses – 7 days
Toric Soft Lenses – 15 days
Rigid (hard) or gas permeable (RGP) lenses – 15 days

Local anesthetic eye drops are instilled in the eye making the surgery absolutely painless. No injections or sedation is given. A corneal flap is created using a microkeratome with a hinge left at one end of this flap. The flap is folded back & the excimer laser (193 nm) is used to remodel the corneal stroma. Finally, the flap is repositioned, where it sticks back in place on the reshaped cornea.

The entire process takes less than ten minutes in which the laser treatment itself takes only a few seconds. The treatment is not painful. Both eyes are usually treated together. There may be a little irritation for a few hours after the operation.

With custom LASIK, your eye’s ability to focus light rays is measured, and a 3-D map in wavefront technology is created that demonstrates irregularities in the way your eye processes images.
Information contained in the map guides the laser in customizing the treatment to reshape your eye’s corneal surface so that these irregularities can be corrected.

Wavefront technology is groundbreaking because it has the potential to improve not only how much you can see, visual acuity measured by the standard 20/20 eye chart, but also how well you can see, in terms of contrast sensitivity and fine detail. This translates into a reduced glare, halos and difficulty with night vision.

Myopic (nearsighted) people who are close to the age mid- to lateforties will require either reading glasses or bifocal eyeglasses. This need for reading glasses may be minimized by performing a variation of the LASIK procedure called “slight monovision”.

In this procedure, the dominant eye is set for distance vision, while the non-dominant eye is set to the prescription of the patient’s reading glasses.

LASIK is a surgical procedure intended to reduce a person’s dependence on glasses or contact lenses and not, as is usually thought, designed to totally eliminate the spectacle power.

The amount of the post LASIK residual power is based on many factors like pre-operative very high myopia or high astigmatism or corneas which are not perfectly symmetrical. The power will reduce to the level where you may not need to use glasses for over 90% of the time.

Hence, it is advisable to have realistic expectations from the surgery.

The procedures include photorerfractive keratectomy(PRK) & LASIK. In both these procedures, one expects a slower recovery, & more pain than in LASIK. Refractive lens exchange & phakic Intraocular lenses are also other options in certain cases. In a nutshell, LASIK can treat a majority of the stages of myopia, hyperopia, and astigmatism.

Therefore, you should first weigh the pros and cons of LASIK surgery and consult your doctor about the LASIK treatment. Your doctor could best help you make the right decision.