How to Assess Whether or Not You are Fit for an Eye Surgery

When it comes to refractive eye surgery, the doubt over the fitness or the success of surgery will reverberate in everybody’s mind.

The real concern will be about the quality of sight that they might have after the surgery and to know this, there is no ready made formula that can be applied to assess the situation in advance.

Although there may be general guidelines that can help eye doctors in deciding the efficacy of refractive surgery, the exact benefit can be decided only on a one to one review of patient’s condition.

That is the reason why you have been asked to visit an eye surgeon for getting an individualized assessment and advice. A quality eye surgeon will ascertain on an individual patient’s case duly taking into account the benefit-to-risk ratio of that particular patient and when it comes to selecting the elective eye surgery, a conservative approach alone can be beneficial.

Deciding on the right candidate for performing refractive surgery is an art and various doctors use various techniques to decide on the suitability of the candidate.

There is no one single test that can be performed on the prospective patient to decide on the success rate that can match with the expectations of the patient.

The laser surgery is in fact a science and in case of excimer laser surgery the doctor, based on his calculated assumptions, will feed the necessary instruction sets or data into the computer that controls the laser and the software will take over to provide the required laser pulses for surgery based on the data fed into it.

But how the doctor decides on the data that are to be fed into the computer greatly depends on his personal experiences and his analytical abilities to assess your age, your response capabilities, your expectation levels, your body’s healing capabilities, and your doctor will decide on the instruction sets after a discussion with you to know your preparedness and other vital factors.

Performing laser surgery is very unique and no two laser surgeries are similar in nature and that makes the doctor performing the surgery to gain a valuable experience out of each and every surgery made by him.

At the first instance your doctor will ascertain from you whether you are comfortable with the quality of eyesight with your contact lenses and in case of an affirmative response from you the doctor may prescribe for laser surgery.

In case your contact lenses are not able to correct fully your nearsightedness, then your doctor may have reservations and might not prescribe your case for laser surgical correction.

In other words, by aiming to correct at slightly under 20/20 in the distance, the overcorrection or the farsighted risks can be diminished.

Your doctor will get to know from you about you expectations, your nature of job, your hobbies, etc., and will arrive at the exact and precise data that has to be fed into the computer for carrying out the surgery.

Your doctor will also asses your healing response and other related points and weigh all the possible options before carrying out the surgery. All these efforts put forth by the doctors make the vision correction surgery as an art.

In fact the success of eye surgeons depends on their ability to deliver what you aspire for and almost all doctors expect an increased motivation levels amongst their patients in the area of improving their vision.

Ophthalmologists normally will not perform laser surgeries on patients who doubt the efficacy of the procedure and the eye surgeons normally restrict surgeries only with the people who actually look forward for an improved vision through surgery.

Many years of such experiences has in fact given many of the practicing ophthalmologists the extra sense (can it be rightly said as sixth sense?) to read the minds of the prospective patients who will be happy with results of surgery.

Further, whatever may be the number of surgeries performed by ophthalmologists, they still have many more things to learn in each and every surgery they perform and as such the invaluable experience attained can help doctors in determining the patients who are to be avoided as far as elective surgery is concerned.

First your candidature suitability for performing the elective surgery will be assessed based on your degree of refractive error, which is a fundamental determining key in laser surgery.

Your corrected and uncorrected visual acuity will be first measured by the physician based on your nearsighted condition or your ability to read the 20/30 line on the eye chart, or the difficulty to read the big E from a 20/400 chart, etc.

In general laser correction will become more feasible whenever the scale of correction is on the higher side.

Unlike the older non-laser type surgery, popularly known as radial keratotomy, LASIK surgery is capable of correcting a wide range of refractive errors, including farsightedness.

Though persons having a problem of nearsightedness can be operated upon using laser surgery, the refraction should be in the range between -1 and -12 diopters and it is also possible in select cases to correct the problem of refractive error up to -14 diopters.

Majority of the people who suffer from myopia can get benefits from such LASIK surgery, but such patients may still have to depend on glasses for their distance sight correction.

This particular problem in LASIK surgery is due to the unavoidable residual error. Hence, in case your refractive error is more than -14 diopters.

Then there is no technology as of now for any surgical correction and you have to depend on glasses till any advanced method is invented for correcting such type of high refractive errors.

Though you may undergo LASIK surgery for correcting refractive error of above –14 diopters, still you may need to wear glasses and it is up to you to make a decision in this regard.

Before the advent of LASIK surgery procedure, doctors have had reservations in performing vision corrective surgeries on extremely near sighted persons, as the success rate was not more than 50 percent.

Despite the lesser success rate, many people opted to get operated on for the reason that they could wear glasses that are lesser in thickness after surgery.

But few other people viewed the same situation differently and never opted for surgery as the same cannot make them to discard their glasses totally and they prefer wearing glasses, be it thick or thin. Such people consider the option of resorting to wearing glasses as a wise one in the place of surgery.

Therefore, in any Laser assisted eye surgery, the patient’s mindset matters the most and as a prospective candidate for LASIK surgery, you must first have a sufficient knowledge about the efficacy of the surgery and have a very reasonable expectation

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