New surgery treatment for very near sighted patients as seen on Fox26NewsBoston?!
Question:
New surgery treatment for very near sighted patients as seen on Fox26NewsBoston?
Hello,
I need information for a friend who is looking into this. There was a health news story on Fox25Boston. Please check out http://www.myfoxboston.com/myfox/pages/n...
Should he look into it? What is it? Thanks in advance.
4 weeks ago
Sorry I meant Fox 25 News Boston. And does run of the mill health insurance cover anything like this?
4 weeks ago
No, I just checked yahoo answers and I did not find this thread you speak of. Please, someone answer.
Answers:
Implantable contact lenses are an effective option for near sighted correction. Lasik (laser vision correction) has been available as you probably know for some time now for the correction of near sightedness. Although it has proven to be a highly succesfull procedure with huge numbers of success stories it does have some drawbacks that are avoided by ICL surgery. First, the higher the nearsighted power being corrected by laser the more cornea the laser removes thereby thinning the cornea. For patients with thin corneas to start with there may not be enough cornea to perform the laser surgery or you risk complications from too thin a post op cornea. Also, the higher the starting prescription the greater the chance of having haloing and starbursting of lights when driving at night. Another common post op symptom of Lasik is dryness. This post op dryness most times resolves in a few months but some patients do develop chronic dry eye.
Because ICL surgery does not affect or change in any way the structures of the cornea, these post op problems are avoided. Then why doesn't everyone just do ICL surgery? The surgery itself requires entering into the inner compartments of the eye and placing a foreign object within. This in itself is a more invasive procedure. So in my opinion at this point in time Lasik is probably the best option for most with mild to moderate amounts of nearsightedness. I tend to begin recommending ICL surgery when I have a patient with 1) thin corneas 2) higher pre op prescription 3) some degree of pre op dry eye.