Lasik Surgery And Myths Related To It

Hi,

I am Dr. Anurag Agarwal, Ophthalmologist. I am practicing from the past 18 years. Today I will talk about LASIK surgery and some misconceptions related to it. As you all know that LASIK surgery is also known as refractive surgery and done to remove spectacles. There are a lot of misconceptions associated with this. Every time a patient comes to me, the patient is full of fear. The part of it is related to history like prior to LASIK surgery, there were some other surgeries which are known as RK, PRK which were not so safe and created fear in the patient's mind. Even with this patient lost his eye. So, this is the reason that the patient is so scared. But LASIK surgery is 100% safe and done with the necessary tests. So, any patient who comes to us for refractive surgery, we do a complete workup for the patient.

The first part is we access the patient's eye. We do various tests like topography which is a mapping of the cornea. We do a complete refractive workup. We analyze the patient whether he is a fit person for it or not. Once we see that patient is completely fit for the LASIK surgery then only we ask him to go for the surgery. In this, one out of 20 people will automatically get rejected because we have strict parameters. This is the first thing that we can reassure the patient. The 2nd thing patient asks whether is it going to be successful in the long term also and will the number completely go away? Right I said if we have selected ur patient correctly, we know that we can deliver a 100% result and then only we can assure that the number will completely go away.

This is the short term aspect of that. Even in the cases where the patient becomes perfectly zero, we can have a small part of the number returning back to the eye. That is a rare thing and it is known as regression. The patient can be again taken for the surgery and corrected at that time. Usually, we do that as a complementary procedure for the patient. The patient does not have to bare any charges for that. So, the LASIK surgery is completely safe and there should be no misconception associated with it.

Thank You.