When it comes to your eye and the health of your vision, modern medicine has developed ways to treat just about any eye condition or issue possible- from glaucoma to astigmatism, there is a good chance that either a medicine or surgery has been developed to resolve those problems.
In the past, when people had a vision issue- such as myopia (nearsightedness), hyperopia (farsightedness), or astigmatism (blurry vision)- the only way they could resolve that issue was to either wear glasses or contacts. While glasses and contacts, of course, are able to superficially correct people’s vision, they tend to be quite cumbersome and annoying. For example, on cold, rainy days, glasses tend to fog up, requiring the user to constantly wipe the fog off their lenses. And people who wear contacts know how irritating it is on dry days; always having to use eye drops or re-moisten their contacts on hot, dry days.
Thankfully, LASIK (laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis), a refractive eye surgery, has been developed, with more and more people choosing to permanently correct their vision with Los Angeles LASIK Surgery with each coming year. The main reason why LASIK is so effective is that it physically manipulates the cornea (the outermost layer of the eye) in such a way that light enters the eye in a more optimal manner, giving the patient perfect vision.However, until recently, there have been warning flags raised about the effectiveness of LASIK before and after cataract surgery.
Cataracts describe the clouding of the lens of the eye, which can develop to various degrees, but will progressively get worse over time. In its early stages, cataracts will begin to give the patient blurrier and blurrier vision, eventually causing complete vision loss if the cataracts are allowed to develop to that stage.
Although non-surgical treatments for cataracts are available, most commonly eye drops, cataract surgery will be needed if the patient’s cataracts do not respond to non-surgical avenues of treatment. Cataract surgery typically involves the removal of the cloudy lens or lenses (if both eyes have cataracts) and the placement of replacement lens or lenses where the natural lens or lenses once were.
It has been put forth that having cataract surgery before or after LASIK will render both surgeries ineffective. While this may have been true in the past, there have been modern developments in procedural techniques that allow cataract surgeons to resolve cataracts before or after LASIK treatments without lowering the effectiveness of either surgery.
If glaucoma surgery is performed prior to a LASIK treatment, the eye surgeon will simply go about performing a normal LASIK treatment- he will evaluate the patient’s vision beforehand and determine the level of manipulation he or she will need to perform to give the patient perfect vision. However, when glaucoma surgery is performed after LASIK treatment, it gets a little bit trickier: the Santa Monica Glaucoma Surgeon will have to manipulate the replacement lens in such a way that the effects of the LASIK procedure are accounted for.
For more information regarding LASIK Surgery, visit: http://www.cornell-eye.com/html/faq.html