Word: eyeful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Just ask Steven Assennata of East Brunswick, N.J. "If I had understood there was a chance I would be worse off, I might have changed my mind," he says. LASIK corrected his eyesight to 20/20 all right, at least in one eye, but left him seeing double and ruined his night vision so that he can no longer drive after dark. The worst part, he says, is knowing he didn't need the surgery. Although his contacts were becoming a nuisance before the operation, he could have seen fine through admittedly thick glasses. Assennata's doctor says he was made...
LASIK is, after all, a young technology. Nearly all the excimer lasers used so far were actually approved by the Food and Drug Administration for a different type of eye surgery. (Doctors are allowed to adapt certain existing technologies to new uses.) The first excimer laser specifically designed for LASIK wasn't approved by the FDA until July 1998. Two more types of excimers are expected to pass muster by the end of this year...
...past two years there have been some dramatic improvements in LASIK technology. And that, no doubt, helps explain why so many eye surgeons have chosen to undergo the procedure themselves. But is LASIK right for you? To answer that, it pays to know a little physiology...
...eyes are surrounded by a tough, protective layer called the sclera. Only at the front of the eyeball does the sclera give way to the cornea, which is transparent. Light passes through the cornea to the pupil, the hole in the middle of the iris, or colored part of your eye. Depending on how bright the incoming light is, the pupil grows wider or narrower, much like the adjustable aperture of a camera. The light then passes through the lens, which lies directly behind the iris and changes shape as needed--curving or flattening--to help focus the image onto...
...happens, the eye's lens provides just a third of the eye's focusing power. The rest comes from the cornea, which acts like a second lens to help focus light onto the retina. If you're nearsighted, or myopic, your eye produces clear images of nearby objects or people. But light from distant sources is focused on a point somewhere in front of your retina--either because the curve of your cornea is too steep relative to the length of your eyeball, or the eyeball is too long relative to the corneal curve. If you're farsighted, or hyperopic...