Laser Eye Treatment

Laser vision surgery is also known as refractive correction surgery. As you know, the defect in the vision is because of the permanent change in the refractive index of your eye lens. The vision defects basically are of three types. Myopia or the near sightedness, hyperopia or the far sightedness and astigmatism are the major vision defects.

Before we look into what this surgery does to correct your vision, a brief understanding of each of them makes better sense.

Myopia is because of the increased or extra length of the eye ball. Here the eye focuses in front of the retina and as a result you will not be able to see distant objects clearly as you could do with the nearer objects. The most popular surgery for correcting this is LASIK or PRK. However these two procedures are not entirely different from each other in so far as how laser is employed in surgery but they differ in the methodology that is applied. In LASIK (laser assisted in situ keratomileusis) surgery a flap is cut on the cornea and hinged over to expose an area in the cornea for ablation. Laser rays in the precisely calculated intensity are impacted in pulses on the exposed area which vaporizes the corneal tissue to the desired extent. And then the flap is placed back. The device used for flap cutting is called microkeratome. PRK type of laser vision surgery is photorefractive keratectomy where the need for cutting a flap is absent.

Hyperopia affects about one fourths of the population and is because of the short length of eye ball or eye focusing behind the retina. This can also be because of a flattened cornea. The surgery is applied in a unique way in this case that a ring of dots is formed around cornea which stretches the surrounding area resulting the cornea to bulge out (this is similar to a bag having a string to close its mouth).

Astigmatism is where cornea's curvature is asymmetrical and as a result objects focus at two points on the retina. Both corneal and natural crystalline lens asymmetry can cause astigmatism. Lenticular (lens) astigmatism is taken care of by over correcting the cornea. Like if your lens has say -1.0 reading cornea needs to be corrected to +1.0 diopter.

If you are considering surgery ponder these points that concern you straight. First of all ask yourself if you need to really go for laser surgery for vision correction. Hearsays apart, the permanence of the surgery is not too high statistically. More over you can not rest assured that the condition will not regress or worsen by itself like it did before you underwent surgery. So does your age will have a definite act on your vision, like on the most of ours. Ask about the complications of both temporary and permanent natures associated with laser vision surgery. Some of the temporary complications associated with the surgery may take up to several months to resolve.