Lasik eye surgery

Hi again,

Today I am going to talk about lasik eye surgery and see if i can simplify it a bit, so it is easy to understand. If you are going to have laser eye surgery then the chances are you will have to choose between either lasik or lasek. Lasik is by far the most common procedure as the recovery time is a lot quicker and for most people there is very little discomfort experienced at all.

The part of your eye that needs to be lasered is the inner layers of your cornea. Your cornea sits over the coloured part of your eye (iris) and is the outer most point of your eye. During lasik, the surgeon has to create a flap, which is basically an incredibly thin layer of your cornea (less than a mm thick) so he/she can access the inner cornea. Once this flap is created and moved to the side the surgeon can apply the laser. The laser is simply re-shaping your cornea to change the power of it, so that it eliminates the prescription in your glasses/contact lenses. You can think of it as lasering the power of your glasses on to your eye if that makes more sense.

Once the laser is complete - normally less than 1 minute - the surgeon replaces the thin layer of cornea (flap) back to where is was originally and your eye heals naturally. The flap is created either using a surgical blade (standard lasik) or using a laser ( intralase lasik).

I will discuss Intralase in a later post - hope this has helped explain lasik,

Thanks for reading