Lasik Surgery After 40 - What Your Surgeon May Not Be Telling You

Lasik Surgery After 40 - What Your Surgeon May Not Be Telling You

Does the prospect of lasik or another vision correction surgery have you excited to ditch your contacts or glasses? Lasik surgery is definitely a life changing surgery, but if you are over 40, it may not change your vision in a favorable manner.

Lasik surgery alters the shape of the cornea in an effort to bend light in a different manner. The cornea is the clear outermost portion of the eye and is responsible for a majority of visual refraction. Most nearsighted, farsighted, and astigmatism corrections are caused by a combination of the corneal shape and overall length of the eyeball.

So to correct basic vision, altering the shape of the cornea with consideration of overall eye length will work wonders. This is why lasik, PRK, and other vision corrective surgeries work and why they focus on the cornea itself.

Thousands of people who once wore glasses for myopia, hyperopia, and some forms of astigmatism are now free from the hassle of glasses or contacts thanks to Lasik.

So who should not have lasik? Is there something some surgeons are not telling patients?

As we approach the age of forty, another visual challenge arises. Presbyopia is characterized by an inability to focus on objects up close and it strikes everybody at some point in life. Presbyopia is caused by natural changes inside the eye to the crystalline lens and surrounding muscle tissue.

Unfortunately, so many people who have presbyopia are led to believe the vision corrective surgery will cure this inconvenience. The reality is that presbyopia has absolutely nothing to with either the cornea or eye length. Therefore, reshaping the cornea in the manner that Lasik surgery does will not help an eye to regain its adaptive focus.

Adjusting the cornea will still only create a static change in vision while presbyopia requires a dynamic function to be fully corrected.

As of this writing, there are a couple of experimental surgeries being performed to correct for presbyopia, but they are not yet main-stream. Some people opt to have one eye corrected for a close range reading distance, and the other corrected for actual far distance. This method is called monovision.

The safest and most trusted way to correct presbyopia is still with a good old fashioned pair of eyeglasses. Whether progressive, bifocals, or reading glasses; spectacle lenses are the only guaranteed way to correct presbyopia.

If you are over the age of forty and still considering Lasik, ask your eye care provider to correct your distance vision with contact lenses or glasses first, and then look at a book or magazine. You will notice that it is difficult to read the magazine and you must hold it further away in order to see clearly.

This simple task really seams to put post surgery vision in perspective. For those that have been mildly nearsighted their entire life and decide to have lasik in their forties, you are trading in one pair of glasses for another.

Ask your surgeon about presbyopia and what you can expect after lasik surgery. Many people still decide to go ahead with the procedure, we simply want you to be informed.

By Sam Opal

Lasik Surgery After 40 - What Your Surgeon May Not Be Telling You