LASIK? Look for Intralase "no blade" flap, and a SURGEON run clinic.
I've had my own personal LASIK saga, and I've been doing lots of research.
If you're willing to spend the dough, look for a LASIK clinic that has an "Intralase" laser. It's an additional laser that cuts the LASIK corneal flap that re-covers the re-shaped part of your eye. This is instead of the surgeon doing it by hand with the radiokerotome (i.e. little buzzing razor blade like a block plane across the tip of your eyeball...) in traditional LASIK.
The Intralase cutting laser comes to a focus like buring ants with a magnifying glass & the sun. It only disrupts tissue right at the point of the focus, where it blasts the tissue into little microscopic bubbles of steam and carbon dioxide. The computer zaps these little microscopic bubbles and stacks them up like lego bricks until they all connect and make the loose flap. And it does it all in a matter of seconds with robotic accuracy. (If you move or blink, even though you're not supposed to, it can adjust or stop instantly too.) Then they put you under the regular LASIK laser that carves your perscription into your eye.
The Intralase cut flap is smaller than the traditional blade cut flap, and less corneal cells are damaged, which means you lose less cornea tissue to the flap. That also means your eye is left thicker so you can safely get more LASIK "touch ups" to your perscription if need be.
The sides of the Intralase laser-cut flap are also thick and vertical like a manhole cover, so it goes tightly back into place, and there's much less chance of you accidentialy blinking or rubbing it out of place while you heal. The cornea also heals faster with a much lower percentage rate of complications than the traditional blade cut flap.
The traditional radiokerotome blade cut flap is more like a dome-shaped slice across the edge of a melon, thinner at the edges which can get peeled up like an onion skin, or like a hangnail before it heals. Not to be alarmist, this dosen't happen often, or LASIK would be unsafe and unpopular, but the laser cut "manhole cover" corneal flap that Intralase provides is even safer.
The other benifit is that the Intralase cut flap is very precise and that improves your results from LASIK greatly. What they don't tell you is that at the blade-cut clinics you can lose a lot of the benifit of the super-custom laser cut perscription because of the microscopic imperfections in the blade and the human hand holding it. It's like polishing and focusing a camera lens to perfection, then covering it back up with crinkled plastic wrap.
There is only one Intralase clinic in Milwaukee, and I went there for a third opinion in utter confusion after two other LASIK clinics told me radicaly different things. The first one scheduled me for PRK, which is NOT LASIK,
without telling me. PRK is where the laser cuts on your eye directly to correct your vision, instead of under a smooth flap that acts like a band-aid in LASIK and makes that a better procedure. It's way more painful and takes days or weeks to recover from.
I told them where to go once I figured it out...
The second clinic put me in the eye scanner and then kicked me out, telling me I was too thin in the corneas.
The third and final clinic was the Intralase clinic. It's run by an eye surgeon who also practices corneal transplants, cataract surgery, eye repair operations, and the like at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and did so long before LASIK came on the scene. Thier techs ran many more tests than the other places bothered to, and my eyes are
fine.
They have no idea what the other LASIK clinics are smoking. They were even nice enough to run more tests to confirm my eyes are fine when I explained how concerned I was over incompatible things the other two clinics had told me. They took the time to show me my eye measurments and corneal depth, and compared it to the USDA LASIK guidelines and safety minimums, which I am well over.
The only downside is that Intralase is expensive as compared to regular LASIK. It's about $2500 per eye. Most LASIK chop-shops will do both your eyes for $2000 or less these days.
I am scheduled to get Intralase/LASIK done in December '06 and January '07 so I can have one eye done each calander year, and double-dip on my insurance and pre-tax Medical savings account.
I am
sick of my glasses, but this is worth doing right.
