LASIK Eye Surgery

LASIK eye surgery is intended to reduce a person’s dependency on glasses or contact lenses. The goal is to reduce your need for eye wear. LASIK stands for laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis and is a procedure that permanently changes the shape of the corney, the clear covering of the front of your eye. Doctors use an excimer laser to conduct this surgery. A knife, the microkeratome, is used in order to cut a slit in the cornea. A hinge is left at one end of this slit. The slit is folded back to reveal the stroma, which is the middle section of your cornea.

Your doctor will use a computer-controlled laser to place pulses that will vaporize a portion of your stroma. The slip in your cornea is then replaced back to its original position.

Colorado Lasik Eye Surgery

LASIK eye surgery uses the cornea as a part of the eye that helps focus light to create an image on the retina. Your cornea works very similarly as the lens of a camera focuses light to create an image on film. The bending and focusing of light is also known as refraction. Usually the shape of the cornea and the eye are not perfect and the image on the retina is out of focus. These imperfections in the focusing power of your eyes are called refractive errors.

There are three primary types of refractive errors that LASIK eye surgery can correct. They are myopia, hyperopia, and astigmatism. If you have myopia, you have nearsightedness, and you have more difficulty seeing objects that are in the distant as clearly as you see objects that are close by. If you have hyperopia, you have farsightedness, and you have more difficulty seeing objects close to you as clearly as you see distant objects. If you have astigmatism, you have a distortion of the image on the retina that’s caused by irregularities in your cornea or the lens of your eye.

Los Angeles Lasik Eye Surgery

The Food and Drug Administration regulates the sale of medical devices like lasers that are used for LASIK eye surgery. Before a medical device can be legally sold in the United States, the person or company that wants to sell the device must seek approval from the FDA. In order to gain approval, that company must present evidence that the device is reasonably safe and effective for a particular use. Once the FDA has approved a medical device, a doctor may decide to use that device for other indications if the doctor feels it is in the best interest of a patient.