Today’s post is a guest post from Tim Harwood. Tim Harwood is an Optometrist with over 8 years of practice. He has a particular interest in laser eye surgery and set up his website Treatment Saver in attempt to fully inform his patients about the procedure.

If you are considering having laser eye surgery then you may already have carried some research but do you really know everything there is to know about the procedure? Below is a list of 5 things that about laser eye surgery that may come a surprise to you:

1. The procedure only takes about 10 minutes: Although laser eye surgery can be a life changing procedure it typically only takes around 10 minutes to carry out. What may be more surprising is that the actual lasering of the eye only lasts for about one minute. This does vary depending on your prescription, with higher prescriptions requiring a longer laser application. The easy way to calculate this is to use the rule that the laser is applied for about ten seconds for every one Dioptre of prescription. Dioptres are what glasses and contact lens prescriptions are measured in. So for example if your prescription was -6.00 Dioptres then the laser is applied for 6 x 10 seconds which equates to one minute. Simple!

2. Laser eye surgery changes the shape of your eye: The reason you wear glasses or contact lenses is because your cornea is not the correct power that is needed for perfect vision. The cornea is the outer part of your eye and it is where the laser is applied. If you are long sighted the cornea is too weak and conversely, if you are short sighted your cornea is too strong. The laser reshapes your cornea to correct these discrepancies, making it flatter if you are short sighted and steeper if you are long sighted.

3. 20:20 vision is not guaranteed: If you believe the advertisements you see on the television, you are made to believe that achieving perfect vision from laser eye surgery is guaranteed. This unfortunately is not the case, as no surgeon would ever guarantee that they can give you 20:20 vision. Most clinics have about a 95% success rate of achieving perfect vision following surgery.

4. If you are over 45 years old you will still need reading glasses: If you are over 45 years old and need glasses for distance vision and reading vision, then generally speaking laser eye surgery will only correct your distance vision. So following laser eye surgery you are still likely to need glasses every time you need to read something. There are some options such as monovision laser eye surgery that can give you both distance and reading vision, but it is generally considered something of a compromise.

5. There is no upper age limit for laser eye surgery: People presume there is an upper age limit for laser eye surgery but theoretically there is no limit. Obviously it is unlikely that a 90 year old would have the surgery but it is not impossible. The main problem with having laser eye surgery as you get older is that you are likely to start developing cataracts. The average age people start developing cataracts is about 70 years and when this occurs they can alter the prescription in your glasses. So for example if you had laser eye surgery aged 70 years old and after surgery you had 20:20 vision. Then 2 years later you started getting cataracts which increased your glasses prescription again. This would mean that you no longer had zero prescription and may need to start wearing glasses again which would mean your laser eye surgery was a waste of money.

There are many more things about laser eye surgery you may not know about and this is the reason it is very important that you fully research the procedure before you decide to have it done. Choosing the right clinic and surgeon is the most important decision to make as you only have one pair of eyes.

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