Lasik Eye Surgery Cost

Lasik Eye Surgery Cost Guide

Lasik Eye Surgery Cost | Lasik Eye Surgery Cost Information

Lasik Eye Surgery Options

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Let’s face it, options rule the roost.  That is, the more advanced options you want with your lasik surgery the more it’s going to cost.  Options mean equipment and experience, and that is a direct translation to increased cost.  Let’s take a look at a few options and whether or not they’re worth paying extra money for.

Some offices will offer the entire spa package.  You’ll get a morning of rubdowns, facials, oils, colorings, and whatever else your heart desires.  Once you’re all relaxed and calm you’ll be taken to the surgeon’s office where they’ll perform the procedure.  Once that’s complete you’ll likely have a car take you to a fancy, upscale hotel where you’ll have a room until the next day when you can drive yourself home.

Nice?  Yes.  Especially if you don’t have anyone to drive you around after the surgery.  Needless to say, you won’t be able to drive yourself for a while so being taken to a hotel room is worth something.  However, all this “stuff” that you can arrange yourself.  You don’t need to make a decision for a LASIK provider based on it, and frankly I think it would be foolish to do so.

IntraLase is an option that you might want to give serious thought to, and at least have a heart to heart with your provider before you write it off.  Intralase is a method of corneal flap creation that uses a very accurate, high powered laser instead of the traditional microkeratome.  Intralase offers several advantages over microkeratomes, to include accuracy and post-LASIK vision in low light situations.  That alone certainly makes it worth at least a little research.

To be a little more specific, intralase uses a laser to focus light under the surface of your cornea and create a microscopic “bubble” of space.  You can imagine that if a large number of these spaces were created next to each other you could create the corneal flap necessary for LASIK, and that’s exactly what happens.  It’s very accurate, and much cleaner than that microkeratome method.

Finally, experience is one thing that is definately worth paying more for, but the question is how much?  My opinion is that you have to evaluate the price and experience differences of the lasik surgeons in your area against one another and make the call for yourself.  The reason there’s no absolute answer is that prices, price differences, and experience will vary widely depending on where you live.  So you can only evaluate these variables in your own area.

Breakdown of Lasik Eye Surgery Cost

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Excimer Laser

Excimer Laser

In the realm of lasik eye surgery cost, there are some things that are worth paying for, and some things that are not. An expensive office building or a weekend hotel or retreat package after your lasik eye surgery adds no value to what you expect to receive from the procedure (that being improved vision). I hold such extras meant to draw in the casual lasik consumer in the same league as car dealer gimmicks and hokey shopping center promotions. You don’t pick a car dealer because they have a huge inflatable gorilla on top of their building; you pick them because they will give you the best price and the best service for an equivalent product. You should apply the same methodology to selecting a lasik eye surgery provider, keeping in mind that the “equivalent” product you’re paying for is improved eye sight with as little risk as possible. And the closer to 20/20 the better, right?

This is where the subject of paying for the experience comes in, and knowing what the experience is you’re paying for. Experience in the lasik eye surgery world comes down to two basic areas. Number of procedures performed and average accuracy of procedures performed. Let’s take a look at them one by one.

Number of Lasik Eye Surgeries Performed

There’s a lot of opinions out there on the optimal number of surgeries that a surgeon should have successfully performed before they’ve worked out all the kinks. To put it another way, there is a learning curve for performing lasik eye surgery just like anything else in the world. Think about any involved project you’ve undertaken, whether it’s a home improvement project, software development, project planning, or replacing the breaks on your car. Unless you’re good and lucky, the first time took longer and didn’t go as smoothly as you anticipated. The second time probably went better since you didn’t repeat the errors you made the first time, and maybe avoided a few errors in the process. The third time was even better, and so on. Lasik eye surgery follows the same concept since the surgeon must use and calibrate a piece of equipment to perform your surgery. The more they use the equipment the better their calibration equations are and the more accurate their results.

Paired up with number of procedures performed is the fact that they should have been performed on the same equipment, performing the same surgery that you will have on your eyes. It does no good if the lasik eye surgery you’re having done is number 5000 for the surgeon, but only the 10th one on a new suite of tools. Sure there’s some cross pollination from the previous experience, but there will be new things to learn on the new equipment that you don’t want a surgeon finding out on your eyes.

Now don’t get me wrong, we’re not talking about the difference between 20/20 vision and functional blindness here. But we are talking about the difference between maybe 20/40 and 20/100, which is a big chasm when you’re trying to see some small print up on the airport arrivals board. Bottom line, make sure your provider has performed at least 100 of your exact procedure, preferably 300 or more.

Average Accuracy of Lasik Eye Surgery

This brings us nicely to the next point, which is that accuracy counts. A surgeon who has performed 5000 procedures with an accuracy of 20% of 20/20 vision isn’t very good, and hasn’t learned a whole lot from their experience. And if a doctor guarantees you 20/10 or your money back, politely thank them and leave their office immediately. The national average for 20/20 vision or better after lasik eye surgery is 65%. If they claim substantially higher than that, they’re probably trying to pull the wool over your eyes, no pun intended. To bring the numbers out a little further, the national average for 20/40 or better corrected vision is 90%.

Another question to ask your provider is how they handle their benchmarking after procedures to refine their nomogram (the equations that the surgeon enters into their excimer laser before and after the surgery). The more refined that the nomogram is, the better the results of the surgery will be, which plays back to the no less than 100 procedures. You’ll want to make sure that the lasik eye surgery provider has used that experience to refine and improve their technique and calibrating their equipment.

Lasik eye surgery cost should certainly be one of the factors that you take into consideration when selecting a provider, but it’s important that it’s not the only consideration as there are important aspects to having a successful, rewarding procedure performed that you’ll be completely satisfied with in the end.

Welcome to the Home for Lasik Eye Surgery Cost!

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Welcome to lasik eye surgery cost.  This website will provide you with all the information you need to select a lasik eye surgery provider, including information on cost, experience, and the different types of lasik eye surgery.  If there are any questions on lasik eye surgery cost that are not answered here, please feel free to leave a comment or send an email to info at lasikeyesurgeryhome dot com.