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 10^th 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.