Laser eye surgery treatment: Can you have LASIK for long sightedness?

So can you have LASIK laser eye surgery to treat long-sightedness? Absolutely! The evolution of the right technology took a little longer to evolve over many years to deliver fantastic outcomes in the treatment of long-sightedness.

Very typically, in order to achieve a really good outcome for the patient, the laser has to slightly overcorrect. In the first week after the laser eye surgery, the skin of the cornea tries to heal away the effect, and it does this in a very predictable way. So the laser causes a slight overcorrection.

Typically, on day one, my farsighted laser eye surgery patients will be euphoric about their vision: “Jesus, this is amazing. I can see this tiny print.” In reality, the distance vision will be just slightly blurry because we’ve actually taken the patient from being farsighted to being a little bit nearsighted. With this ReLEx process being spread out over the following weeks, we get our final result usually about ten to twelve weeks after the initial surgery. We do finally enhance that rate more readily with our farsighted patients who become nearsighted, and that’s because more healing is required. Typically, about five percent of patients will require a return to the laser three to six months after the original treatment in order to find a genuine outcome and get that really sharp division thereafter

In terms of the range of long-sightedness we can treat, there’s a lot of debate about how far you can push this amongst different surgeons, and it does appear to vary slightly between different laser platforms. There are some platforms that are very good at treating long-sightedness, and the design male 90 platforms which we use are very good. Also, the Schwind Amaris, which is also wave-like, seems to be particularly good at treating long-sightedness, and we have patients we’ve managed to treat up to about plus five or plus six.

It is very patient-dependent. It is affected by the tear film preoperatively, the corneal thickness, and the cornea steepness beforehand as well. I don’t make the cornea quite steep if we’re going to perform a very long cited correction, and if the patient has already started out with a steeper-than-average cornea, you can end up with a shape that is not going to give them really good optics and may be slightly more difficult for them to wet with a nice tear film.

So, as with all the work we do, it’s about tailoring customization and not pushing things too far, making sure that we’re comfortable and confident that we can really deliver a safe and effective treatment for a patient.