Who are not candidates for LASIK?
[back to top] Why You May Not Be Eligible for LASIK You Have Unstable Vision While your ophthalmologist would need to consider the root of your fluctuating vision to make a final determination about your eligibility, most surgeons believe that vision should be relatively stable for at least one year for LASIK to be indicated. Trying to operate on eyes with unstable vision is like trying to hit a moving target. Most doctors would consider a change of one diopter (1D) or more in 12 months significant. You Are Pregnant or Nursing Most doctors will not perform surgery on a woman while she is pregnant or nursing because the hormones produced during those time periods could cause temporary instability of the eye’s refraction. You Have Unstable or Uncontrolled Diabetes LASIK is not recommended for those whose blood sugar levels are still fluctuating, as the fluctuation will affect the cornea’s refraction. This makes achieving an accurate correction difficult. In addition, diabetics generally
In an aging population, you see some cataracts. For patients who have cataracts, there are lens implants available now to correct distance, intermediate and near vision, so we suggest they go right into cataract surgery. That happens daily here. People who have fluctuating vision due to abnormality in the cornea, normally a thinning problem, are not good candidates. Patients who have severe uncontrolled diabetes are generally poor healers. People on steroids long term are poor healers also. Those are people more at risk for infection. What is your view of this FDA review of LASIK? I think what has the FDA doing sort of a 10 year review of this technology can largely be attributed to two fundamental problems. Number one, some of these patients probably were not great candidates for LASIK to begin with, and number two, their doctors probably did not communicate with them well before or afterwards. These people are unhappy, and they were kind of left there to struggle. The nice thing abou
