Laser Eye Surgery Blog | LASIK-Truth.com

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Watch Denise in her own words talking about her recent laser eye surgery at FOCUS Laser Vision. Denise explains about her problems wearing glasses or contact lenses while working as a TV presenter and what led up to her decision to go ahead with laser eye surgery.

Denise opted for the most advanced treatment of Z-LASIK, which is blade free using two lasers for maximum accuracy and safety, plus wavefront optics to give her an outstanding quality of vision.

Click on play below to see the video:

We were delighted to treat TV presenter and actress Denise Van Outen in January and she popped in the other day for her check up. You may have seen Denise recently on TV as she and several other celebrities decided to climb Mount Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief. Denise has suffered with glasses for years but the climb was a real push to have laser eye surgery – she did not want to rely on glasses or lenses at the high altitude. After hearing good things about FOCUS from friends she finally decided to go ahead and have treatment.

Denise did brilliantly to reach the top of Kilimanjaro, along with all the other celebs. Red Nose Day has so far raised a whopping £65,000,000 and continues to make a major difference in its 21st year.

Check back for our pioneering series of laser eye surgery videos, for everything you could ever want to know about having lasik laser eye surgery, with also lots of information for those of you living in or near London

How would you like advanced laser eye surgery and then get all your money back?

The Full Refund Referral Plan from FOCUS Laser Vision means that really is now possible. You can have laser eye treatment to see once again without glasses… and then you could get all your money back! Brilliant.

Sounds too good to be true?

First of all, FOCUS Laser Vision offer the UK’s best price for advanced blade free laser eye correction, so you are happy you saved money over more expensive clinics but without compromising skill, quality or safety. NHS Corneal Consultants, best and safest lasers, superb team. But you can go even further. You can get a full refund on your treatment, every penny.

Here’s how it works. You are delighted with your new vision after your laser eye treatment. Of course you want to tell everyone! You tell your family, friends, work mates. Now they want to have laser eye surgery too.

Once 5 people you know have come along and had treatment you can get 50% of your money back. Once another 5 come along and have treatment, 10 people total, you will get all of your money back. All of it, in full.

In effect, you will then have back everything you paid and had your laser eye surgery for free!

Your family, friends and colleagues are delighted with their new vision and also because they got the UK’s best price! They really like you! And they too can spread the word to benefit from our Full Refund Referral Plan.

According to PR Newswire yesterday, Eric Abrue (30), a quadriplegic patient who is dependent on a respirator since he was 8 years old, underwent a historic and highly successful LASIK procedure performed by Drs. Jeffrey and Joseph Dello Russo in Bergenfield in New Jersey, USA.

Eric fell from a playground bar back in 1986, breaking his neck and also cutting his spinal cord. Ever since he has suffered from quadriplegia, completely unable to move his body from his neck downwards and is only able to breath for a short time without the use of a respirator.

Eric is the first quadriplegic patient in the world who underwent LASIK, using the Wavelight Eye-Q and a special WL Swivel Chair (also used by FOCUS Laser Vision).

Eric is dependent for all his needs on an around-the-clock care giver. He runs a successful music production company, attends a college online and designs his own T-shirt line. He was using eyeglasses to see his computer clearly but in the last few months has found out that wearing glasses did little to clear up his vision, and the images became after using the computer for 14-16 hours per day. Sitting about two feet away from his laptop, Eric began to have headaches due to the strain on his eyes. Eric uses a wand placed in his mouth by his caregiver to surf the internet and send mails to clients and friends. He is highly skilled with the device, typing rapidly and accurately for many hours of the day. Trying to ensure his eyes will keep serving him as the main tool to connect with the world, he became interested in the LASIK procedure and began reading about it online.

IMPORTANT NEWS for those people considering having LASIK laser eye surgery.

There appears to be a fundamental difference between LASIK flaps cut either with a blade or created with a laser. Laser created flaps mean a safer surgery as the results are more accurate, so fewer enhancements needed, and the eye is left stronger.

Making a replaceable flap is the first part of the LASIK procedure, just prior to reshaping the cornea to correct vision. Until recently (and still in many clinics) the flap was made by a physical cut with a very sharp razor blade contained within a precision device. However several clinics and the major three chain operators have invested in femtosecond lasers to create the corneal flap without the need for a blade.

This is known as blade-free LASIK, dual laser LASIK, Z-LASIK or IntraLASIK depending on which clinic you are talking to.

We know that thicker flaps cut with a blade do not fully heal and can be lifted up surgically even many years later. Traditional blade flaps are thicker and cut deeper into the cornea. However laser flaps are thinner and leave the eye stronger afterwards.

However a key difference highlighted by Professor John Marshall in London is that because these very thin laser flaps pass through near the surface of the cornea where the collagen is different from deeper down, they actually heal down and are not able to be lifted later on. This means the eye regains strength again with a laser flap, but not with a blade flap.

Newer blade machines have been introduced in 2008 and 2009 that cut thinner flaps to compete with the thin femtosecond laser flaps which should benefit from the better healing seen in sub-120 micron flaps

My recommendation to you when choosing a clinic is to be able to select to have a femtosecond laser procedure at a clinic that has that technology. They are more expensive than blade procedures (expect to pay around £300 more per eye) but well worth the likelihood of a long-term increase in safety.

The number of people having laser eye surgery in the UK has increased following a boost in March 2006 when the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) issued their guidance that laser eye treatment was sufficiently safe and effective to be carried out on appropriately selected patients.

Since then, the number of clinics offering laser eye surgery has increased. The three UK laser eye chains – Optical Express, Optimax and Ultralase – have all stated plans to increase the number of clinics they run.

The credit crunch and stock market falls have led to a dip in recent weeks reported by most consultants doing private laser eye correction. However the overall trend has been a rise in the number of procedures carried out in the UK.

We discussed in the last post about the two options you have: LASIK or PRK (surface laser), and how 90%+ of treatments are done via LASIK.

LASIK comes in two flavours now: blade or blade-free. The older traditional LASIK technique uses a mechanical device containing a blade (called a keratome or microkeratome) to cut a flap during the first part of the procedure. The newer, more advanced method is to use a special laser (known as a femtosecond laser) to create a flap without a blade.

These femtosecond lasers are hugely expensive (about a quarter of a millions pounds each!) so expect to pay more for this technology. Some clinics have not yet invested in femto lasers due to the high cost involved and continue to use a blade.

The benefits of a laser flap over a blade flap are becoming clear: more accurate treatment, better healing of the flap, greater strength in the cornea post-op due to significantly thinner laser flaps and greater residual thickness. Blade flaps have been used for many years and have been proven safe to date, but thinner laser flaps have added better accuracy and strength. You will see a gradual phasing out of blade flaps over laser flaps over the coming few years.

More tomorrow!

If you read yesterdays post you are up to speed on wavefront technology. OK, so far so good. It seems wavefront correction improves quality of vision after laser eye surgery. And indeed clinical trials confirm that vision results are much better after laser makers added the ‘wavefront‘ upgrades to their machines.

For example, the American made VISX lasers, used at all Optical Express laser clinics, have much better results when using their wavefront upgrade from 2002. I would not recommend having laser eye treatment today in 2008 without choosing the wavefront package on that system.

Wavefront laser eye surgery - is it the whole truth?

So now you want ‘wavefront‘ in your laser eye treatment! Of course, as the results are better. But when laser manufacturers introduced ‘wavefront’ they actually bundled in other improvements which may account for much of the jump in results! They just didn’t tell you. Why? Because it is complicated to describe all these improvements to someone who isn’t familiar with the technology – such as you, the patient!!

And honestly, I bet the sales people at most clinics talking on the phones who want to sell you a consultation don’t really understand it either! However, they have been trained to explain the wavefront part only, as something like this… “we take a scan, a unique fingerprint, of your vision and the use that fingerprint to perfectly correct your vision“. Go on, call them and check it out!

But for you, as a patient or customer, don’t really care about which part of that technology is helping you the most, you just want great vision, right?

So don’t let clinics blind you with science about wavefront scanners, wavefront maps, measuring hundreds of points of light or how much better their scanner is than other clinics scanners. It is usually marketing spin! Take it all with a pinch of salt.

However, you should choose the ‘wavefront option’ because within that package are the big improvements in laser eye treatment over the past several years. The success of surgery may actually be less to do with the true wavefront technology that has helped astronomy, but rather other improvements that may be confusing to patients but get wrapped up in the marketing of wavefront LASIK.

We come back to ethics again here. Is it ethical for some clinics to still sell ‘non-wavefront’ laser eye surgery technology that was replaced back in 2002?

For my own clinic, we do not offer non-wavefront treatments at all. None at all. I want every one of my patients to have the benefit of the newer laser eye surgery results. So we made it very affordable. In fact, we charge less for wavefront LASIK than other clinics do for their ‘entry level’ lower price non-wavefront LASIK. Really.

That’s my plug for FOCUS done! So, do choose wavefront but don’t pay more than you have to!

Following on from yesterdays post on some key LASIK and laser eye surgery questions, lets look at these:

• Do clinics try to sell you on the most expensive treatments?
• Are these expensive treatments no better than the cheaper ones?
• Is there really any difference between blade LASIK and the newer (more expensive) blade free dual laser option?

The main point here is about more expensive laser eye treatments over cheaper ones. What is the difference?

When you buy anything you normally have a choice of quality and price, for example an HD television or more basic one. Or a Mercedes over a Fiat Punto. We all understand that more money usually gets a higher value brand and clinics typically price the surgery this way too.

There are two ways you can upgrade your treatment: (1) upgrading on the quality of the final vision (you will see better afterwards) and (2) improving the safety and accuracy of the eye surgery. These are upgrades on what used to be the best treatment only a few years ago, which is known as non-wavefront LASIK and using a blade device to cut a thin flap in the surface of the cornea (the clear window at the front of the eye).

Let’s look first at spending more to get better quality of vision than the older ’standard’ treatments (which are STILL available at most clinics, not at my centre – FOCUS, by the way, although there is a good case to abandon this older technology). The high street chains (Ultralase, Optimax and Optical Express) all offer two levels of surgery for quality of vision.

The basic cheaper treatment is called by various names but all are what are termed ‘Non-Wavefront’ surgeries. For example Ultralase call it just ‘laser eye surgery’, Optimax and Optical Express refer just to ‘LASIK’.

The higher quality, better vision treatments all come under what is called ‘Wavefront’ laser eye surgery.

‘Wavefront’ simply refers to a technology that is claimed to offer higher-definition vision, especially at night time, which was introduced several years ago.

Just to confuse you there are different names, again depending on which clinic you visit! For example, Ultralase call this ‘ULTRALASIKplus‘, Optimax opt for the simpler ‘Wavefront LASIK‘, while Optical Express go for the mouthful of ‘Advanced CustomVue Wavefront LASIK‘. Other independent clinics use various names.

At my own clinic FOCUS Laser Vision, we only offer the higher quality vision ‘wavefront’ laser eye treatments. You cannot get non-wavefront eye surgery with us.

Please note that paying more at one clinic doesn’t mean you get better surgery than at another clinic. You need to look at what you are paying for. For example FOCUS Laser Vision charge less for advanced wavefront correction than most other clinics do for older technology non-wavefront treatments. Blowing my own trumpet here, I know! But paying more does not always equal getting more. More on this later.

Kay also asked in her mail about the ethics of treatment offerings and we will cover that topic in the next blog postings. Basically, is it ethical to offer lower quality treatments when newer higher quality ones are available? No-one cares about this for other products and services (is it ethical to sell Fiat Puntos when Mercedes are available?) but it can be a hot topic in healthcare. I will write on this subject during the coming week. And I will welcome your comments!

OK, but are these ‘wavefront’ treatments really better than ‘non-wavefront’? Come back tomorrow to get the truth!

Overall all laser eye surgery prices are increasing or set to increase. The cost of new technology to give you better and safer surgery is very high and needs to be constantly updated. Even though FOCUS have the UK’s best prices, you will find the trend everywhere will be up.

For example, laser clinics used to need one laser at a cost of £1/3 million. Now they need two to offer blade free dual laser LASIK, total cost £2/3 million and treatment prices are no different on average to back in 2000.

In a nutshell it costs a lot to do this type of treatment and costs are only increasing. The benefit of that though: highly accurate treatments with better safety than ever before.

At FOCUS, we made a decision to buy the very best technology and to bring that to the UK at the lowest price so that more people could afford to get fantastic levels of surgeon, service and technology, all without compromise. That is not hype. It is just what we have wanted to do.

But all of that does cost and has to be paid for. And no government bail-outs for anyone in healthcare! Unlike some banks we have to be prudent, cautious and look after our customers without risk so that we will be here next week, next month and next year.

Price wars in the US a few years ago meant cheaper surgery at first. Then bankrupt clinics closing with people having to pay all over again in order to get their aftercare. Not a good result for patients in the end.

You may see some special offers following these recent economic changes until things level out and then improve again. You may want to take advantage of those, as longer term costs will go up.