I was recently asked by Kaz to explain the Z-LASIK procedure in more detail. Watch this video and in a second post I will run through why I consider Z-LASIK combined with the WaveLight excimer laser to be the ultimate in LASIK laser eye surgery.

I recently treated Denise Van Outen at my clinic and you can see the full story in today’s Daily Mail. We also made the front page with a leader. The phone’s were ringing non-stop!
You can watch Denise in the video below, or click to see her full story on Denise Van Outen and her laser eye surgery in London at the Daily Mail’s website.

Denise can now see better than 20/20 in each eye and is delighted with the result. She had the operation to get ready for climbing Kilimanjaro next month for Comic Relief without her contact lenses.

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:

One of the most common questions I get asked is how to choose where to go for their laser vision correction. I talk about the 5 ’secrets’ to choosing a laser eye surgery clinic, which many patients have found helpful. This is now available as a download from Focus.

Click here to sign up to immediately get the information directly from their site.

Do send me some feedback if you find the information helpful. If there is something else that you want to know, post a comment below or send me a message through the box in the right sidebar.

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:

The choices can seem bewildering! You want to have laser eye treatment e.g LASIK and now you need to choose the clinic for your surgery.

But which one?

There are over 100 clinics in the UK, although 75% of those are made up of only three large business laser chains: Optical Express, Optimax and Ultralase. The other 25% are mainly owned by doctors and optometrists, who practice from their centres.

80% of UK centres have adopted the advanced blade-free femtosecond lasers, and so now offer blade-free LASIK (a.k.a all-laser LASIK, Intralase, Z-LASIK). These include:  FOCUS Laser Vision , Optimax, Optical Express, Ultralase, Moorfields Eye Hospital and Centre for Sight.

20% of UK centres have not yet invested in this technology, and only offer bladed LASIK, where a device containing a short blade is used to cut the LASIK flap. These centres include Advance VisionCare and Accuvision in London

Having your laser eye treatment with a blade free femtosecond method has rapidly become the standard of care for UK LASIK laser eye surgery.

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!

TECHNOLOGY that has become available over past two years means that reading vision problems can now be very effectively addressed through laser eye treatment. Although at present only a few clinics specialise in this area, it is the fasting growing section of the laser vision arena.

FOCUS Laser Vision specialises in the correction of loss of reading vision, either through advanced LASIK laser eye surgery or through the use of lenses inside the eye (IOLs)

Several approaches to LASIK are showing promise in the treatment of reading vision problems (presbyopia) for patients with otherwise normal distance vision, or long or short sight, according to studies presented at the 12th Winter Refractive Meeting of the ESCRS.

In research presented by Kenneth A Greenberg MD, all patients achieved good distance vision of 20/25 or better and were able to read telephone directory sized print, 12 months after undergoing customised LASIK treatments. The multicentre study involved 28 presbyopic long-sighted patients with an average age of 56 years.