The first thing you notice is that some clinics outline some or all their prices, while others give a headline price and give more details after you contact the clinic directly. One very handy site that can help you get all that information quickly is www.lasik-eyes.co.uk where patients can post independent reviews of their experiences at all of the UK’s laser eye clinics plus the price they paid for surgery.

There is a huge variation in the prices paid at UK clinics. Take a look at the following chart of London laser eye correction clinics showing the average price paid (total price for both eyes) to date as found on lasik-eyes.co.uk on April 15th 2009.

Prices paid for both eyes for laser eye treatment vary from around £1,500 up to over £4,300! My own clinic incidentally, FOCUS Laser Vision, is the second best priced centre in London.

But what does this mean for you? What about quality? Do you get what you pay for? Or do prices not correlate well with the quality of the surgery, vision result or service?

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:

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.

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.

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:

The choices can seem bewildering!

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.

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.

For LASIK laser eye surgery safety, there are 3 things you must look for when you plan to go ahead. This LASIK safety trio means a more accurate result and the safest procedure we know of today:

1. Choose a blade-free all laser LASIK technique – using the latest femtosecond lasers means no blade is used in the surgery. Check with any clinic you talk to that they can offer blade-free LASIK – if they can’t then they are out of date and should be avoided.
2. Wavefront-based LASIK is a must today, so make sure you go for that option. For example, at FOCUS Laser Vision we only do wavefront treatments so that is taken care of. At other centres such as Optical Express, do not choose their non-wavefront option.
3. Get the safety and reassurance of NHS consultant corneal specialist surgeons to do your treatment – the three laser eye chains do not offer this for the great majority of their treatments. Premier centres like Moorfields Eye Hospital, Centre for Sight and FOCUS Laser Vision do.

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.

What happens if my vision isn’t right after treatment?

Most people don’t realise that the effect of laser eye surgery, including LASIK, LASEK and PRK procedures, CAN be fully reversed.

Although this isn’t necessary because if the prescription for glasses hasn’t been fully corrected then a second treatment is easily performed to fix that and stay free from the need for glasses or contact lenses. If the effect of the laser correction is a bit too strong or too weak, we call this an over-correction or an under-correction respectively.

All over- and under-corrections can be treated easily. In fact, as I mentioned, the whole laser eye treatment can be reversed. The move over to the Ziemer blade free system (Z-LASIK) has dramatically reduced the need to re-do LASIK treatments.

Most clinics quote enhancement rates of around 5%.  BUT with Z-LASIK for short-sight I have only had to adjust one case in the last 200, so that’s a 0.5% rate. Without any hype or spin, that’s just very impressive and a great step forward.

To fully reverse the effect of e.g. a short-sighted laser eye treatment, we remove some tissue from the outer part of the cornea to put the corneal curvature back to where it started. So now an equal amount of tissue has been removed across the cornea and so the focus would be back where it started. Of course, the cornea is a little thinner than before, but still strong enough for its role.

It’s the accuracy of the dual laser approach that allows such a very low enhancement rate, which means 9.5% of short-sighted patients are on target and very happy with only one treatment and without the need for a top-up.

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.

People have been looking for peace of mind and want to know that a clinic will take care of them afterwards.

Currently only FOCUS Laser Vision and Ultralase offer a lifetime care guarantee after laser eye surgery.

The biggest thought in every patient’s mind is about safety and that is exactly how it should be. As a prospective laser eye surgery patient (LASIK or PRK) you need to do a little research beforehand, so take a look at various clinics’ websites. Check the FOCUS Laser Vision or Ultralase websites for more details of their Lifetime Care Guarantees.

You can also check out Optimax, Optical Express or Moorfields (or any other UK clinics in fact) but none of these clinics offer a lifetime guarantee.