Similar Procedures to LASIK Eye Surgery

Dr. Schwartz explains the most similar procedures to LASIK corrective eye surgery.

Similar Procedures to LASIK Eye Surgery Besides LASIK eye surgery we have the Visian ICL and ICL is basically an implantable contact lens. I typically use that in my practice for patients whose corneas are a little too thin for LASIK, or their prescription is a little too high. For whatever reason, LASIK doesn’t feel like the right choice for them. Another option would be to do what’s called the lens replacement, or if they have early cataracts to actually do a cataract surgery instead of LASIK. When a patient comes in and has a lens replacement procedure the goal with that is to restore not just the distance vision, but the reading vision, the computer vision, and the distance vision. LASIK can’t do that. The best LASIK can offer is the monovision where one eye’s distance and one eye is either intermediate or near -- it can’t give you all three because we don’t have three eyes, you can only go at two different distances. With the multifocal lenses they have the ability to see at all those different levels. There is a lot of different versions of them. The two main ones that I use, well actually there’s three, there’s the ReSTOR lens, which I think is an excellent lens, a very similar product is the TECNIS® Multifocal. I put in a lot of those. And then another one, which is slightly different but also very good, is the Crystalens. The ReSTOR and the TECNIS work with three specific zones of vision. Their biggest issue is at night you can see a little bit of a halo but it tends to fade but they both have very, very good near vision, good intermediate, and good distance. The Crystalens is a wonderful technology. It actually changes shape and focuses just like the eye used to when we were younger. Patients are able to see far away. They are able to see at a computer pretty well. The reading is hit or miss a little bit with the Crystalens. So I tell my Crystalens patients, you may still need some reading glasses but it should be much better than what you experienced before. Another type of lens that we do offer, that I do perform is the Toric lens. Patients often come in with astigmatism but can’t have laser to fix it for whatever reason or they have a cataract and they want to take care of the cataract and the astigmatism at once. That option is the Toric lens. A Toric means it fixes the astigmatism in the axis of their eye that’s having a problem. So they get better distance vision and that particular lens doesn’t give reading or intermediate, but it gives excellent distance vision. So a lot of it is goal-dependent. The discussion, the conversation that I have with each patient helps determine which technology is going to be right for them.