[QUOTE=VoIPA,May 25 2005, 04:46 PM] What??? Of course the cornea heals.

 

don't you mean PRK?
no one does RK any more

 

My GF had it done last year for $5gs and I thought that was a little high too. Overall she loves it and is glad she did it. What I did not know until she looked into it is that often times price quotes are for vision that is not very bad. The bigger the correction they need to make, the more the price goes up. Not true everywhere but in many places. Her vision was about 20/500 I think.

Also, some of the cheaper places have older equipment with more risk of side effects especially to night vision.

She really has not had anything bad except for that you are supposed to use steroid drops and eye drops to moisten for about six months until fully healed. She is still using the drops over a year later because she still has discomfort and gets a burning sensation in her eyes. She still thinks it is a minor discomfort when compared to hard contacts. They did make soft ones for someone with vision as bad as hers.

 

Sorry, I suppose my degree in optics may have tainted my facts.

RK (the original eye surgury, not PRK) was performed by cutting slits in the cornea radiating from a ring around the center of the cornea with a knife. As the cornea heals from these slits, it spreads the ring around the center and the cornea flattens, thus correcting myopia. The healing process is what makes this work.

With the advent of medical lasers, PRK was developed where the epithelium (outer layer of the cornea) is removed, and the laser basically blasts away the middle layer of the cornea to reshape. The epithelial the regenerates over the next few days, healing the cornea. If the epithelium did not regenerate (heal), you would be very uncomfortable for the rest of your life.

LASIK was developed so that the healing process would occur much quicker. By cutting the flap and blasting beneath it, less epithelium is destroyed, and healing is much quicker.

Visit http://www.usaeyes.org/ or any one of the million other sites describing how these operations work.

 

It's your eyes why would you pinch pennies? Buy Nitto brand tires for your car if money is that tight .Royalty fee's per procedure to the Laser manf. are fixed (avg. $350.00 per eye),so is office rent , salaries to employees, consumables, after-care, maintence on equipment. The only way lowball places can do it is with volume. Do you want to be rushed thru so the doc can make his numbers ? Or they use grey market equipment, or they are starting out and building their numbers (practicing on you). The price is what it is and either you step up to the plate and pay it or take your chances with a cheap doctor.

As a example the doctors and their staff spent over 4 hours on me when I got zapped. Measuring and remeasuring , try getting that level of service with dr lowball. Top tier docs avg around $5,000 using a all laser treatment.

 

But you will agree since the cornea has no blood supply it does not heal itself in the traditional sense. It will rebond in most people but truly never heal. Like I said before this is why fighter pilots are treated with PRK instead of LASIK.

 

Depends. What do you mean by the traditional sense? At least to me, to heal simply means to mend or restore to original form.

In all the research I've done on eye surgury, it's called healing, and while that area will obviously be weakened, the flap is not just dangling there ready to come loose at any minute like someone suggested. That's all I was really referring to in my original post.