Is LASIK Safe?

All eye surgical procedures carry a level of risk including not obtaining the desired outcome through to varying levels of visual loss. Your eye surgeon will discuss the risks and benefits including ones specific to your circumstances at the time of your preoperative consultation.

Safety is fully dependent on who the operating surgeon is and the clinical setting they are working in.

It is similar to safety for driving – is driving safe? This will depend mainly on the driver, the car they are in, and the environment where they are driving. Is it rush hour or a quiet country road?

If a surgeon is under pressure and operating on 20+ patients a day, that is very different from an expert consultant specialist in a low volume centre, having much more time and treating 4-6 patients a day.

LASIK Safety Factors

The main safety factor is selecting people who are good candidates for treatment.

In 2015, most complications arose when the person treated was not an ideal candidate. This will come down to the surgeon and clinical setting. If it is a high volume commercial environment where less time is spent on assessment and selection, risks can rise.

Choose a specialist surgeon in a low volume setting, such as a clinical-owned specialist centre.

Reducing the Risks of LASIK

There are always possible risks with any technique and we encourage you to discuss these with us. Please note that treatments are available for almost all complications that affect your vision (but not all). Serious complications with LASIK or PRK are actually very rare if the patient is well selected. The chance of having a complication, including various minor ones, from LASIK has been documented in previous clinical studies to be less than one percent, and based on procedures which used less sophisticated technology than we have available today. All options have some risk, e.g. it has been shown that there is a higher risk of infection from wearing contact lenses long-term than from LASIK.

Many of the risks and complications associated with this procedure can be reduced or eliminated through careful patient selection and thorough pre-operative testing using the latest diagnostic technology. That is why FOCUS has invested so heavily in screening technology.

After laser eye treatment, you may experience some visual side effects. These are usually mild and most often diminish over a few days to a few weeks. But there is a slight chance that some of these side effects won’t go away completely, such as feelings of dryness, glare and haloes. If after a thorough examination we decide you are a good candidate for vision correction, you will be given additional information about the procedure that will allow you to make an informed decision about whether to proceed. Be sure you have all your questions answered to your satisfaction.

If you have any more questions about the risks of laser eye surgery, please give us a call on 020 3733 5657and we’ll be happy to answer them.