The Price of Laser Attention Surgery

[Kelle Greco]

When talking of the treatment that's carried out on people that have problems with short-sightedness (myopia), long-sightedness (hypermetropia) or the sloping curve of the area of a person's eye (astigmatism) two terms are commonly noticed. Those conditions are often 'laser eye surgery' or 'refractive surgery.' Nevertheless, despite the fact that it is (in terms) probably similar in the meaning, there's a technological difference that must be remembered.

Echoing surgery does not always use lasers (such as for example the treatment or the sealing of a retinal tear, usually called radial keratotomy), while laser eye surgery is just a type of treatment that sculpts and remodels the area of the eye through laser treatment. Both forms of treatment, however, may be used to cut back individual dependency upon the wearing of contacts and glasses.

The true origins can be traced back to when an lecturer, Landeer Jans Lans in the Netherlands published the first-ever principle regarding the risk of changing the shape of the contour of the cornea to reduce astigmatism in people the late 19th century. Nevertheless, it remained only a theory until the 1930's once the Japanese ophthalmologist, Tsutomu Sato carried out corrective eye surgery on six pilots and put that theory into practice. He were able to correct the sight of these pilots by often six diopters (a way of measuring visual power of a contact). Nonetheless, this caused high prices of corneal degeneration in the people and therefore the medical world denied the practice as being unsatisfactory. It wasn't before the 1950s that Jos Barraquer produced a better approach and innovations were produced in the industry.

Existing techniques of laser eye surgery time back again to 1989 once the US Patent Office granted the very first patent for LASIK (Laser-Assisted in situ Keratomileusis). LASIK uses what is referred to as a femtosecond laser' that produces short-duration pulses of light. A femtosecond is 10-15 seconds, or one millionth of one billionth of a second (a quadrillionth), e.g. useful reference.