LASIK - the small print (Issues and Concerns Surrounding Laser Eye Surgery)

Member Name: sgrup

Product:	Issues and Concerns Surrounding Laser Eye Surgery
Date:	04/03/01 (1167 review reads)
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I am quite surprised to see a considerable number of ops praising corrective eye surgery treatment. People considering laser eye surgery and reading these dooyoo ops might get a biased picture of the situation - but then they might be misled even by the 'official' data produced by the clinics who perform LASIK and PRK treatments.

I will not go into the details of the LASIK surgery and why you should or shouldn't do it since I have already done so in detail in a previous op. This time I would like to speak about the dissipation of statistics and information on the treatment. Many people believe that statistics can't be wrong - and that whenever a percentage is quoted, say, then that number must be correct. But this is not always the case. For example an article I read on a prominent news magazine concluded that traveling by plane is safer than traveling by car since less people die in plane accidents than in car accidents. What the article failed to mention is that the number of people that travel by car everyday worldwide is much larger than the number of plane passengers - this means that the percentage of people who die in plane accidents is actually larger than the percentage of car accident victims even though the raw data would indicate otherwise.

This might be a trivial example of how data can be misleading. I have read plenty of data and statistics regarding LASIK corrective surgery; firstly as a prospective patient (I was considering LASIK a few years ago but then decided against it since the failure rate was considerably higher than what I was prepared to accept) and now as a researcher in a related field. Some sources would quote a reasonably high 'success' rate without making it clear what they were considering as a 'success'. Correcting from 6D to 2D might be considered a success by the surgeon because it might be within the acceptable error for the particular case - but the patient would not be as happy
with the result as he or she would still need spectacles.

What you don't hear or read of often is the failed cases - in some cases with very bad results. The number of such cases might be relatively small - but I would not want to be one of them myself.

I don't want to write too much on this subject since I have already voiced my opinion on LASIK previously. But be careful how to interpret the data you are given. For example, when you hear that less than 1% suffer from a particular side-effect you should always ask whether it is 1% of all the treated eyes or 1% of the 'successful' treatments. Make sure you get the complete picture before making such an important decision which you will not be able to reverse if you don't like the result.

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