By Steffi Liu
I’m sure you’ve all heard of LASIK eye surgery. Reports and advertisements on it can now be seen everywhere: on TV, in magazines, and on the internet. These ads make it appear like it’s the greatest blessing nearsighted people are ever going to have, because they can get rid of their irritating glasses or contact lenses forever. But is the surgery really as amazing as they claim? While most of the information presented to us is positive, there still may be some aspects of the technology that remain unrevealed, information which the mass media and advertisements believe unnecessary for us to know. Therefore, I decided to get some information myself. I went to some clinics and interviewed people from medical schools. I found out that while many people expect the surgery to cure their visual deficiency, the basic theory of the surgery actually means more harm to the eye. By sculpting the cornea, the transparent covering in the front of the eye, the inappropriate curvature causing myopia is fixed, and the eye is then able to create images on the retina again. Nothing is done to the abnormal part of the eye, it is the originally normal part that is altered. Normal vision will return when the cornea has recovered from this “injury.” And will there be side effects? What we know so far is that this varies from person to person. Most people don’t have side effects at least in the first few years after their operations. But up to this point long-term research is still unavailable. Since the technology is still young, we can’t know what might happen in the future. Yet one thing I did learn is that the eyes might become weaker so that they need more protection or care; for example, long-haul flights should be avoided. Another thing people often wonder about is how good their eyesight will be after the surgery. Actually, no one knows. It depends on how well a person recovers from the surgery. Before the procedure there is an evaluation to see if you are an ideal candidate for the surgery, including your age and how bad your myopia is. Your post-surgery vision may also be estimated; usually they give you a range, say, 0.5-1.0. Since every case is different and not every operation will be equally successful, it’s not like you are guaranteed to get your normal vision back. But there is another problem. Most of the information that is presented to us in our daily lives may be biased, or even kept from us entirely, because the LASIK clinics want to encourage us to view their technology in a positive way, and to create in us a desire to buy it. Does wearing glasses really make you look so bad? Are glasses or contact lenses really so irritating that we must turn to LASIK surgery? Try to think about how advertising has shaped public knowledge, especially about this nascent medical technology, making us focus on the dark side of our lives and look to the surgery as a way to make us happy. a
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Authors
The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
|