Better Eyes in Old Age

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Laser eye surgery isn't just for the young. A new study from the University of Illinois at Chicago shows there are still substantial benefits of laser eye surgery, or LASIK, for older patients. There were known benefits to having LASIK at a young age because of the cornea's strong healing responses, but now researchers have found small adjustments in the correction to the cornea compensate for differences in age-related healing for older patients.

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Wavefront-Guided LASIK: The New Frontier

/24-7PressRelease/ - April 11, 2007

Wavefront-guided LASIK uses Wavefront technology to customize the surgery precisely to your eyes. Traditional LASIK and corrective lenses can correct common vision problems including nearsightedness (myopia), farsightedness (hyperopia), and astigmatism, but cannot address other problems with quality of vision. Higher order aberrations can cause vision problems such as halos, glare, decreased contrast sensitivity, and shadows. These problems normally do not affect visual acuity (how you test on the eye chart) but affect the quality of what you see in real life. Higher order aberrations can actually be exacerbated by traditional LASIK surgery.

So what are higher order aberrations? As they relate to your vision, they are infinitesimal imperfections that create minute changes in the light rays that pass through your eye. These minute changes in the light rays affect the quality of your vision (even with glasses or contact lenses) although you are probably not even aware of the difference.

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Selling elective refractive procedures

By: Nancy Groves
Ophthalmology

Demonstrating value, meeting individual needs win patients over

Whether a patient is interested in LASIK or in cataract surgery that may include an optional IOL to correct presbyopia, the approach should be the same।

"There are a couple of rules for the road that are really important," explained Shareef Mahdavi।

"One of them is that before you start talking about solutions as a provider, you need to understand the problem that they're going through," Mahdavi said। "The problem is more than just 'I can't see well.' You need to get to their specific and unique concerns."

Getting there means having a conversation with each patient about his or her lifestyle, work habits, leisure activities, computer use, reading—anything that helps you understand them.

"That's really important, and there isn't enough of that being done," Mahdavi said. "People tend to shortcut that step and want to go right into a selling mode, saying why the technology is really good or why that particular surgeon is really good. Typically, that's done sooner than it should be."

Patients want to feel special, and they want to feel listened to," Mahdavi added. "The counselors who do that well are going to have a lot less resistance when it comes to price and people saying yes."

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