Many patients wonder: What is laser eye surgery? Dr. Holzman explains that laser vision correction reshapes the cornea so that light refracts properly. Treatments like LASIK and PRK can address nearsightedness, farsightedness, or astigmatism, often eliminating or significantly reducing the need for contacts or glasses.
So a lot of people are confused as to actually what laser vision correction is and how it works. First thing you need to understand is that the cornea is the front window of the eye. And what we’re doing with laser vision correction is we’re resculpting and reshaping that window with a non-thermal laser in order to make a perfect shape so that images that the patient looks at fall onto the back of the eye so the brain can recognize them. The goal of this is to significantly reduce and many times eliminate the need for glasses or contact lenses. There are different types of patients that we treat. Nearsighted patients typically have corneas or windows that are too steep, so the laser flattens the cornea thereby eliminating the nearsightedness. In farsightedness, the patient’s cornea is too flat, and what we have to do is actually steepen the cornea with the laser. And that works equally as well as treatments for nearsightedness. The last thing that we treat is astigmatism. A lot of people are confused about what astigmatism is. Astigmatism is basically just a curve in the cornea, again, in the front of the eye. And what the laser does is smooths out that curve and makes the cornea more round thereby reducing the blur the patients see.