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Surgeon gives pearls on handling unhappy LASIK patients
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 Michael Lawless |
BEIJING — There are a number of steps that surgeons should and should not take when confronted with an unhappy post-LASIK patient, according to a speaker here.
"By far the biggest driver for unhappiness is residual refractive error from my point of view," Michael Lawless, MD, said in a presentation here at the 25th APAO Congress.
Some things surgeons should do when seeing an unhappy post-LASIK patient for the first time is to make sure the patient is 20/20 and perform any necessary tests for residual refractive error, tear film abnormalities, irregular astigmatism, higher order aberrations and lens and macular pathologies, Dr. Lawless said.
"Fix the external errors," Dr. Lawless said. "If you get them right, everything else will be right. And fix them for free."
"The worst thing you can say to an unhappy LASIK patient is, 'You should be happy with your result,'" Dr. Lawless said.
He said it is up to the surgeon to listen to the patient and then do what the surgeon can to remedy the situation. When a patient has lost confidence in the surgeon or the surgeon feels overwhelmed, Dr. Lawless recommends that the patient gets a second opinion and the surgeon pays for it.
Ideally, better visual results and meticulous patient selection are the best ways to avoid unhappy post-LASIK patients, he said.