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Publication Exclusive: Significant advantages abound for young patients who have laser vision correction
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Greg Parkhurst has hit for the cycle! Wow!
Greg has touched on the four most significant advantages of having laser vision correction — quality of life, better vision, cost savings and safety — while also discussing that a full 90% of the population has reached ocular maturity by age 18 years and is ready for refractive surgery.
He also mentions the very high prevalence of laser vision correction in the four branches of the armed services and previews our article in an upcoming issue of Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery about refractive surgery in refractive surgeons, in which we show ... well, you will have to wait for that one.
Great job, Greg.
Richard A. Norden, MD, OSN Refractive Surgery Stories Editor
Were you that junior high kid who dove head first off the back of the boat, finally your turn to water ski at the cool kid’s birthday party, only to realize you forgot to take your glasses off first? Nope, that was me. After thrashing around in the waves, grasping at my quickly disappearing pair of –4.75 specs as they spiraled toward the bottom of the lake, that fine summer day still takes the prize as one of my most humiliating and frustrating experiences. That was not the only experience I remember hating about my glasses, though. There was the fact that I had to get rubber-covered springs that wrapped around my ears to play sports. Plus, every soccer player knows that the best weather to play in is the rain. There are few things in life as much fun as slide tackling in the mud, unless you have to wear rec specs in order to see.
You better believe I went into contacts as soon as I could, but what about getting poked in the eye when it was time to box out for that all-important fourth-quarter rebound? At this point, I might as well admit I was also the kid who picked up his RGP off the basketball court, not many places to clean it off at that moment, so right back into my eye it went. It is no wonder adolescents and college students come in so frequently with corneal ulcers and infections due to poor contact lens habits.
Click here to read the full publication exclusive, Refractive Surgery Stories, published in Ocular Surgery News U.S. Edition, August 25, 2015.