What are the risks, complications and side effects of LASIK?
There is no risk free procedure, but the likelihood of having complications during your LASIK surgery is very small. Learn more from Dr. Marian Macsai on behalf of NorthShore University about LASIK surgery.
Transcript
The worst risk would be that of having an infection or inflammation under the flap.
If that were to happen, you need extra drops and extra visits to be followed very closely to recover your vision.
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There are always risks. There's no risk-free procedure. But the likelihood of your having complications
is very small. If I list the risks from worst to least,
the worst risk would be that of having an infection or inflammation under the flap, if that were to happen,
you need extra drops and extra visits to be followed very closely to recover your vision.
The second risk would be that of having problems with the flap of your cornea either during surgery, which
is very rare when we use a laser to create the flap, or after surgery. In the first two weeks, you really
don't want to get hit in the eye because you could move the flap. We can fix it, but we prefer not to.
The third risk is that of dryness. We want to make sure you don't have a dry eye before surgery.
And watch closely after surgery. If you tend towards dryness, you may need extra drops
or you may need to use a prescription eye drop for dry eyes or you may need
a plug placed in your lower eyelid tear drain to keep the tears in your eyes longer.
The fourth risk would be glare and halos. The first night of LASIK, most patients experience a lot of glare and halos
at night, but over the long-term, that should resolve. There's about less than 1% risk of that lasting long-term.
And last but not least, another risk of LASIK would be that of needing a fine-tuning or enhancement.
If one of your eyes doesn't heal as you and I expect because each person is slightly different,
you may need a fine-tuning or an enhancement. Now there are a few other risks that are much less common,
but we always watch the patients for, and one is skin cells growing underneath the flap, which
is rare and usually related to trauma, and the other is the unknown.
Plain and simply, when you have LASIK, you're not done living.
You've got 10, 20, 30, 50 more years of life. So whatever's genetically programmed to happen to you
as you age will happen, and LASIK won't cause it or prevent it. So if you're going to get glaucoma or cataracts
or other problems, we want you to come in once a year so we can detect those before they become a big problem.
eye health
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