LASIK Surgeon Experience
If you’re thinking of getting LASIK surgery, there are many things that you have to take into consideration. What type of surgery would fit your needs? Which eye, or both? What does your recovery period look like? What are the possible complications for the surgery? And, perhaps, most importantly, exactly how experienced is your surgeon?
This last question is probably the most significant consideration you will have while thinking about LASIK, because every other question ends up depending on the answer to this question.
Surgeon experience is vital to LASIK, because though it’s a short surgery, it requires an inordinate amount of skill. Moreover, the stakes for a LASIK surgeon are quite high—if they make a mistake, their patient could end up blind. So, with all these facts, surgeon experience can end up significantly impacting your LASIK surgery and recovery time.
How? Well, read on to find out.
1) Complications
If you’re having your surgery performed by an inexperienced surgeon who is not under the supervision of a more experienced one, you may end up having to deal with complications. LASIK procedures, especially procedures that still use blades to create the flap, require a lot of precision.
An inexperienced surgeon working solo might make mistakes with cutting the corneal flap. However, an experienced surgeon, or even an inexperienced surgeon working with an experienced one, will know what to look out for, improving your chances of emerging from the surgery with less complications.
2) Recovery time
If you’ve had surgery performed by an inexperienced surgeon and are suffering from complications that occurred during the procedure, then your recovery time could end up being much longer than you anticipated.
If it’s a simple issue, like flap realignment, you could be looking at an extra two or three weeks of recovery. For more serious complications like blindness, you might have to deal with recovery as well as therapy to compensate for the disability. Having an experienced surgeon perform the procedure ensures that you have the shortest recovery time possible.
What is experience?
Okay, so now that you have two very good reasons why you should choose a surgeon with experience, you might be wondering about what constitutes experience in this case.
Well, your surgeon should have completed their undergraduate studies, medical school, f4years in an ophthalmology residency program, preferably one extra subsidiary fellowship, and should have undergone a LASIK-specific curriculum from an affiliated institute or program.
