Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Why it's done
By Mayo Clinic staff
LASIK eye surgery may be an option for you if you have one of these vision problems:
- Nearsightedness (myopia). When your eyeball is slightly longer than normal or when the cornea curves too sharply, light rays focus in front of the retina and blur distant vision. You can see objects close up, but not those far away.
- Farsightedness (hyperopia). When you have a shorter than average eyeball or too-flat cornea, light focuses behind the retina instead of on it. This makes near vision and sometimes distant vision blurry.
- Astigmatism. When the cornea curves or flattens unevenly, the result is astigmatism, which disrupts focus of near and distant vision.
- Presbyopia. Age-related eye changes result in the gradual loss of your eyes' ability to focus actively on nearby objects.
Your eye doctor will likely recommend that you try other ways of correcting your vision — such as by using glasses or contact lenses — before you turn to LASIK eye surgery or another similar refractive procedure.
- Bower KS. Laser refractive surgery. http://www.uptodate.com/home/index.html. Accessed Nov. 4, 2008.
- Sakimoto T, et al. Laser eye surgery for refractive errors. The Lancet. 2006;367:1432.
- Doane JF, et al. LASIK: Indications and techniques. In: Yanoff M, et al. Ophthalmology. 2nd ed. St. Louis, Mo.: Mosby, Inc.; 2004. http://www.mdconsult.com/das/book/body/109505671-2/0/1197/24.html?tocnode=50819839&fromURL=24.html#4-u1.0-B0-323-01634-0..50024-9_519. Accessed Nov. 4, 2008.
- Wavefront-guided LASIK. American Academy of Ophthalmology. http://www.medem.com/medlb/article_detaillb.cfm?article_ID=ZZZ5NVRIREE&sub_cat=0. Accessed Nov. 4, 2008.
- What should I expect before, during, and after surgery? U.S. Food and Drug Administration Center for Devices and Radiological Health. http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/LASIK/expect.htm. Accessed Nov. 4, 2008.
- Schallhorn SC, et al. Perspective: Avoidance, recognition, and management of LASIK complications. American Journal of Ophthalmology. 2006;141:733.
