Life Without Glasses

Vision Correction Surgery: An Overview

If you’ve read this far, you know how the eye works. You know that you have a refractive error, which is a medical way of saying that you need glasses or contacts. You may have nearsightedness, farsightedness, or astigmatism, and, if you are over forty-five, you also likely have presbyopia impairing your reading vision. This chapter provides an overview of the various surgical procedures we use to correct your vision. The colloquial term for these procedures is vision correction surgery. Because these procedures correct refractive errors, eye doctors call these procedures refractive surgery. In this book I’ll use both terms.

We can correct refractive errors by changing either the curvature of the cornea or the power of the lens of the eye. So refractive surgery divides neatly into two categories: corneabased refractive surgery and lens-based refractive surgery.

Cornea-Based Refractive Surgery »