Is it possible to correct presbyopia using lasers as “LASIK”?
No. Laser vision correction changes the curvature of the cornea.
The cornea and the lens of the eye both play a role in focusing light rays onto the retina.
As presbyopia is the deterioration in the lens’s ability to focus, surgery to the cornea will not correct the vision.
Indeed, people who have had successful laser vision correction to correct their myopia or hyperopia will go on in later years to develop presbyopia.
However presbyopia can be corrected by lens surgery as SuperSight Surgery.
Advantages of SuperSight Surgery Over LASIK
Proponents of SuperSight point out that if one has SuperSight Surgery instead of LASIK to correct vision, then the patient never will develop a cataract since the natural lens will already have been replaced by the plastic implant and plastic implants cannot get cataracts. Proponents would argue that patients in their 50-s or older already have natural lenses that have become stiff through presbyopia, causing the need for reading glasses or bifocals (a “dysfunctional lens”). Removing and replacing an older lens that does not function as well as a younger lens, they would argue, is more reasonable than removing a fully functional, flexible lens in a 30-year-old, for example, who is too young to have developed presbyopia.
Furthermore, there are now implant technologies that can correct presbyopia, these would include a multi-focal or multifocal toric lens implant.
If a patient in their mid-50s or older has LASIK, the lens of the eye still will eventually develop a cataract (as it would have anyway) if the patient lives long enough and the patient will eventually need cataract surgery anyway. Proponents of SuperSight Surgery argue that lens replacement in the over-50s “kills two birds with one stone”. Advantages of SuperSight Surgery Over LASIK
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It is never too late to be what you might have been.
– George Eliot
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