What if you are nearsighted and would love to have laser eye surgery but because your myopia is too extreme laser eye surgery would be ineffective.
What are your choices? One is that you could continue to wear glasses.
Another is that you could maybe opt for contact lenses.
Or you could see about having an operation to have implantable contact lenses inserted into your eyes.
This last option is called implantable contact lens surgery or ICL.
And it is what thousands of people are discovering and starting to take advantage of.
Most people when they think of eye surgery, naturally think of lasik.
It is a billion dollar industry and it is hard to avoid the millions of dollars spent on advertising it.
Implantable contact lens surgery is less well known and while it will probably never receive the public awareness that lasik has achieved, it is still a good option to be aware of for those who hate wearing glasses.
The idea behind implantable contact lenses is simple.
The surgeon makes one or two small incisions just below the cornea.
The implantable contact lens or ICL is then inserted through that incision.
It is placed directly behind the iris and in front of the eye's natural lens.
It is then adjusted through the small incisions until the placement is where it should be provide the necessary corrective vision.
When comparing laser eye surgery to ICL surgery, there are a number of similarities and a few differences.
The similarities are that they both can be used to improve near sightedness, far sightedness, and astigmatism.
They both also provide a 'permanent' solution to vision problems.
A basic difference is that lasik surgery is much more intrusive.
It involves directly cutting into the cornea and changing its shape.
An ICL procedure does not change the shape of the cornea.
So, you might think that an ICL procedure is inherently safer.
The countervailing thought, however, is that lasik surgery has a much richer and deeper set of experiences behind it.
There are literally millions of laser eye surgeries done each year in the U.
S.
alone.
So many are done in fact that the surgery is now considered trivial by many surgeons.
ICL surgery, on the other hand is much newer, with a lesser number of surgeons having direct experience with it.
The prudent thing to do before having either of these surgeries is to go to a recommended ophthalmologist, inform him of your situation and what you want to accomplish, and listen to his recommendations.