That is good evidence, but I’d disbelieve its reliability a bit because it is so funny. Like obese dieticians, or non-rich investment brokers, or divorced marriage counselors.
Excellent point. I’d have difficulty believing this guy too, if he hadn’t predicted millimeter wave full-body scanners wouldn’t work before anybody in the media knew they wouldn’t, based on the fact he’d been building them.
He says the main problem with LASIK is that when you correct myopia with it, your presbyopia (inevitable hyperopia from being over 40) is going to be worse by the same degree that the operation made the myopia better, and you’re going to be stuck with it for much longer. Glasses or contacts for myopia you can just take off when you reach that age, but LASIK for myopia will need to be countercorrected. He didn’t object to LASIK for hyperopia.
One possible reason is that (reputedly, among opthalmologists) one of the side-effects of Lasik is thought to be fractionally worse colour discrimination. Which might be fine for Joe Public, but very bad for people who spend their careers identifying and manipulating sub-milimeter structures.
How much of that is age-related? LASIK doesn’t remove the need for reading glasses—it pegs your eyes to 20⁄20 if done properly, but as you age you lose the ability to alter focal distances, so you’re only 20⁄20 at a particular distance(usually far-field).
Since we’re already at the anecdote level: A friend of mine saw a LASIK surgeons conference at his university and he says they’re all wearing glasses.
To get away from the anecdote level and bring in an empirical source, LASIK satisfaction rates are at 95.4%. [non-paywall pdf]
Thank you for a very interesting read, and especially for thinking to provide a non-paywall link.
That’s the most impressive list of declared conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen.
That is good evidence, but I’d disbelieve its reliability a bit because it is so funny. Like obese dieticians, or non-rich investment brokers, or divorced marriage counselors.
Excellent point. I’d have difficulty believing this guy too, if he hadn’t predicted millimeter wave full-body scanners wouldn’t work before anybody in the media knew they wouldn’t, based on the fact he’d been building them.
He says the main problem with LASIK is that when you correct myopia with it, your presbyopia (inevitable hyperopia from being over 40) is going to be worse by the same degree that the operation made the myopia better, and you’re going to be stuck with it for much longer. Glasses or contacts for myopia you can just take off when you reach that age, but LASIK for myopia will need to be countercorrected. He didn’t object to LASIK for hyperopia.
One possible reason is that (reputedly, among opthalmologists) one of the side-effects of Lasik is thought to be fractionally worse colour discrimination. Which might be fine for Joe Public, but very bad for people who spend their careers identifying and manipulating sub-milimeter structures.
How much of that is age-related? LASIK doesn’t remove the need for reading glasses—it pegs your eyes to 20⁄20 if done properly, but as you age you lose the ability to alter focal distances, so you’re only 20⁄20 at a particular distance(usually far-field).