Originally posted by: TygGer
What there is to believe or disbelieve is:
1. The quoted statement says that, "Nearsighted patients who do not have refractive surgery actually retain the ability to see up close naturally after the age of 40 simply by removing their glasses. LASIK increases the need for reading glasses by changing the eye?s focus from near to distance."
People on the "other" forum say that by being near-sighted, you have built-in magnafying glasses and won't need reading glasses later in life.
Everyone has built in magnifying glasses. That's the function of your lens and cornea. The eyes of nearsighted people with presbyopia are stuck at near vision. The eyes of LASIK patients with presbyopia are stuck at far vision. It just depends which one you want . The only real issue I have with the statement is that "LASIK increases the need for reading glasses." This is a misrepresentation. Take a person who is nearsighted. If they do not get refractive surgery, they will get old and need to wear glasses all the time. They can remove them to read. If the same person had refractive surgery sometime in their life, they will get old and need reading glasses to read. I suppose you could call that an increase in the need for reading glasses. You just leave out the part about not needing regular glasses for however manys years of their lives until presbyopia develops. The benefit of refractive surgery is that patients are more likely to be able to be corrected for monovision later in life. This might not be possible for nearsighted patients since your eyes need to be within about 3 diopters of each other for monovision to work. Or you could get surgery to induce monovision while you're young and try to avoid this when you get older.
Also consider the term "nearsighted" encompasses a wide range in different people. Depending on their refractive error, some people may need to hold reading material at different distances from their face. If you're lucky, you can hold a book at a comfortable distance and still make it out. I was at -9.00 in both eyes. I literally had to have the words within an inch of my nose for it to be legible. That wasn't really how I was planning on reading in the later years of my life.
2. What you said is similar to what the eye docs have told me. Presbyopia as nothing to do with what is corrected (or uncorrected) with lasik.
Shimmen, do you mind if I quote your explanation?
I'm sorry, but I'd actually prefer you didn't. Since they're my words, I would feel obligated to back them up against the inevitable backlash they'd receive at the other message board, and I don't really have the time or patience to deal with that. Here, with ATOT, I know people are at least open to new information and discourse with regards to this subject. At the forums you posted, the general attitude towards LASIK is so fiercely negative that it would be like trying to have a discussion about politics or religion; a lot of back and forth, but at the end of the day nobody changes their mind.