Is LASIK worth it if your eyes aren’t that bad?


The decision of whether LASIK is "worth it" depends on how unhappy you are with your current vision. You might imagine the out-of-pocket cost of LASIK would be directly related to how nearsighted you are: you would be getting more "value" for the money treating a higher degree of nearsightedness.

In reality, there is not nearly as much correlation between the degree of nearsightedness and patient satisfaction as you would think. Some patients who could see 20/25 pre-op become ecstatic over a 2-3 line of improvement. This can be just as rewarding if only subjectively to patients who are 3-4 times as bad off, e.g. with 20/200 pre-op vision. It all depends on how well you are functioning with the vision you have versus the kind of vision you want.

Written by J. Trevor Woodhams, M.D. - Chief of Surgery, Woodhams Eye Clinic