Laser surgery for long sightedness
Laser eye surgery has become increasingly popular for treating long sightedness or far sightedness. As with short sighted patients, the laser is used to make alterations to the cornea, which will ensure that the light rays are properly focused.
There are a number of ways in which laser surgery can be used to treat long sightedness, and it often depends on the recommendation of your laser eye surgeon as to which specific treatment you might use. Correction treatments include PRK, LASEK, LASIK and LTK (thermokeratoplasty). Whichever method the surgeon thinks is appropriate for you, the procedure is carried out under local anaesthetic and is finished in minutes.
Depending on the type of treatment chosen by the surgeon, it can take anything from a week to several months for recovery after laser eye surgery; for this reason some people choose to have one eye operated on at a time.
What is long sightedness?
Long sightedness generally becomes more of a problem as a person gets older, but if you suspect that a child is long sighted, you should take them to an optician straight away. When left untreated in children, this condition can result in the loss of sight from one eye. Long sightedness, which may also be called hypermetropia, often runs in families and an optician may want to know if you have a family history of the condition.
When people are long sighted the eyeball is too short for the proper focusing power of the cornea and lens. Before the cornea and lens are able to bend light rays, they have already travelled to the back of the retina. In rare cases long sightedness is caused because the eyeball has been shortened by a tumour.
For a long sighted person, objects close to them appear blurred because the bending of the cornea means that the position of the light rays prevent proper focusing. The lens is flexible in young children and although close objects might be blurred, they find it easier to see thing at a distance. Long sightedness is usually treated with the prescription of glasses or contact lenses, while laser correction adds another option for treatment.