Longing To Throw-Away Your Glasses?
When laser eye surgery goes wrong, the effects can be devastating.
Take the case of Stephanie Holloway, a 21-year-old, short-sighted book dealer from Lee-on-Solent, Hampshire, who dreamed of joining the police without needing to wear glasses or contact lenses.
Her eyes were left so painfully sensitive to light after laser surgery in 2008 that she has to wear sunglasses almost all the time.
Six months ago, a court ruled that Stephanie, now 28 and jobless, had not been warned properly about the risks and the High Street chain involved was ordered to pay her £500,000 in damages.
Sasha Rodoy, a 57-year-old Londoner, says that her eyesight was ruined by laser eye surgery in 2011.
A former fashion designer – ‘before my life fell apart’ – she bitterly regrets the day she was tempted by a cut-price offer of £2,000 to have both eyes treated.
Her short sight wasn’t that bad – minus 4.0 diopters in one eye and minus 4.25 in the other (a diopter is the measure of lens strength needed to correct sight), which is average for short-sightedness and easily corrected with glasses or contact lenses.
‘It wasn’t done for vanity,’ she told Good Health. ‘I did it to save money on glasses.’
But Sasha now needs glasses not only for distance, but also for intermediate and close-up – and she suffers debilitating side-effects, including dry eyes, loss of depth perception and starbursts around lights at night.
Sasha settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
In 2012, she set up the website My Beautiful Eyes to support other victims of laser surgery and claims she’s been contacted ‘by thousands of people’.
Every year, an estimated 100,000 people in the UK have laser eye surgery – around 75 per cent are treated by the big three High Street players (the market leader Optical Express, and Optimax and Ultralase – these two are owned by the same company).
The rest of the market is divided between much smaller clinics and some hospitals, such as Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London.
There is no doubt many people are more than satisfied with the results of their laser eye surgery.
Yet individual horror stories show the complications can be life-changing.
And as Sasha Rodoy discovered when she sought help, laser eye surgery treatment is completely unregulated – not only is there is no independent watchdog monitoring the results of companies or individual surgeons, or collecting data, there are no obligatory qualifications needed in order to perform it.
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