Is Laser Eye Surgery safe?
Why is it that we always seem to focus more on the negatives of a situation rather than the positives?
Let’s imagine it’s the big opportunity you’ve been waiting for: you’re delivering a presentation that could result in you getting the promotion or new position you’ve been waiting for. But due to incessant thoughts and visions of you stumbling over your words and going blank when the heat is on, you back out and ask your coworker to take the lead. You miss out on the chance to improve everything from your confidence and experience to your happiness and health, just to avoid the smallest chance of experiencing a fleeting moment of stress or embarrassment.
Why do we do this? Is it because of the media and the constant barrage of negative information that we consume? Or is it just that many of us are inherently grumpy and suffer from self-esteem issues?
Well, it’s of course worsened by what we read and watch and talk about on a daily basis, but what it really comes down to is something called the negativity bias. The negativity bias refers to the idea that things of a more negative nature (certain thoughts, emotions, social interactions), have a much greater effect on our brains than positive things of equal intensity.
Say for instance on a regular day you have three or four pleasant experiences and three of four unpleasant. According to the numbers, you should feel pretty neutral, but as the negatives hold much greater weight in your mind, you feel like you’ve had a bad day. This is the negativity bias in action.
But all is not lost — once we are aware of the negativity bias, we can learn to overcome it and start bringing more positivity into our lives.
We see this often in people considering Laser Eye Surgery. Although the treatment offers incredible benefits to those with a wide range of refractive errors, even one or two overblown scare stories and outdated opinion pieces are enough to turn people away.
Laser Eye Surgery: the safest elective procedure in the world
LASIK, having now been performed on over 20 million people, is considered by experts as one of the safest and most effective forms of elective surgery in the world.
But it’s not just the word of patients and leading laser eye surgeons we have to go by — we have a comprehensive FDA study on the safety and patient satisfaction of LASIK to prove it
The report shows that LASIK eye treatment is not only safe and cost-efficient but consistently effective too — with 95% of patients achieving 20/20 vision or higher.
We also have another large population based study from the FDA called the PROWL (Patient Reported Outcomes With LASIK) study. A group of 262 military personal and 312 civilian patients were given a questionnaire before and after treatment. The questionnaire scored and reported on visual symptoms, dry eye, and patient satisfaction. Some of the major findings include: a decrease in symptoms after surgery such as halos and ghosting compared to before surgery, patient satisfaction of over 96% for both groups, and a safety outcome of 99.82%.
After considering both the low complication rate and high patient satisfaction, it is clear to see why the treatment is so popular.
