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Laser Eye Surgery Patient Stories – In Their Own Words – Lucy and Ralf – Part 2

How Lucy And Ralf Found The London Vision Clinic

Professor Reinstein: The range of correction in refractive surgery is now pretty much unlimited.

Lucy: At my first appointment they gave me a sheat of questions that the London Vision Clinic recommend you ask any surgeon that your considering using for this kind of operation. And, a second sheat of these questions with the answers given by Professor Reinstein, e.g. safety records, safety of all the different procedures, just incredibly detailed, but very impressive.

Ralf: For me that’s really one of the key points really to see, what risks am I taking? You know, I have only two eyes, I don’t want to mess it up.

Professor Reinstein: Well, the way that we manage fear is through confident evidence based information, not hearsay.  So, we feel that what we’re doing is on solid ground.  Knowledge dispels fear!

Ralf: They’re using the latest technology and they’re using German technology as well, so I could relate to that.  I met Professor Reinstein and he explained that he’s actually cooperating with Zeiss designing the machines, you know, to his needs. I just felt I was in good hands when I met him, so I thought I want to go for the best.

Professor Reinstein: Becoming a laser eye surgeon can be a very short path or it can be an extremely long path and I decided to take the long one.  I, well, I went to medical school and became a Doctor.  I then specialised in eye surgery.  Once I specialised in eye surgery, I then specialised in one part of the eye which is called the cornea, that’s the front window in front of the eye.  And once I was a cornea specialist, I then specialised in altering the cornea to change the focusing and that’s Laser Eye Surgery. So, if I count the number of years that I spent training, that would be a total of 18 years.  Okay, so how are you feeling?

Lucy: quite scared.

Professor Reinstein: Okay well, that would be normal. It would be abnormal if you weren’t a little bit scared, yeah, but, I’m not scared!

Lucy: Okay.

Professor Reinstein: Alright. The laser that we use for Laser Eye Surgery is a highly specific piece of equipment (laser noise) and because it’s a very high energy laser the light is absorbed in a very, very small area of the cornea and it just so happens that you can change the shape of the cornea by thousandths of a millimeters and you can affect a change in the focusing of an eye.