Lucy And Ralf’s Laser Eye Surgery Patient Stories
Lucy and Ralf are two patients undergoing the most advanced laser vision correction procedures by Professor Dan Reinstein of the London Vision Clinic. Professor Reinstein explains the use of custom programming to help people see without glasses even for high prescriptions and ageing eyes (presbyopia).
Laser Eye Surgery Patient Stories – In Their Own Words
Lucy: Four eyes, speccy face.
Lucy: I have been short sighted all of my life as far as I can remember. I first wore glasses when I was four and I had one point at school where the glass in my glasses was so thick that I was looking down and it actually fell out and broke through the plastic of my lenses and shattered on the floor, which was very hilarious for all of my school mates.
Ralf: I work for a bank and I’m a Fund Manager. So, that involves a lot of desk work. I try to avoid the long haul travelling a bit and do video conferences as well. I can’t walk around without glasses. It started when I was 18 really and I partly blame computer work for it I think and working in offices with air conditioners and stuff. I think I put a lot of stress on my eyes.
Lucy: When I started acting my eyesight wasn’t really a problem, but as I did more work with sort of very bright television and film lights, I just found that my eyes were getting more and more tired at the end of the day with my contacts, which I think is part of getting older as well, but also quite specific to the job I do.
Searching For A Laser Eye Surgery Clinic
Professor Reinstein: Laser Eye Surgery has come to mean treating someone who wears glasses or contact lenses so that they don’t need them anymore.
Ralf: I was thinking about laser treatment when I heard about it, which must be like five or six years ago, so something like that.
Lucy: When more and more clinics started opening up I sort of picked up fliers and phoned them up and said, you know, hello, I’m interested. And they would say, what’s your prescription? And when I told them they would say, oh well,we can do one of your eyes, but we couldn’t do the other.
Ralf: I was looking for high quality and, er, the more places popped up, I felt like I lost my touch with really finding what the best, you know, person to go to would be. And, I got you know, generally very good feedback on eye laser, but I also heard about cases where people were just in a queue and then got onto the machine, and got the laser treatment and I just felt that you know, my eyes are so important to me, that I didn’t want to just go you know, to some, some er chain that would treat my eyes and maybe you know mess it up.
Lucy: A friend of mine told me about London Vision Clinic and I telephoned them and they said, well, they said rather than straight off we can’t do one, they said, well come in and have a look, they sat me down, we had a lovely chat, they tested my eyes, and then blow me down, they actually said, yes we can do something. And then probably a couple days later came absolute terror (giggles) but the initial thing was just absolute astonishment when they said yes, yeah, we can do it.
Helping Those With Presbyopia (ageing eyes) With PRESBYOND® Laser Blended Vision
We’ve developed specific, well specific ways of changing the shape of the eye that achieve the correction very, very high corrections, without compromising the night vision and that’s really research that we’ve done over the last five years. So, it’s not new but … because we’ve used now on quite a few people, but it’s very exciting because we couldn’t have done this before.
In addition to correcting short sighted, long sighted and patients with a astigmatism, a large proportion of our practice is helping people who had perfect vision to start with and then age caught up with them and they’re starting to have to put a pair of reading glasses in every room in the house.
Margaret: I need glasses for reading. I’ve worn them for over 15 years. So, I don’t have a problem seeing given I have my reading glasses, I just have a problem losing my glasses, a lot! My work involves a lot of reading, a lot of computer work and a lot of mobile phone use, texting. It would be so simple if I never needed to wear glasses again, that’s my hope.
Professor Reinstein: We’ve managed to develop a technique for correcting presbyopia or aging eyes. So, we’ve got one eye that carries the vision from distance to mid and the other eye that carries the vision from mid to near and we have addressed two things. The first is that the difference between the eyes we’ve managed to decrease to such a small level that basically everybody can tolerate it.
The second thing we have done is that we’ve improved on the optics of contact lenses because when you put a contact lens in your eye you are changing the focus of the eye from one point to another point. And what we’ve done with these very sophisticated lasers is that we’ve learned how to re-shape the cornea to change the focus of the eye from a point to a zone.