Will I have better than 20/20 vision after laser eye surgery?

If you are considering laser eye surgery, it is important to have realistic expectations. As we all know, the same result with different expectations can leads to different degree of satisfaction.

It is a common myth that people think laser eye surgery will give them "super" vision or better than 20/20 vision . Yes, a small proportion will see better than 20/20 but they are usually people who had great vision with glasses or contact lenses before surgery i.e. they had super healthy eyes and the only thing wrong with their eyes and vision was their spectacle/prescriptive error. Most of the population even with so called perfect vision don't see better than 20/20. The very definition of 20/20 is that this is the vision that the majority of the population have. Laser eye surgery only corrects your prescriptive error- it doesn't make your eye somehow better than it was before.

The other reason why better than 20/20 is not a reasonable expectation after laser eye surgery is that laser eye surgery isn't 100% accurate in everyone. Why you may ask? Well again its because eyes may not react in a 100% perfect fashion to the laser. I will often say to my patients that the laser would be accurate 100% of the time if your eye was a piece of inorganic metal or plastic... but it's not. Your eye like yourself is unique and hence the lack of a perfection guarantee. About 2% of patients at our practice at Vision Eye Institute will need an enhancement or 2nd laser if the first one results in an under or over-correction of your refractive error.

So better than 20/20 vision after laser eye surgery? Probably not. 20/20 and happy with the result? Most likely yes. But the best way to understand your individual chances of success, is to be assessed.