Am I a good candidate for LASIK?

The ideal candidate for LASIK is over 18 years of age, not pregnant, and free of eye disease. Your eyeglass or contact lens prescription should be stable, and you must be willing to accept the potential risks, complications and side effects of LASIK surgery.

Although not all refractive errors can be corrected by LASIK, the FDA has recently approved an expansion of the parameters for vision correction. If you have been told in the past that your prescription could not be corrected by LASIK, you should ask again.

It is important that anyone considering LASIK have realistic expectations. Most people are corrected to 20/40 vision or better, and many achieve 20/20. In some cases, your doctor may decide to perform a second surgery, called an enhancement, to refine your results.

Depending on your vision error and age, LASIK may decrease your dependence on glasses or allow you to do without them entirely. You should be aware that with or without LASIK, almost everyone with good distance vision will need reading glasses by their 40s or 50s. For that age group, your doctor may suggest a procedure called monovision, which corrects one eye for near vision and the other for distance.