Finding a good surgeon for your
LASIK care is not as simple as it sounds. With any professional
service including elective surgery, there can be wide variations in
critical factors including diagnostic capability, treatment
capability, surgeon experience, surgeon judgment, staff training,
and procedure price, among others.
If you find it helpful, use the
following criteria as your own personal guide:
Experience.
Make sure your surgeon has performed at least
1,000 LASIK procedures.
Personal
Recommendation. Often, the best
recommendations come from friends, family, or acquaintances that
have already been to a particular doctor for vision correction
care.
Meet and Speak
With the Surgeon Personally . In
some practices, you don’t get a chance to meet the surgeon
before the day of surgery. If the doctor is “too busy doing
surgery” to speak with you personally, you are better off to
leave and find another surgeon.
Speak to
Patients, Ask to speak to some of
the patients that have had their procedures done with this
particular doctor or center.
Results:
The more meticulous and detail-oriented surgeons carefully track
and statistically analyze their patient's outcomes. Ask the
surgeon to can show you his (or her) results and complication
rate. The surgeon and/or staff should be willing to discuss
these issues with you candidly and openly (not defensively). At
BEST LASIK, our patients achieve 20/40 or better vision 99.9% of
the time, when optimum distance vision is targeted. This level
of vision would allow you to pass the DMV vision test without
the need for corrective eyewear.
Enhancement
Rate: In any practice, some small
percentage of patients may benefit from a touch-up (sometimes
called enhancement) to achieve ideal vision. One of the
advantages of LASIK is that it can be "enhanced" or "touched up"
if there is an under- or over-correction from the targeted goal.
Seek out a surgeon who has an enhancement rate equal to or
better than (below) the national average (about 8%). Our
enhancement rate at BEST LASIK is now about 2.2% for patients
with nearsightedness and astigmatism, followed for one year
after initial treatment.
Licensure.
Check to see that the surgeon has a valid medical license, and
that the license is in good standing. State medical boards
including the California Medical Board typically list this
information on their web sites.
Litigation
Search.
If you are extra careful, you may want to check one of the
public information databases on the internet, searching for
evidence of malpractice claims against a particular surgeon
and/or laser center. I have used and recommended
knowx.com for this purpose. This information is not
free, but may be worth it. The number of
malpractice filings against a doctor does not in itself indicate
the severity or culpability in any individual case; but in my
opinion, more than a very small number of claims is usually not
a good sign.
Dr. Cheng has one of the cleanest (if not THE cleanest)
record of any Lasik surgeon in California. Dr. Cheng has
had 0 lasik lawsuits, 0 lasik claims, and 0 lasik
settlements.
At BEST LASIK, we take the
responsibility for your individual care very seriously. LASIK
is an extremely safe procedure when performed by a well-trained and
skilled surgeon. I advise seeking an experienced surgeon that will
make your LASIK procedure seem like a few effortless minutes
resulting in improved vision. We invite you to come to BEST LASIK,
learn about vision correction, then relax and enjoy the LASIK
experience with the confidence of knowing you are in the hands of a
caring, experienced, well trained team using state-of-the-art
technology
