I, too, have lousy vision. I'm slightly myopic at -11.75L, -12.50R. If you don't know what these numbers mean, imagine it this way: I can barely focus on my hand, when the palm of my hand is touching the tip of my nose.

I've been considering LASIK, and some of the more radical treatments, but I have developed this theory. Until my opthamologist is willing to have a procedure done on himself, I won't do it. He does several thousand LASIK procedures a year, and is very well known. However, he's still wearing glasses. And as long as I can wear contacts, I will, until he does a procedure himself.

SurgicalEyes is a resource for people that have had unsuccessful LASIK, RPK, RK, AK, ALK, etc procedures. This is the place to look for the 1% that you hear about that have problems. These include such problems as dry eyes, halos, starbursts, retinal tearing, etc. Another link with some good information about how eyesight is measured, how to read the prescription, etc is here.

That being said, LASIK DOES work for a lot of people. I know directly of 3 people that have had it done, and are thrilled with it. No problems, near perfect vision, etc. They were starting from a more middle ground than I would be however, and as such, were better candidates.

The new technology is pretty remarkable. Rather than just determining the overall correction factor, as they do for contacts or glasses, they actually map the eye from several hundred to several thousand points, producing a complete retina topology map. This allows them to adjust the correction so that even if the top of the eye is -2.0 diopters off, and the bottom is -2.3, it all comes out correctly. Pretty cool stuff...

But I may wait until Nikon comes out with Digital Eyes, and just skip this whole analog thing...

--Chris

e-mail jcwren