Your eyes are the window to the world, so to speak, letting you take in your surroundings in a full and complex way. Your eyes can see beauty and suffering. They see everyday sights too, like grocery stores and parking lots and the trappings of a modern existence. Your eyes are useful too, of course, helping you to read and cook and navigate the world in a safe and efficient way.
But eye problems are far from uncommon for people of all ages. Nearsightedness is perhaps one of the most common conditions of the eye, but farsightedness and astigmatism are also commonplace, particularly as people begin to age and enter their later years, when eye degeneration tends to become more advanced. Fortunately, many of these problems can be fixed through vision correction options like the use of corrective lenses, be they contact lenses or glasses. Even prescription sunglasses are now highly available – and very much affordable, at least more so than they used to be.
However, some eye conditions are much more severe and can even lead to blindness if they are not treated (or if they do not respond to the treatments that are given to them). One of these conditions is glaucoma, a disease that impacts up to three million people here in the United States alone. And though there are treatment options that can help to slow the progression of this disease, unfortunately only around one and a half million people with glaucoma are actually aware that they have it and have been accurately diagnosed.
Unfortunately, glaucoma can lead to blindness if not diagnosed relatively early on in the progression of the disease and given a wide array of glaucoma treatment options. In fact, more than 10% of all cases of blindness can be tied back to glaucoma, making it the second leading cause of blindness not just here in the United States but all throughout the world. So if you’re now worried about glaucoma or potentially developing it later on in life, what can you do to preserve your vision?
For starters, you should be visiting your eye doctor at least once a year, as up to nearly three fourths of people do. Part of the lack of treatment for glaucoma and the lack of diagnosis seen surrounding it is simply due to the fact that many do not see their eye doctors as frequently as they should. Simply changing this fact can change your experience and preserve your vision by quite a bit.
When it comes to treatment, LASIK eye surgery is often a great way to treat a variety of eye complaints and diseases like glaucoma, which LASIK eye surgery has shown promising results as a treatment for. When it comes to LASIK eye surgery, the applications are many. In fact, LASIK eye surgery can even be used for the treatment and correction of relatively mild vision impairments such as nearsightedness and farsightedness.
And LASIK eye surgery as conducted at LASIK eye surgery centers has also been used as a treatment for cataracts. Like glaucoma, cataracts can severely impair the vision of those who are impacted by them, and they are also quite common, with up to half of all people experiencing cataracts in at least one eye by the time that they reach the age of 80. LASIK eye surgery can be hugely beneficial to cataract patients and has been proven to be quite adept at restoring vision in the eye or eyes of such patients, as cataract surgery is now more than 95% (98%, to be more precise) effective.
And many people simply seek out LASIK eye surgery because they are tired of the hassle that having poor vision prevents them. After all, poor vision can be expensive, requiring new glasses and new contacts on a regular basis. In addition to this, both glasses as well as contacts can all too easily be damaged or lost, necessitating an even higher amount of spending. But LASIK eye surgery, though certainly a higher up front cost, is likely to repair your vision for good, negating the need for corrective devices and solutions used by many in America.