I recently completed an interesting RK case from East Texas. Ironically we started last October, but because of his business, he couldn’t get in again until April. Then the next visit was early July, and the final visit was last week. He had to have the lenses by August because of an important vacation that required good vision. And we gave it to him.
His unaided vision was 20/50 in the right eye and 20/200 in the left. Best corrected vision with eyeglasses was 20/40 and 20/30. His Laserfit lenses required a toric correction, with best visual acuity of a little better than 20/30 in each eye with those. I then applied a wavefront guided correction and got him to 20/20 in each eye. Hello world!
Data on file shows that the wavefront guided Laserfit lenses tend to improve the visual acuity by an additional 1 to 2 lines of vision on average. I can’t emphasize how important that is to my RK patients – all patients. Getting someone to 20/20 vision who has not been able to be corrected to better than 20/30 with anything is an important psychological milestone. For one thing, 20/20 vision is perceived as ‘normal’ vision. Crossing that 20/20 barrier also involves reducing the higher order aberrations by a significant amount.
The point I am trying to make here is that further improvements in visual acuity are possible when the higher order aberrations are reduced. Of course 20/20 is closer to the absolute threshold than 20/30, and going from 20/20 to 20/15 may not be as dramatic as going from 20/30 to 20/20. When I say we fight for every line of acuity for our patients, I mean it.
