I worked on the redesign of a Lasik machine in 2005. As part of this work, I spent a few weeks just watching lasik operations in various locations around the US. I saw several events that made me very wary of the procedure-- specifically, a technician accidentally setting a microkeratome to the wrong size and thereby detaching the corneal flap. I also talked with several patients who were back for 3rd and 4th sessions to fix problems that had occurred previously. It appeared to me that while generally the machines work well, there were occasionally drastically bad outcomes, often due to human error.
Overall, my impression was that the surgery is more risky than one is led to believe. I can't give you any good statistics on how risky it is, but I would not consider doing it myself until I saw credible statistics that suggested that the error rate was very low. From what I've read, approximately 1 in 20 lasik patients are not satisfied with the outcome of their surgeries, and this is from one of the big lasik doctors[1], who I presume would have a strong interest in describing the risks as minimal. But as far as I know, there haven't been any large-scale studies of lasik outcomes.
You might also ask the doctor what machine will be used to do the surgery. When I was watching surgeries, the doctors generally thought that the Visx machines were the best, but they were excited about the arrival of "wavefront" machines that can correct for variations in the geometry of your eyes. I bet that's mainstream by now.
[1]: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/103194.php
Overall, my impression was that the surgery is more risky than one is led to believe. I can't give you any good statistics on how risky it is, but I would not consider doing it myself until I saw credible statistics that suggested that the error rate was very low. From what I've read, approximately 1 in 20 lasik patients are not satisfied with the outcome of their surgeries, and this is from one of the big lasik doctors[1], who I presume would have a strong interest in describing the risks as minimal. But as far as I know, there haven't been any large-scale studies of lasik outcomes.
You might also ask the doctor what machine will be used to do the surgery. When I was watching surgeries, the doctors generally thought that the Visx machines were the best, but they were excited about the arrival of "wavefront" machines that can correct for variations in the geometry of your eyes. I bet that's mainstream by now.
[1]: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/103194.php