Multifocal LASIK Eliminates Bifocals, Reading Glasses

For eliminating glasses and contacts for long-distance vision, the popular LASIK procedure is preferred.

But people in their forties with excellent long-distance vision gradually lose their ability to see close up and so regular LASIK is not enough.

Are you past your mid-forties? Do you need bifocals or reading glasses to see close up? There is help for you.

Now thanks to a development called multifocal LASIK, people even in their late sixties can eliminate their need for all glasses, even reading glasses and bifocals, while maintaining driving vision. Multifocal LASIK works for people who need almost any type of glasses. It works for people with prior LASIK -- even for those who had previous cataracts surgery. And as with regular LASIK, its results are lasting.

With increasing age and what is called presbyopia, the eye loses the ability to change focus from far to near. Some signs of presbyopia include a tendency to hold reading materials at arm's length, having blurred vision at normal reading distance, having eye fatigue along with headaches whendoing close work, or having to take off glasses to read easily.

In LASIK the surgeon uses an excimer laser to change the front eye curvature for vision correction. "Multifocal LASIK is a more intricate curvature correction producing a greater depth of focus," according to Robert L. Epstein, MD, of McHenry, Illinois, who has the nation's longest experience in the multifocal LASIK.

According to Dr. Epstein, over ninety-one percent of his multifocal LASIK patients from three and four years ago still report being completely free of all glasses at all times, and eight percent are wearing glasses for less than one hour per week.