What is Premium Cataract Surgery?
Some people mistakenly believe that having cataract surgery will enable them to see perfectly without glasses. Having the eye’s natural cataract-clouded lens removed and replaced with a clear artificial lens implant should certainly improve your vision. However, the conventional artificial lens is a single, fixed focus lens. It cannot give distance focus one moment and near focus the next (like the eye’s natural lens does in a young person). Thus, even after cataract surgery, eyeglasses are still needed in order to shift the focus of your eye.
Traditional cataract surgery is also limited by inability to correct astigmatism. Astigmatism is a natural blurring of vision which occurs because of an irregularly shaped cornea.
New cataract surgery techniques have been developed to reduce one’s dependence on glasses. These techniques include implanting specialty lenses into the eye and surgically changing the shape of the cornea to reduce astigmatism. Specialty lenses, called multifocal implantable lenses, are now used to reduce presbyopia (one’s ability to focus) and reduce astigmatism. Implanting these new lenses as a part of one’s cataract surgery is not easy and can be fairly expensive. As a result, patients should read this information packet thoroughly and discuss any questions with their ophthalmologist before deciding.
No current technology can eliminate glasses, and how well you will perform with these lenses can vary because of individual factors. Nevertheless, they are an excellent option for patients already needing cataract surgery who want to decrease their reliance upon glasses. While multifocal implants or astigmatism correction carry no guarantees, they should greatly improve the odds that you will be able to read and see better overall without glasses.