Lens Replacement or Implant Surgery
Refractive Lens Exchange
Lens replacement surgery may be a better option than LASIK if you are over the age of 45, longsighted and wish to have both distance and near vision restored permanently. It is also indicated if your prescription is too high, either long sighted or short sighted, for Laser Eye Surgery to be performed safely.
Lens replacement surgery procedure involves removal of the eye’s natural lens and replacement with an artificial lens. The artificial lens may be multifocal, toric, aspheric or a combination of these.
With refractive lens exchange you may be able to see clearly without glasses for both distance and near and this is a permanent correction to your vision. The lens replacement surgery procedure is performed as day surgery in our laser facility.
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A toric lens is a lens that corrects astigmatism. Astigmatism means that your eyes are slightly oval-shaped like a football, instead of perfectly round like a golf ball. And that needs to be corrected, otherwise it makes your vision blurry, far away and up close. The toric lens is essentially a slightly oval-shaped lens that corrects the ovalness in your eyes and gives you better vision, generally either better distance or reading vision but not both.
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We have a choice of lens implants for cataract surgery. Traditionally, everybody got what we call a standard lens implant. It gives very good vision, but our expectation is you wear glasses after surgery to see really well. Over the last 10 years, we now have lens implants called Advanced Lens Implants, allow us much more opportunity to give you great vision without glasses after surgery by using these implants.
It’s good because we’re doing the surgery anyway, so it’s an opportunity to correct your vision without taking extra risk as you might by having some kind of vision correction surgery. So it’s a really great option for people who wanna see clearly without glasses.
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The multifocal lens is an advanced lens that gives very good far away and up close vision. About 90% of people with this lens wear glasses never or just sometimes. Disadvantages of the multifocal lens are that you will often experience some halos or glare around lights at night, although that’s usually not bothersome. And the crispness of distance vision is not as good as other lenses, so there is some tradeoff there. The multifocal lens is best for people who have a high desire to be free of glasses most of the time or all of the time, and are willing to put up with some blurriness for distance vision.