l portion of the cornea must be made steeper; and this is accomplished by removing corneal tissue in a donut shaped pattern, or in another words more from the peripheral areas. Eyes with astigmatisms focus light waves unevenly because of the irregular shape of the cornea; football shaped as opposed to the usual round, basketball shaped corneas. The excimer laser can remove corneal tissue asymmetrically, and so the end result is a round, symmetrical surface (Sloat, 90).LASIK, did not just develop suddenly overnight in some ophthalmologists mind; however, LASIK is part of an evolved procedure (Gallo, 127). Todays vision correction revolution dates back decades through the sheer genius, persistence, and ingenuity of Professor Jose Barraquer (Slade, 8). Refractive surgery, which is the type of surgery LASIK is characterized as, started in Bogota, Columbia in 1948 when Barraquer started performing a procedure called Freeze Keratomileusis. This procedure involved adding a disc of corneal tissue (donated from another person) with a predetermined curvature in the cornea giving it structure. In a journal found 2 decades after this procedure, it stated that patients who had myopia could see better after the procedure; however he stated a few months after the surgery, that some patients would lose their eyesight due to infection. The reason for this was that Barraquer used an unsterilized shaver to cut the cornea. It was not until the late 1970s that refractive surgery resurfaced when US surgeons visited the Soviet Union. The surgeons brought back a procedure called Radial Keratotomy (RK) which made spokelike incisions in the cornea by using a handheld diamond scalpel. The results were good, but scientists noticed that the incisions structurally weakened the eye. Scientists and doctors worked for 2 decades to develop Radial Keratotomy into a procedure that was both safe and produced good results. Then in 1994, a company by the name of S...
