In addition to glasses and contact lenses, there’s another way to achieve good vision: refractive laser vision correction. As a Product Manager at Carl Zeiss Meditec AG – the company that developed the most cutting-edge laser in this field – Burkhard Wagner was certainly no stranger to modern corrective techniques in corneal refractive surgery. “With SMILE, the minimally-invasive eye surgery procedure for refractive correction, the surgeon, using the laser, creates and carefully removes a lens-shaped piece of tissue from the interior of the cornea,” explains Burkhard. With this technique, the corneal incision is 80% smaller than with LASIK, the most commonly used method. Thanks to the small incision, there is little disruption to the biomechanics of the cornea, speeding up the healing process.
“At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how safe a procedure is according to trial results and field reports, or how much you yourself know about the process. It’s basically a gut decision,” says Burkhard. “I have to admit that I wasn’t exactly thrilled about undergoing surgery, but I got up the courage, went to the preliminary consultation where they performed the requisite measurements on my eyes, and ultimately went through with the surgery.”