Bay Area Wavefront LASIK and Laser Eye Surgery

There are dozens of San Francisco Bay Area Wavefront LASIK (and Bay Area LASEK) surgeons from whom to choose, including Harvard MD and surgeon Dr. Scott Hyver. Most patients will naturally base their initial evaluation of Bay Area laser eye surgery doctors on location and price. That's a good starting point, but as we'll see, these factors address only two of the three variables that define LASIK value.

Bay Area LASIK Business Models Drive Medical Approach

The location of your Bay Area laser eye surgery provider is an obvious consideration: as a LASIK patient, you'll need to see your doctor during the pre-op, treatment and post-op stages of your care. To give his Bay Area LASIK patients more convenient access to our specialized services, Dr. Hyver sees patients at ScottHyver Visioncare's Daly City, Santa Clara and San Ramon offices.

To the question of LASIK price, you'll find Bay Area LASIK surgery providers quoting fees that range from $299 per eye for conventional technology, up to $3,000 per eye for Bay Area Wavefront LASIK. This disparity reflects the different business models of the Bay Area laser vision correction providers. And this is where it gets interesting: because different business practices among the Bay Area laser vision correction surgeons, often mean different approaches to the pre-operative stage of the patient's care.

The Quality of Pre-Op Care Affects Accuracy of Your Treatment

There are few elements that bear more dramatically on your post-surgical visual outcome than the quality of your pre-op care. Consider that in the pre-op stage, your vision error and corneal configuration is mathematically characterized. These data are used by sophisticated software to generate a "laser session" file that ultimately instructs the laser on where to move over your cornea, and for how long to fire. As engineers well know from the "garbage in, garbage out" syndrome, it doesn't matter how reliable a system is: if the data input is inaccurate or corrupt, the system will produce a poor quality outcome.

The same goes for the data that's entered into the laser that treats your eyes. So what's surprising and often mind boggling in the Bay Area LASIK surgery community, is how so few doctors are really personally dedicated to the pre-op stage of your care. For example, there are several Bay Area laser eye surgery practices — corporate chains, in fact — where you don't see your surgeon until you enter the operating room on the day of your procedure!

What does this say about the accuracy of the pre-op data, that your surgeon is not even present during this critical stage of your care? Or consider the case where your Bay Area LASIK surgeon breezes into the exam room, only to conduct a quick and cursory analysis of your eyes, before he excuses himself to hurry off to his next appointment. How confident are you that this brief engagement produced a precise understanding of your vision problem?

So here's the deal: Bay Area LASIK surgery providers are not required by law to produce the best visual outcomes they can. Many Bay Area Wavefront LASIK surgeons are quite happy to produce average, run of the mill visual outcomes, because to produce really superb outcomes — the difference between 20/20 and the far superior 20/15 — means the surgeon needs to spend extra time analyzing the patient's vision. And that means he'd have to see fewer patients overall, thereby reducing his earnings potential.

"Test Twice, Treat Once" Approach

Not only is Dr. Hyver personally and extensively involved in your pre-op care, he is virtually unique among his peers in the Bay Area laser eye surgery community, in his devotion to the "test twice, treat once" pre-op philosophy. Your measured prescription will slightly vary from day to day based on various factors, such as the moisture content of the tear film covering your cornea. If your Bay Area laser vision correction surgeon only analyzes your vision error (i.e., prescription) on the day of your consultation, then your post-op visual outcome will be based solely on the accuracy of that reading. And that's risky.

It's far better to analyze your prescription again on another day, and then compare the data sets generated on the two separate days to arrive at a more accurate understanding of your vision error. That extra precision could mean the difference between a lifetime of 20/20 vision, or a lifetime of 20/15! In fact, Dr. Hyver analyzes your prescription on both your consultation day AND on your surgery day prior to your procedure. This level of analytic rigor clearly sets Dr. Hyver apart from his Bay Area laser vision correction peers, and is a great reason for you to consider ScottHyver Visioncare for your LASIK treatment.