Optical Express 'ruined my life' gripe site lives on A gripe site for people who claim high street opticians Optical Express “ruined” their eyesight with botched LASIK surgery has been allowed to remain online, after a cybersquatting panel ruled that the owner has the right to free speech. Nominet Dispute Resolution Service panelist Keith Gymer earlier this month ruled that the …
Well all surgery comes with risks, even elective surgery like this one.
But yes, I wouldn't be giving it a go, particularly as a friend of mine was refused the surgery due to only having one eye - they apparently considered the risk to the remaining eye as too high. I'd be suspicious of anyone who thinks having two eyes is a contingency plan. I use extended-wear contact lenses which more than suit my needs.
Don't consider ANY elective surgery until they can point at a statistically valid number of guinea-pigs, sorry people, who have lived to a ripe old age with no undesirable side-effects. The medical history books are full of treatments that looked like a good idea at the time, but proved to be a long-term disaster.
I won't even consider contact lenses. It'll be another couple of decades before there are ninety-year-olds who were wearing them since their twenties. Does vanity or slight convenience justify even the slightest increased risk of losing your sight in your old age?
(It is of course different if the surgery is to address a life-threatening or seriously life-limiting problem.)
I take it you've never taken Ibuprofen, Cetirizine (Zertek/Benadryl), etc? Just suffered the pain and had a runny nose?
They're chemicals, surelly a far potential long term risk than removing some un-neccessary cells (OK, thats over simplified, but still...).
They are also far more recent than Radial Keratotomy. The fact a laser is used for the cutting now rather than a blade isn't really a factor in the long term results.
The effects of drugs taken for a short time are almost certainly reversible, even if your body reacts badly. The adverse effects of long-term use of Ibuprofen are well-known, starting with increased risk of heart attacks (read the leaflet in the packet). It's a long-term effect, caused by the drug interfering with your body's self-repair mechanisms. Short-term (for a few days), it's a negligible risk.
Surgery is almost by definition irreversible. Contact lenses are equivalent to long-term drug usage, and I would also counsel avoiding elective use of a drug therapy for the rest of one's life if the treated condition isn't life-threatening or seriously debilitating.
I have in fact made that choice with respect to life-long use of anti-gout medication (no thanks). I prefer to put up with a few hours of extreme pain in my big toe maybe once a year, and treat that with diclofenac (a more powerful version of ibuprofen) for about a week when it happens. Someone suffering from gout more severely would doubtless choose otherwise, as I will if the attacks become frequent, or develop into chronic gouty arthritis, or spread to my major joints.
I've not taken that cr4p. Just suffered the pain of a hot meal, fresh garlic, some exercise, and a good sleep. Medicine is for whimps. HHOS.
In case you are wondering, there is a reason for that runny nose or fever. If you stop it, you also keep in whatever your body is trying rid itself of. It's better to be healthy than get rid of symptoms. That's like painting over rust.
I used to have extended-wear contacts - they were great, until my eyes started rejecting them... After that, no contacts would settle :(
There is also an infection risk with contacts every time you put them in or take them out (massively reduced with extended wear - so stick with them as long as you can!)... But people tend to gloss over that when poo-pooing surgery.
The benefits dwarfed the risks for me, I went to a respected eye hospital to have mine done rather than a high street chain. All risks were made clear, expectations were set (I was -9 with astigmatism).
Only thing I found was the "discomfort" when making the flap was a bit more than "discomfort" to me - rest of the procedure was fine.
In terms of the risks, you're not going to have a laser blasting a hole through your skull - risks occur around healing, so if you don't use your various eye drops for the couple of weeks after surgery, your eye may respond by trying to fix the removed cells, resulting in scar tissue forming - you could then end up with blurry vision, or having to have more surgery.
As my correction was quite massive, I was fully prepared for the night vision problems (halo's / starbursts etc) - it's quite annoying, but not really any different to when I was wearing glasses at night.
All in all, it was certainly worth it for me.
Lets not forget that the best surgeons (of any discipline) in the UK tend to work for the NHS in one form or another. So, why not go get it done by them?
See http://www.cmft.nhs.uk/royal-eye/our-services/laser-vision-correction.aspx for example. This eye hospital is one of the biggest in Europe and is one of the leading research centres in the world and is more than happy to take your money at rather competitive rates.
They do tend to be a bit economical with the truth where the risks of LASIK are concerned.
I used to be an Optical Express customer, but only because a previous employer's company heathcare plan insisted I use them and only them. I wasn't with them very long before changing to another 'unapproved' optician because they keep pestering me to have laser surgery.
It was a damn good job I did. I had to have eye surgery several years later and learned that I would have lost my eyesight entirely had I agreed to LASIK treatment.
And yes, This was something Optical Express' opticians should have spotted.
... worked for the RAF V-Force whilst they still carried nuclear weapons. Two pilots, four eyes (eye patch worn, co-pilot kept anti-flash cockpit screens closed until required) meant they could fly through the flashes of up to three nuclear explosions and still see the target.
I agree that the surgeons ought not just be relying on 'having a spare' in case a surgical procedure goes titsup... the blurb about laser eye surgery tends towards describing it a routine, completely repeatable and highly controlled.
Annihilator: "they apparently considered the risk to the remaining eye as too high"
... and they strongly disparaged my idea of having my eyes done separately, one year apart. Those two positions seem internally contradictory to me.
Upvote for extended wear lenses - get a good fit and high quality lenses and you can wear them for a month.
Yes but I still wouldn't choose Optical Express.
They managed to get my wife's prescription completely wrong even after 3 attempts of them to get it right.
She was left with glasses that made her walk into walls.
Went to Vision Express and got a new prescription completely different ( no astigmatism) and she now has a pair of glasses she can use.
Tried to get my money back from OE. they will fix them (how if they get the prescription wrong and have had 3 goes) but no chance.
AVOID them like the plague
Similar story here - I went for a contact lens fitting and the guy tried talking me into Laser surgery, which I seriously considered. Fortunately he fitted me with incorrect contact lenses at least 3-4 times, so I learnt very quickly to avoid them like the plague..
Night vision loss - I'd guess that what people notice is increased scattering of bright light, such as oncoming headlights, by the scar tissue. Light scattered into the dark parts of your visual field means that the subtle gradations of dark are washed out by the "noise".
Everyone's dark vision deteriorates with age, but an optician may point out that you have a "pre-cataract". That's clouding of the natural lens in the eye, which will lead to a cataract but which at present is only hurting one's night-driving vision. Hard question: give up night driving, or pay for and risk a cataract operation a decade before the cataract will be causing everyday vision problems?
I also wonder whether some people who try LASIK to correct severe lens defects which spectacles can't properly address, might be better treated with a full cataract operation to replace the faulty natural lens in their eye? The cataract lens-implant operation has an extremely high success rate and leaves one with vision that's in some ways more perfect than nature. I guess the risk of losing the eye altogether is higher for cataract surgery, though the risk of being left with vision that's worse after the procedure than before is surely higher with LASIK. And one does have two eyes .... But there again, eye lens implants haven't yet been tested for a full lifetime. People who have lens implants are usually elderly, for whom a lifetime is unlikely to exceed 20 years (and the implants have now been well-tested over that timescale).
More modern lasers are better and apparently this is now not the common side-effect it was in the early days. Halos and so on are widely discussed, but the treatment I had (Ultralase's top one) specifically is supposed to avoid this due to additional accuracies in the laser.
"I guess the risk of losing the eye altogether is higher for cataract surgery"
These days, cataract surgery is a simple out-patient procedure which takes around twenty minutes unless the lens breaks up during removal. It takes a few minutes longer when that happens.
The only real danger is the usual post operative infection risk and that can be managed.
...doesn't seem to be awash with blinded punters. Six people with problems from what I can see. I also read the petition, and while I don't have a particular problem with its content, it seems like they're only trying to formalise what a good clinic does anyway. I had LASIK surgery 7-8 years ago and it was a major improvement in my life. Of course my eyeballs may fall out any day now, but until then I'm a fan of the process.
Having worn extended wear lenses since I was 20, and getting dry and weary eyes every evening at 50, I decided to treat myself to a Femto-Laser procedure. They use the ultra fast laser to model a flap from the surface of the cornea instead of using a miniature dermatome to cut a flap. Then the standard laser is used to model the exposed surface of the cornea (based on maps made of the visual characteristics of the whole visual path - which also removes any astigmatism). Then the hinged flap is folded back over the freshly lasered cornea. One night with a protective lens and presto, could read the license plates from the 2nd story office. I was -6 diopter.
6 years on and I see perfectly at any distance and don't even need my reading glasses any more for the newspaper in the morning, can even read the fine print on the packaging in the shops. No issues w. night driving, better than w. glasses of contact lenses, no flares, sparkles or halos.
My only regret is that this wasn't available back in the 70/80s - when it would have given me 30 extra years of visual and living quality.
I remember a photo in National Geographic, showing the Moscow theatre this was conducted in, with a carousel of beds so that patients could be treated en masse. Obviously there wasn't the risk of infection (non contact) as with traditional forms of surgery.
I read of the exploits of a mountaineer who had had the treatment, and he only had issues when at some silly altitude on Everest... something about extreme cold temperatures or low air pressure can cause temporary problems. Obviously his treatment hadn't been botched.
(icon: "Ow, my eye, my beautiful eye")
The ruling seems correct- there is no way that you would confuse opticalexpressruinedmylife for the company's own website. (Unless your eyes had been messed up)
However, my uncle is an eye surgeon, who spends his time trying to restore eyesight to people who've gone through windscreens, people who have knifes jammed in their eyes, and, yes, people who have botched LASIK surgery. He won't touch your eyes unless there is already something wrong with them, since fixing problems with your eyes is damned hard.
Yes, 97% of people who have LASIK are quite happy with it, and yes, LASIK has been around a long time now. Would you take a 3% chance that your eyesight won't be ruined?
I'm also shocked at some of the reports on that website - OE treated both eyes at the same time! WTFery! If something goes wrong, like it did in his case, at least you would still have one un-fucked eye.
"Would you take a 3% chance that your eyesight won't be ruined?" Bit of a skewed statistic that... Seen it knocked around before.
3% don't reach driving standard eye sight without assistance (need much weaker glasses / contacts than they had before) / have unrealistically high expectations != ruined.
I wouldn't touch OE with a bargepole, but I also wouldn't band ALL corrective surgery practices in one chunk.
3% are not quite happy with it does not mean 3% have ruined eyesight. OE showed me charts which told me the exact statistical chance each of my eyes had of achieving different levels of sight (both good and bad) based on my initial prescription.
I didn't go with them but they have the data and by spreading lies you're potentially putting people off who think you know what you're talking about. All the 3 places I visited were open that sometimes things can go wrong BUT this is on a per-eye basis, and none of them could recollect ANYONE having sight 'ruined'.
Look, I'm only reporting what my uncle - an consultant NHS eye surgeon, who has literally written the book on eye surgery - has told me about it. He spends his days trying to fix botched jobs, and I am simply repeating his explicit advice to me when I expressed an interest in getting it done.
I'm sure all these providers are up-front about the risks, but the providers don't provide the after-surgery care for those with problem cases - just look at the website in the story for details of how OE treat problem cases - they go to a special unit in London.
Therefore all the treatment centers see are the successes (and the commissions). None of them can recollect having anyone having sight ruined, because anyone with ruined sight would not be dealing with them at that point.
The question should be whether your life is really seriously impaired without LASIK? If spectacles are able to correct one's vision defect, then LASIK is a risk being taken for little reason beyond convenience or vanity. If it goes wrong (which sometimes it does) one is irreversibly worse off, and spectacles then won't help.
The thought of someone risking both eyes at once is quite incredible. Have one done, and wait until one can judge the short-term results before risking the other one! Having one eye irreversibly screwed up is bad, being functionally blinded is far, far worse.
But the chances of one eye going wrong is independent of the other... so even if the first goes well, the second is as likely to go wrong.
SOME practitioners DO do it that way, however that means undergoing two procedures and therefore two sets of recovery time, as well as twice as much surgeon time.
NO! look up "common mode failure". Examples: incompetent surgeon /operator, incorrectly calibrated LASIK equipment, idiosyncratic (unusual, bad) reaction to the surgery in one particular patient (ie you). Any of these could cause BOTH your eyes to be knackered if you have the procedure performed on both eyes at once.
Same reason airlines NEVER service both engines on a twin-jet at the same time!
I had my eyes done at Optimax at Newcastle about 6-7 years ago, both done by epi-lasik in 15 minutes and corrected astigmatism at same time. Think I paid around £850 at the time, completely painless getting it done although once the anaesthetic started to wear off it was rather painful, but worth it IMHO.
Can honestly say that was the best £850 I've ever spent but maybe I was lucky as I experienced zero side effects.
OpEx did my laser surgery 7 years ago - Newcastle branch if its relevant.
I went from -4.5/-4.25 with astigmatism to 0.0 in both eyes (or from 40/6 to 4/6 if you prefer)
I had no post op issues, my last eye test showed -0.25/0.0 so very slight movement in prescription, no correction necessary - using a different optician - not OpEx.
The pros: can see the bedside clock without squinting, cheap sunglasses, can keep an eye on my 6 yr old son in the swimming pool without having to rely on looking for a blur in bright trunks. Could see clearly 2 hours after the surgery, no night vision problems.
The cons: did not like the table tipping past vertical (head down) or the smell of burning hair when the laser clipped an eyelash. The steroid eyedrops taste foul.
The burning hair smell is not eyelashes, its your eyeball....
I had it done and the laser goes no where near your eyelashes.
One good thing I was told is I have a thick enough cornea for 2-3 more treatments if I need them in the future...
3 years down the line I still have great eyesight, and no night vision problems!
I used Optimax for my eyes, very good result history, good surgeon, and most importantly, its 90% automated, that is why I said yes, flaps are cut by machine, prescription is found by machine, eye surface is reshaped by machine, so really it was how much do I trust the developers?
and my answer, is quite a bit, due to the evidence..
Now I have 20:10 vision!
Optical Express.... sounds too much like a fly by nature outfit to me....
If they believe it is the case, then they could use UK libel laws to stop people posting.
However, I think, that they realised they would lose the case, so tried the easy way out instead. Now what they have is everyone looking up the website and thinking twice about using them.
Foot, meet mouth.
I had LASIK on both eyes (by Optical Express, May 3). £2,500.
Apart from allergic reactions to two of the eyedrops and a small corneal injury (sharp stray piece of plastic from the disposable vials), no "complications" as such, just significant under-correction in the right eye.
End result? My vision is *nearly* as good as it was wearing specs - just short of 20/20 in the left eye - but with a LOT of extra 'floaters', and all goes to pot in low light when my pupils dilate beyond the correction zone. Dry eye greatly improved, but still needing drops a couple of times a day.
Improvement? No chance. If I could undo it, I would in a heartbeat. If I could somehow pay another £2,500 to have it all undone, I'd jump at the chance. Technically, though, this qualifies as a "success".
And now have perfect 20 12 vision, including at night.
For the none opticians, I can see clearly at 20 metres what a 'normal' person sees clearly at 12.
I would recommend them, but I also support the site's right to exist as it provides a balance to all their advertising.
If you are thinking about laser eye surgery then go and talk to Optical Express and all the others,
But make your own decision based on the risks/benefits for YOU.
Had Lasek treatment back in May, having strung me along telling me the prescription is still healing, finally just found out I've been over corrected by 1.25%, now I need different glasses for every thing.
OE are real keen to have the opportunity to screw with my eyes even more.
Not to mention the constant drops I have to use, the sore eyes when I wake up in the mornings.
Why did I do it? Combination of believing the sales pitch and putting too much faith in the surgeon. Boy did I make a life changing MISTAKE.
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