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Lasik Helps U.S. Retain Pilots, Astronauts

The natural human aging process is in a constant war with the U.S. military and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Aging has always degraded the vision of Air Force pilots, Navy divers and NASA astronauts - and this has made it difficult for the respective services to retain them.

The government has always feared that eyeglasses and contact lenses could be broken or dislodged in the course of the service members' often grueling work, threatening life, limb and government property in the process. Even with the advent of Lasik surgery, the fear didn't subside.

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Choosing Between Traditional and Custom Lasik

Lasik eyesight-correction surgery, a phenomenal breakthrough when it was first approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration in 1995, has recently been trumped big-time by the innovation known as wavefront Lasik technology, which is some 25 times more precise than its older cousin.

The consumer still has both choices available today - the traditional versus the new custom technique - but there is an enormous difference in technology.

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New Excimer Laser

New Excimer Laser
Breakthrough Excimer Laser technology is leading to unprecedented results in the field of eye correction.

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Vision Impairment Study

If you think you might need glasses, but don’t, you’re not alone.

According to new research in the Journal of the American Medical Association, there are millions of Americans with vision impairment.

The most common reasons for vision impairment, fortunately, are refractive errors--when the lense of the eye doesn’t focus the image sharply on the retina, the seeing part of the eye. That’s where glasses and contact lenses come in. But you have to wear them to correct your vision.

“I wear glasses but only when I am in class to see the board.” Natalie admits what happens when she doesn’t wear her glasses: “It is all blurry.”

Hopefully all Natalie is nearsighted--meaning, she can’t see far away.

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VISUALLY IMPAIRED FIND MEDICINE LABELS TOO SMALL TO READ

74 year old Teresa Olender struggles to keep track of all of her medications.
“One is for the heart, one is for blood pressure, one is a water pill and the other one is for cholesterol,” says Teresa. Teresa’s problem is that she has poor eyesight, making it hard for her to the read the labels on her medicines.

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Visual Process

The visual process is the means by which the eye perceives light and movement and translates these into nerve impulses.

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Vision 20/20

An eye exam will show any abnormal arterial growth that will threaten one's eyesight. Lenses are used to re-focus light to land where it is supposed, correcting this error of refraction.

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New Lasic

Lasik is a new procedure that borrows technology from laser keratotomy and radial keratotomy to correct near sightedness and astigmatism. To correct near sightedness, doctors try to change the way light is refracted through the eye.

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Color Blindness

The first report on color blindness was written by the British chemist John Dalton who was himself afflicted with it.

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Blindness

The group of conditions known as retinitis pigmentosa or RP is the most common cause of inherited blindness. Initially the rods in the retina begin to die and the cones at the center of the retina, known as the macula, will also be lost.

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