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Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

This is a dangerous perspective on the issue. Why should the FDA approve an elective procedure that has the possibility of ruining your life? Lots of perfectly healthy people people who had a bad outcome have committed suicide due to the unbearable pain and suffering.

If this was a life-saving procedure with a 50/50 chance of working with no alternatives, then that's different. But an elective procedure where a perfectly healthy person sees an advertisement one day, and has their life ruined the next is not something that should be acceptable.

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The FDA should approve the procedure because adults have a right to decide for themselves what risks they are willing to tolerate.

I think the issue highlighted by this article is that the risks have not been accurately communicated. It's not really been advertised as HAVING side effects, and the doctors most willing to fight for your money are probably the least likely to tell you about them.

If commercials for LASIK were like drug commercials ("... side effects include vomiting, migraines, and death..."), we'd likely have a more informed populace.

So this then would apply to all kinds of cosmetic surgeries then..Ban them all too?

In my mind, the big difference is advertising.

I hear Lasik ads regularly. They never/rarely mention side effects. Just "hey, come get Lasik and see better!"

I never hear ads for boob jobs, nose jobs, or lipo.

And medication ads are always ended with a listing of side effects. "Complications include bleeding, puking, bloat, pimples, and death."

That might be a fair argument but I got lasik about 20 years ago (it was the best money I ever spent). And when I went through my assessment more than one doctor and at least one office person went through the risks with me and I was given all the paperwork explaining the risks - that I read. So IF all Lasik facilities do that, explain the inherent risks and give them to you in written form, then people are doing this with informed consent. It isn't like you see a commercial and then go get your eyes zapped no questions asked...there is a pretty through assessment and discussion of the risks involved and what to expect afterwards.

It's entirely acceptable on a society level if the numbers are low enough. If 1 in a billion die from a vaccine, do you approve it? There's probably at least one person who died in an accident from an airbag that otherwise wouldn't have without an airbag. Do we remove airbags despite them being statistically safer? This kind of "Zero Allowable Risk" attitude is quite frankly technophobic.

Not only is it a measurement of how many lives will be improved, it was a stopgap on non-regulated procedures.

So the choice was either rubberstamp it so there was oversight or don't and potentially have even worse cases.

None of those examples you gave work here. The numbers that die from vaccines are much lower than the numbers that die without them, and it's a problem where a decision must be made. And nobody chooses or is convinced to be in a car accident. Shit just happens.

The people who get LASIK chose to do it either because they saw an advertisement or someone convinced them to do it. Nobody's life is saved by LASIK, and people can live a perfectly good life without it. They can wear glasses or contact lenses, or wait until someone comes up with a safe alternative to LASIK.

Read through some of the stories [1] from people who have had complications so you see that this isn't a minor statistic that can be easily ignored. Peoples lives are actually being ruined.

[1] https://www.lasikcomplications.com/letters.htm

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