Hacker News Reader

Comment by qgin | Hacker News Reader

LASIK is essentially an automated surgery and 1-2 million people get it done every year. Nobody even seems to care that it’s an almost entirely automated process.

View on HN

Not a doctor or an expert on this but as a patient I would say LASIK sounds less invasive than internal organ operations...

They're cutting into your eye!

With a laser!!!

Maybe not the best example:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/18/lasik-laser-...

Any intervention, heck even jogging around your house, has a risk. The only important question is: are there less automated errors than human errors? If yes, here's the progress we asked for.

If no, then it isn't. Given that they overstate their success rate by orders of magnitude there seems to be a problem.

Makes total sense, I think robotic surgeries are happening for quite a while now not only for eye surgeries.

And I think it’s another great example of how automation is happening in the medical practice.

If they can automate training me not to recoil from the eye speculum I'd appreciate it, my pesky body does not like things getting too close.

(Serious remark)

I think sedation may be an option (chemical automation, how about it?)

I was told it wasn't :(

Full anesthesia - yeah, not an option, you need to be awake. Something milder - it could be an option (depending on the state, maybe? not sure, mine was done in WA).

Neither me nor my friends (all of us who got lasik) asked for it, but my clinic gave me valium, and my friends’ clinic gave them xanax shortly before the procedure.

Tangential sidenote: that was nearly 8 years ago, and I am absolutely glad I got it done.

Noted! I'm in the UK and nobody mentioned anything. Maybe I'll ask! I'd love to not have glasses even if it was just some of the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com