Among them is a young, highly paid pilot for United Airlines whose flying career was destroyed after LASIK surgery performed in Tucson severely damaged his night vision.
Now declared unfit to fly the jets that were his passion and his livelihood, Steve Post, 33, remains in shock a year after the surgery he hoped - as so many do - would simply liberate him from glasses and contact lenses.
"When I first realized the problems were not going away, as they said they would, I was in a lot of turmoil," said Post. "I thought, 'My God, is this the end of my career?'
"I was a captain in the world's largest airline. I loved my job, I was set for life. There has been a lot of difficulty accepting that this really is the end of my career. It's been very hard to let go."
Though sentenced to glasses and contacts to correct his poor distance-vision since he was 17, Post was never hindered in his fast-track flying career. He joined United at 24 and zoomed to 737 captain by 31 - about 10 years before most pilots do.
"I didn't have to have it (LASIK) to fly. I was just pretty frustrated with having to wear glasses all the time," he said.
While weighing going under the laser, Post did his homework, spending a year researching the surgery and the surgeons. He settled on Snyder at the UA - one of the two top LASIK surgeons in Tucson, his research found.
What went wrong for Post is one of the most common problems producing bad outcomes associated with LASIK surgery, according to his account.
The surgery itself, performed by Snyder, was not the problem. It went flawlessly, he said.
Rather, Post believes he was erroneously evaluated before the surgery by a technician and an optometrist, who pronounced him an "excellent" candidate for LASIK surgery.
In short, he alleges they failed to accurately measure the size of his pupils - one of the vital criteria for LASIK surgery. Patients with very large pupils often suffer severe problems with night vision after the surgery - what are known as "starbursts, haloes and ghosting" around lights.
It is a phenomenon that destroys the ability to see objects clearly at night.
One of the most common and debilitating complications of LASIK surgery, the problem is usually blamed on technicians not trained well enough to do accurate measurement, or clinics too eager to take on too many patients, even risky ones.
A year after his surgery, with no improvement in his night vision, Post has been permanently medically grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration. He will never fly commercial planes again.
Instead, he has returned to his home in Sierra Vista, where he does volunteer work with troubled youth, has become licensed as a foster parent, and has trained his dogs for therapy work in nursing homes.