Corneal Refractive Therapy

[handlesaregay]

Anyone heard of this? Does the FAA have a position on it? Looks like an intriguing alternative to surgery.


http://www.flowersvision.com/procedures-crt.html

http://www.paragoncrt.com/

 

[AV80R]

Nothing new here, it’s a newer version of ortho-K lenses. In the past when many major airlines required an uncorrected vision of 20/100 or better (United Airlines prime example) this was a very common method of getting through pre-employment medical. You had to wear those lenses for 8 hours or so a day and they temporarily reshaped your corneas and thus improved your vision; sometimes the improvement lasted only a few hours, sometimes it lasted for days. The more often you wore it, the longer the improvement lasted.

Often though, the lenses (which are hard lenses) left tiny scars on the corneas and the doctors could tell you’ve been cheating and would let you go through other tests where they could find out your true “uncorrected” vision. Nowadays with Lasik, etc, ortho-K is not used a whole lot. The lenses you are talking about are the “newer” generation which lets your eyes “breath” more and therefore supposedly you can sleep in them. However, the principle of reshaping your cornea is the same.

Personally, I think it’s crazy to sleep with contact lenses, whether they claim it’s safe or not. We work in a fairly “dry” environment and to risk corneal scratching just for the sake of convenience is too great of a risk in my mind.