Many patients have asked a relatively simple question, “why was LASIK invented at all”? A decade ago very few people even knew the word LASIK, and while the word had become a part of our lexicon, the real reason that doctors choose to do LASIK escapes many peoples understanding. We were one of the first handful of doctors in the United States, and the first to realize the potential benefits of LASIK for vision correction almost fifteen years ago. Since that time there are now over 10,000 LASIK doctors in the USA alone and a multiple of this number worldwide. The reasons for the success of LASIK are numerous but in a sentence it provides rapid, accurate, and relatively painless restoration of vision to a wide range of refractive errors. Patients are able to see like they were wearing contact lenses without all of the bother, cost, inconvenience, and risks of contacts. In general they have better visual function than provided with glasses in the same way that contact lenses are better than glasses for so many reasons. This simple question is profound, because it touches on an invention that has changed the way in which the world views vision correction and has helped millions of people worldwide to see better without the aid of glasses or contact lenses. For perhaps millions of years, much of human kind has suffered with vision problems. There are the serious eye diseases such as cataracts, glaucoma and a myriad of other problems. Beyond this is the simple fact that many people are unable to see clearly at distance, near, or both. This is from the imperfections of the eyeball as a camera and this was greatly helped over that last few hundred years by glasses and more recently in the last 50 years by contact lenses. Although with the advent of lasers, there was a hope that such technology could improve vision, limitations in the nature of the eye had limited laser application to vision correction until the advent of LASIK . LASIK is a hybrid procedure, that is it involves two steps which together are able to improve vision very rapidly and predictably for patients with ametropias. The first step is to create a potential space for the laser to correct the vision and the second is to do the correction itself. In the early days of LASIK about 15-20 years ago , this potential space was made with a device called a microkeratome. This is a miniature shaver which can peel a thin layer of outer tissue from the cornea which remains attached at the edge or “hinge”. Another laser, the excimer laser then focuses on the freshly cut surface, and removes tissue in a programmed manner to reshape the eye. Finally, the flap is replaced which assumes the contour of the newly shaped cornea beneath it. It is the transfer of the shape combined with covering the treated area with living tissue that makes LASIK so remarkable. Healing occurs at the edge or seam of the flap and the eye barely knows that anything has occurred beneath. The vision is rapidly restored with no significant healing response, which is key to the success of LASIK. Newer lasers, called femtosecond lasers, are able to make the flap layer more precisely without a cutting blade but fundamentally perform the same function. This all laser approach is a safer and slightly more effective way of restoring vision by LASIK. The current state of the art in LASIK is to use advanced femtosecond lasers such as our Visumax to make a flap, and a wavefront optimized excimer laser like our Zeiss or our Allegretto laser(s) to reshape the cornea. With this type of treatment we have a very low complication rate, and excellent vision results in most cases. We become complacent very quickly with new technologies but it is a truly amazing and revolutionary accomplishment that in a procedure that lasts only a few minutes , a persons vision can be corrected from a lifetime of limitations.