What percentage of people who undergo laser-eye surgery view it as a major negative turning point in their life?

254

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resolved Jul 13

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65%44%

0.1%

35%1.7%

0.3%

14%

<2% because the LASIK Quality of Life Collaboration Project quizzed 216 people and 4 of them were "Very dissatisfied" or worse after 6 months had passed since surgery. Source: https://cdn.jamanetwork.com/ama/content_public/journal/ophth/935

Inspired by https://manifold.markets/SneakySly/will-i-get-lasik-by-the-end-of-the How to participate in this market: - Leave a response with your estimated probability and an argument for why it's the correct probability. - I'll resolve the market to the the most compelling argument. By "major negative turning point", I mean something more significant than "Yeah I wish I hadn't done the surgery, I see some halos at night now" and more like "I'm blind / I have huge amounts of eye pain on an ongoing basis / my vision is extremely blurry and I can't do my normal activities / etc" Jul 12, 8:49pm: Ended up resolving to two answers (one 65% and the other 35%), because I found each of the arguments compelling. Interestingly, they were both pretty different *types* of arguments, and I found both lines of thinking helpful. Thanks Jack for the share of study analyses and your thinking and thanks Charlie for sharing your thinking!

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answered

0.1%

But I believe a large fraction (probably most) of those people already had those eye complications pre-lasik, so I tried to adjust for that and estimate how many people developed new complications due to lasik.

answered

0.1%

Note, this is trying to estimate the rate of symptoms lasting e.g. 5 years. Not just 6 months, which unfortunately is what many of the studies are limited to. Some more numbers to help clarify what levels of severity we're talking about: In this paper "Patient-reported outcomes 5 years after laser in situ keratomileusis" 0.3% of patients report having a lot of difficulty with daily activities because of vision, and 0.1% report never trying to do daily activities because of vision. 5% report having a lot of difficulty reading ordinary newspaper print. 0.8% report dry eyes "all the time" and 3.7% "most of the time"; 0.0% painful/sore eyes "all the time" and 0.7% "some of the time". (Though may be worth noting this study was funded by lasik manufacturers.)

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0.1%

Oops, fixed and shared!

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0.1%

@jack requested access to the google doc! (Maybe you meant for it to be public?) Thanks for sharing this!

answered

0.1%

bought Ṁ20

I did a bit of literature review on this topic a few years ago. The studies I could find were very unsatisfactory, but I guesstimated that long-lasting "moderate" complications were probably around 0.1% - 1% rate, and I guesstimated that long-lasting severe complications are probably around 0.1% (although I don't have a very clear definition of what those severity buckets mean). My links and notes are at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mTZSt7CGSO9g-4IMG2B8TGzBG0uTFvPI6BYOfyM9u8M/edit#

answered

0.3%

@Charlie that counts as an explanation! Thanks

answered

0.3%

@TedSuzman Haha unfortunately it was just that 1/100 felt like too many and 1/1000 felt like too few.. I know one person who had problems afterward, but it was done many years ago and those problems didn't qualify as major according to your criteria.