There. There's your 1 in 20. Happy now?

Finally! (actually, that didn't sound like fun!)

Honestly, I asked my doc about that, and in all the thousands of procedures he's done, he's had exactly three problems: ....

I'd certainly allow that's possible -- even with the high degree of computeriztion, I'd still guess that there are folks who are better at this and some who are not. Unless, I knew one of these folks extremely well, though, I don't know that i would take what they say at face value. Suspicious old me!

Where did you hear that 5% statistic, and what does it mean? Is that 5% failure rate of all procedures starting from the first time it was ever performed? What's the statistic for the procedure in the last... say... year? And just what constitutes a "failure"? Achieving anything less than 20/20? Going blind?

I think different statistics get kicked around on this and I am no authority. I used the 5 percent figure in the context of "if the failure rate is" 5 percent. What is a failure? I expect some of the follow-up studies have come up with different definitions, but I doubt they are always clear-cut. I would characterize what you experienced as a complication, not a failure. For success/failure, I would be looking at long term outcome. Did vision situation improve? stay the same? get somewhat worse? get much worse?

Since I pretty much decided not to do this because of the reading glass issue, I didn't really research all of these things, but if I were contemplating this, I would spend a week in a medical library searching thrrough Medline for Lasik studies. Esoteric Ogg players are a great place to be an early adopter. IMO, early adoption of surgical procedures is for life-or-death or agonal situations.