Nanny,
That sounds fantastic!!!
As a PRK patient myself, I can vouch for the several days of discomfort, but I had excellent results (thanks, VISX).
For clarification, I'll mention that Sunrise's product is targeted at a different patient group than the Excimer. I was around 6 diopters "nearsighted" (technically myopia), and would never have been a candidate for the Sun 1000, which treats "farsighted" people (presbyopia), and another condition which I'm not sure of the name for but it's people who need reading glasses (hyperbyopia?)
The basic different is the center of my myopic cornea was curved out too much, and the other conditions are from not curving out enough. PRK removes tissue from the middle, while the Sand process (SNRS) uses heat to shrink tissue around the edges to give the middle some lift (kind of like a couch potato's belly when he tightens his belt <g>).
The point of all this is that it's not a case of Sunrise eating the Excimer's lunch, but actually a vast, unserved market which will pay high rewards to the first successful device manufacturer. Hopefully, that will be Sunrise instead of VISX or BEAM figuring out how to add this treatment to their existing product.
-Mack |
