No, you didn't say anything about LASIK. I did. But, you stated that...
...and I am letting you know that there is no such thing as floaters on the surface of the eye (from the point of view of laser surgery). You clearly have no knowledge of the subject at hand, and so why not just stay out of the discussion (instead of guessing and adding to misinformation on a public forum)?
This is only the case for actual "floaters", debris floating on the surface of the eye.
A lot of the discussion about "floaters" with regard to Trobalt appears to be discussing visual snow, which is a neurological problem that is not any more treatable than tinnitus.
Thanks for the tag,
@Markku. I will explain in greater detail why Dr. Scott Geller says not all floaters can be treated with a laser.
I figured I'd butt in here because I've researched the development and treatment of eye floaters actively for several months (years?) now. If you care about this condition
at all, then
read on. There is a LOT of relevant information in here.
@passerby is very much correct (if a tad rude) in his pointing out that floaters are not on the surface of the eye. The vitreous humor, the (almost always) clear jelly-like substance that fills something like 80% of the inside of the eyeball, is made up of mostly water, about 1-2% collagen strands, and assorted trace vitamins. What you are thinking of is a "pterygium," which is a bump of corneal tissue on the surface of the eye. These can be produced by damage, or just show up because. Incidences of pterygium are very easily scraped off the cornea with a scalpel by a trained opthalmologist.
This is what a floater really is; As we age, this inert substance (the vitreous humor) that fills up your eyeball slowly loses cohesion as the collagen strands, which form an intricate support network for the vitreous humor, stretch, weaken, and snap. The loss of support causes pockets of vitreous to become more like a liquid than a jelly (remember, the vitreous is something like 90% water) and you can see the dangling, weakened collagen strands in these pockets as "floaters." This process can be accelerated by repeated serious head trauma (like in boxers) or by myopia (shortsightedness).
The collagen strands that support the circular/ovular structure inside the eye "snap" out of their support structure and come loose, either as individual, clear strands or dots. Literally everybody has these, and if you look up at the sky, I'd be willing to bet you could spot at least one.
The problem arises when you get unlucky, and these beasts really are just a matter of luck. Sometimes, the collagen strands coagulate, seemingly by pure chance, into hellish balls of opaque brown nightmare fuel with innumerable tentacles. It's like having a Lovecraftian beast inside your eye. The further back in the vitreous that this degeneration happens, the worse off you'll be. If
even a little microscopic bit happens in the pre-macular bursa near the retina, you're basically screwed, as in my case.
Here's a diagram of what I'm trying to explain. (Note that a vitreous does not have to be detached for floaters to occur. Vitreous detachment typically shows up in your 60s or 70s, and is the main cause of 90% of severe floater cases. Young people like Markku and I got them spontaneously and have to live with them for more than 50 more years...)
The only floater I personally have any gripe with is a teeny tiny one in
almost direct contact with my retina (in a zone of the vitreous called the pre-macular bursa) but, because of this proximity to the light-sensitive tissue, it is greatly magnified in size and casts a darker shadow. I have *many more* of the clear dots and strands in my right eye that I don't even give half a shit about, and don't notice unless I look for them. The left eye's floater has nearly killed me on the highway not once, but twice, as it completely obscures vehicles coming from the left, and it moves quickly as my eye moves.
When it comes to lasers, a YAG (yttrium aluminum garnet) laser can, in the hands of the one or two trained professionals who wield them, eliminate floaters that are well-suspended in the eye, far away from the tissue-paper thin retina. This works because each laser has a focal distance, where multiple beams of light and heat meet. The laser is focused through a lens, converges its energy to a point, and then splits back up, dissipating its energy over more space as it continues on and "splits up." The doctor doesn't just shine a burning-hot, ultra-focused, laser-cannon beam STRAIGHT into your eye and onto your retina - the energy needed to burn collagen away is quite high. Were the laser to make full contact with the delicate retina, it would burn it, producing blind spots. A surgeon having a poor focal distance setting has caused this to happen many times, so you can't even tout it as a safe treatment.
(For an example of the disastrous consequences a laser can have, read this
http://floatertalk.yuku.com/topic/6...tVitreolysisgtStem-cellsg?page=1#.V2MAE7srKUk)
This is (very simple) example of what I mean by focal distance. It's simple optic science and shouldn't be hard to understand - the same mechanic is used in common eyeglasses to correct near- or far-sightedness.
And here is a diagram explaining how the laser converges, zaps a floater, and diverges.
The same focal-distance mechanic is what makes the YAG laser ineffective for floaters such as mine. My floater is SO CLOSE to the retina that the laser, were it to be aimed at the floater at the back of my eye, the beam would hit and melt the floater, but then immediately hit my retina, almost FULL FORCE, because it didn't have the time or space to dissipate its energy in my eye. It would give me blind spot where the floater was (like in the thread I linked to).
As a side note, Trobalt causes visual snow, not eye floaters. People, for some reason, can't tell the difference sometimes. Visual snow is a type of neurological sensory interference, where the optic nerve (maybe? no one knows) transmits garbage information to the brain that is interpreted as static, much like tinnitus is garbage information from the ears, interpreted by the brain as ringing, sizzling, screaming, Beethoven's bloody fifth symphony, or whatever.
Floaters, however, are not neurological. They are very real, very physical, very medically unappreciated, and very rarely,
very disabling. If you have any other questions or if I didn't explain something clearly, feel free to ask me.
If you disagree with the content or subject of my posts, you're quite free to continue to banter with me, or simply ignore me. I'd also suggest that if you're deeply concerned about misinformation on the internet in general or on this forum specifically, there are probably many things that are much more egregious than someone stating that floaters are on the eye's surface rather than inside it... but, again, that's just my opinion.
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