08 Aug, 2025
Imagine waking up and seeing the numbers on your alarm clock without fumbling for glasses. Fifty years ago, that sounded like science fiction, or at best a risky experiment. Today it’s a common Monday-morning conversation in Australian cafés: “Had my eyes done on Friday—back at work already.”
Back in the 1970s the first attempts at surgical vision correction were about as refined as panel beating. Surgeons made deep spokes in the cornea—called radial keratotomy—to flatten it. Results were unpredictable. One patient might walk out with perfect sight, the next with fluctuating vision that changed hour by hour. “Cut and pray” wasn’t a winning formula, so most Australians stuck with thick glasses or hard contact lenses.
Everything changed in 1990 when Greek ophthalmologist Ioannis Pallikaris paired a thin corneal flap with an excimer laser that could shave off tissue micrometre by micrometre. Laser-in-situ keratomileusis—LASIK—was born.
Instead of using a scalpel, surgeons now sculpted the eye’s front window with computer-guided light. The procedure took ten minutes, was painless, and patients often drove themselves to the follow-up the very next day. Worldwide, more than 40 million people have since had LASIK. Serious complications occur in fewer than one in five-thousand cases. That’s safer, statistically, than driving to the clinic.
Technology never sits still. In 2011 German engineers refined the operation even further with SMILE, a keyhole approach that removes a wafer-thin “lenticule” of tissue through a two-millimetre opening—no flap needed. Patients report less dry eye, and there’s no risk of the flap moving because there isn’t one. The newer technique, CLEAR, even fine-tunes the shape for people with tricky astigmatism.
For many Aussies glued to screens all day, those small comfort gains matter. Within a week, most CLEAR patients can read the bottom line on the eye chart. Almost all are back to surfing, swimming or chasing toddlers without the fog of lenses.
Some eyes are too short-sighted—or too thin—for laser. That’s where the implantable collamer lens (ICL) might be considered. Think of an ICL as slipping a soft contact lens inside the eye rather than on top. Inserted through a 3-millimetre incision, the ICL sits behind the iris and in front of the patient’s own lens, invisible to everyone, including the patient. It can correct prescriptions beyond –15 dioptres, the measurement that once condemned athletes, pilots or police recruits to lifelong spectacle dependency. If life circumstances change, such as a cataract growth in later life, the lens can be removed in minutes.
Statistics can feel cold, so let’s translate. Modern LASIK or CLEAR offers a better than 95 percent chance of patients seeing at least as well unaided as they did with their best glasses—and that’s by the first post-operative week. Enhancement (“touch-up”) rates hover at around one percent. Dry eye, the most common nuisance side-effect, usually settles within a few months. Infection remains rare, and reputable clinics follows strict theatre protocols and pre-screening to keep it that way.
Queensland Eye Institute (QEI) has a track record of setting national benchmarks. QEI introduced Queensland’s first ray-tracing LASIK platform, bringing laboratory-grade optical modelling into routine surgery, and QEI ophthalmologists performed Australia’s inaugural CLEAR small-incision laser procedure—both milestones that quickly became reference points for peers across the region.
Ask anyone who has ditched their glasses what changes most and you’ll hear about simple joys: stepping out of the surf without losing a lens, ordering a coffee without squinting, seeing your child’s face clearly the moment you wake. Multiply that by the millions who have undergone modern refractive surgery and you start to grasp its social impact—better career choices, safer driving, and yes, the small thrill of buying sunglasses off the rack because every pair is suddenly prescription-ready.
Half a century ago, surgically fixing eyesight was a roll of the dice. Today, laser and lens-based vision correction are routine day-surgeries with outcomes many cataract surgeons would envy. In other words, the odds are finally stacked in favour of clear vision—and that’s great news for anyone tired of hunting for their specs.