The recent events in the national news about a very famous golfer who turned out not to have the personal character that was bestowed upon him during the marketing of his image has made me come out of the woodwork and comment on celebrity endorsements. While it may be true that certain people are instantly recognizable, and having them juxtaposed with your product or service may sell more sneakers, this type of advertising when it comes to serious medical services should raise some concerns. To begin with we are asked to make the jump in logic that just because someone can hit a golf ball, throw a football, or some similar activity that they have great judgment when it comes to picking their medical provider. What is being said if not this is in fact something far more subconscious and misleading. It is that this athlete or celebrity could pick anyone that they wanted, and this is whom they chose and now endorse.

We talk about astigmatism in abstract terms but seeing it graphically can help to visualize exactly what the problem is and how it can best be corrected. Here we see the actual astigmatism of a real patient which is fairly extreme being over 6 Diopters in amount. What this means is that the cornea is shaped like a football on the front surface, and therefore light rays are focused differently depending on their orientation. This output is from an actual patient we recently treated at our office who is a pilot and depends on clear vision for his job and safety. The 3-D map is created by a device called a Zywave. It works by sending in straight rays of light into the eye and looking at how they are distorted as they travel through the eye, essentially a reflection of the red eye that is seen in photographs of the pupil. Here we can see that there is a significant distortion of the light caused by the irregular shape as seen at the bottom of the cube. The LASIK procedure can reshape the eye, resulting in much lessened distortion of the light and a flattening out of the shape seen in this image. When the shape is flat and in the correct plane this corresponds to sharp clear vision as was exhibited by this patient after his LASIK procedure was completed. Click on the title to see the image discussed above.