[jluetjen]

Not so! I've been wearing a CRT lenses for 3 months now and theyre great! They're not for everyone since there are some side-effects, but compared to laser surgery, they may be an ideal alternative for some people (like me).

1) Laser surgery is not slam dunk. Amongst the fine print you'll find the following:
- Scarring. Not a big deal if you have it done once, but if it needs adjustment, the scarring is cumulative. This also doesn't go away.
- If you have dry eyes, laser surgery will make them dryer -- potentially significantly so. This happened to my wife and she now is taking eye drops multiple times a day to keep her eyes moist after having Lasik done a few years ago.

CRT has some different compromises:
1) CRT requires that you wear hard lenses. For the first week or so these will take some acclimation if you were previously used to soft lenses (like I was). They still make me look "tired" when I have them in and I tend to flutter my eyes a bit, but I can read or watch TV before bed time with them in with no issues. The sensitivity has gone away as my lids have developed "callouses" to the hard lenses.

2) If you wear them every night (like you're supposed to), your eyes will stabilize and I don't have any appreciable degredation from morning to night. On one occasion, one of the lenses came adrift overnight and so did not shape my cornea. I could see fine, but by the end of the second day, that eye could not see (by itself) well enough to drive with. But with my corrected eye I was fine. I'm now sensitive to what it feels like if a lens isn't sitting correctly.

3) While the concept of CRT has been around since the 60's, it's only in the last 5-10 years that they have had lens material which had the correct charectoristics to allow them to be safely worn overnight. Apparently it required a couple of flights in the space shuttle to develop the material (although I doubt that shuttle flights are required for the production material). I know that my experience is that the lenses get a little gupey in the mornings (compared to wearing no lenses), but I can still see to get up and walk around and do things. I generally take them out first thing in the morning (~ 4:40) and I can still see fine past 11 with no issues (on those few days when I stay up that late).

In my case, my eyes are not good candidates for laser surgery since my pupil's sizes are at the larger end of the distribution. I also did not use hard lenses which apparently change your lense shape in a different fashion that compromises your eyes for CRT. Not to mention I didn't want to risk the dry eye issues nor having permenant surgery performed on my eyes.

My experience? I could drive the morning after my first night and tested 20/20 (better then most my eye doctor does admit), although my vision wasn't quite right around the pariphery of my field of vision. The second day it was better still. Since then it's improved and the halos that I had around lights at night (also a common side affect of Laser surgery BTW) have progressively gotten better. I've also noticed a greater sensitivity to dust on the lenses with hard lenses compared to soft lenses, so cleanliness is key in your day-to-day mainanance of the lenses.

I do love not having to worry about a contact lens floating out when bike-riding at speed, and being able to see when I swim or water-ski. I also like being able to nod off for a cat-nap when travelling (planes do that to me) without waking up to super sticky eyes and a junked pair of soft lenses. Now if I nod off, I wake up and can see perfectly with no issues.

So in my case, I'm a happy customer and something of a poster child for the process. My wife had laser surgery and is still generally happy with the results in spite of the side affects. So there you go, neither is necessarily better or worse, but rather just a different set of compromises.