refractive surgery fellowship

[BeaconOfLight]

I am considering a cornea fellowship, but overall I am more interested in refractive surgery than corneal transplants. Does anyone have thoughts/recommendations on fellowships focused on refractive surgery?

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[LightBox]

Some of the private practice fellowships "focus" on refractive surgery, but I'm not sure how much actual lasering you are doing. Some of these private practice fellowships include: Durrie's, Pepose, etc.

Of the better-known cornea fellowships, the ones that I've heard where you do a decent amount of refractive (e.g. 75-100 eyes) are: Colorado, Utah, Hamilton Eye (private practice fellowship in Atlanta), Casey Eye. I'm sure there are others. Unfortunately, most cornea/"refractive" fellowships provide very poor, real-world experience to refractive surgery. This is due to the fact that most high-volume LASIK guys are NOT in academia.

 

[ocularis]

So what is the best way to learn LASIK in high volume? Perhaps outside of fellowship?

 

[Pinkertinkle]

Refractive surgery is a lot simpler in terms of actual mechanics than actual surgeries like cataract. You should be able to learn it without problems in most cornea fellowships.

 

[MstaKing10]

While the surgery itself is not that difficult, it is the patient selection and knowing how to deal with the rare complications that is really crucial. Most cornea fellowships will expose you to this but I'm sure that as a fellow your ability to perform surgery is limited. Prior cornea fellows will hopefully chime in with their experience in this regard.

 

[LightBox]

So what is the best way to learn LASIK in high volume? Perhaps outside of fellowship?

The absolutely best way: have your Ophthalmologist-father/mom teach you

All kidding aside, probably the fastest way to learn how to do LASIK is by joining a private practice whose boss(es) will mentor you on how to perform refractive surgery in a realistic, high-volume setting. I think that the biggest barrier for LASIK-newbies, is that many employers do NOT want to train newcomers for fear they will become their next-door competition! It is an understandable fear given how competitive the refractive surgery market is.

I did a Cornea fellowship, and I probably learned 1% of what I know about refractive surgery today during that entire year. I did more LASIK during the first 4 weeks of my private practice job, than the whole year of my fellowship. Conversely, you will never get as much concentrated corneal cases in most private practice jobs, compared to an academic cornea fellowship.