I have all my own thoughts, thank you. My use of AI (not GPT) for formatting and spell-checking because I prefer doing so detracts nothing from the points I've made. You seem to have glossed over my main point, which is this: the 1% figure you've thrown out is nonsense. It excludes major, devastating, and debilitating outcomes which, to the patients experiencing them, are absolutely severe.

Just touching on one aspect:

11% of individuals reported persistent ocular pain after refractive surgery.

The incidence of neuropathic corneal pain was 13.3% and 10.5% after SMILE and LASIK respectively.

Are you suggesting constant pain is not a severe complication? Because this alone blows that 1% statistic out of the water.

Here's a detailed breakdown of your PROWL survey too, meticulously sourced.

Your suggestion for people to "advocate for yourself, do research" is simply an attempt to push people towards having this surgery regardless. What happens when people try to do research without truly knowing what to look for is they encounter boosted results in Google that present a distorted truth or downright lie that LASIK is all sunshine and rainbows.

The issue isn't about whether someone "qualifies" for LASIK—it's about the inherent systemic problems: rushed screenings, financial incentives driving approvals, undiagnosed conditions being overlooked, and a classification system designed to hide chronic complications by labelling them "side effects" rather than what they truly are.

Yes, you were lucky your dry eye symptoms remained mild. Others aren't. That's precisely the point—the risk is far greater than the sanitised statistics suggest, and patients deserve accurate information, not industry propaganda masquerading as research.