The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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fwiw, I consider my LASIK surgery to be some of the best money I ever spent. I did read about the risks beforehand, but after a lifetime of glasses and contacts, never having to wear them again was totally worth it. (I am getting old enough to need reading glasses, but I was told beforehand that nothing will prevent that.)
Short version: If you go to an eye hospital ophthalmology department you'll note that nearly everyone is wearing glasses.
Long version: When I'm teaching medical students in surgery I say something along the lines of "roughly 25% of surgical residents drop out, nobody ever says they are going to be one of those..." People almost never think they are going to be in the pile of bad outcomes (unless they have a nervous disposition). LASIK risks are reasonably rare (but more common than you may think) and nobody ever thinks they are going to be one of the ones who gets them, but most people's primary means of interacting with the world with is through their vision. Losing that, or having it appreciably worsened with dry eye or tanked night vision...it's awful.
That said medical professional skepticism is driven by actually seeing the bad outcomes, that isn't necessarily appropriate if everything is weighted correctly. And lots of eye doctors avoid contacts for similar reasons. You do also see plenty of eye doctors that get it done, but I will always remember the time in med school I asked an ophthalmologist why he still had glasses and he said "why the fuck would I laser healthy tissue."
The other piece you want to keep in mind is that surgeons want to "cut" but LASIK makes the most sense in a relatively narrow age range and for a relatively narrow degree of eye defects. Outside of that it makes far much less sense, but you can still easily get it done.
Yes, I know that I was basically rolling the dice and hoping not to be one of the unlucky ones. I calculated the odds and it worked out well for me, so I have no regrets. But I can certainly understand someone who doesn't think it's worth taking the chance.
Yeah totally fair, I do worry some people don't really consider however. For those who do - go ahead!
It's kind of amazing, this world we live in. Patients can and do consider risks/benefits of medical procedures when making decisions. Of course, some of them don't consider with italics. Some might be more willing to just listen to a doctor who "want[s] to 'cut'"1, while other doctors might have urged more caution (even if only by their action/inaction). Yet somehow, this amazing world keeps on turnin'. One might have been led to believe from this sort of story that we can't just let patients make decisions; they might not consider enough... or they might even make a bad decision! Most certainly, one could think that it would be impossible for said patients to include pricing information (including the possible cost if something goes wrong) in their decision-making process... if only, ya know, that was not the way things currently work on a day by day basis, all in this absolutely amazing world.
FWIW, I've done some significant considering about LASIK over the years; haven't pulled the trigger yet. But ya know, times change, money means different things to me at different times, risks/benefits mean different things to me at different times; who knows what tomorrow will bring? But at least in one area, I'm glad that I'm Free to Choose.
1 - Weird that doctors sometimes can just have preferences that may not always align with those of their patients, properly considered. I'm also intimately familiar with completely different situations where surgeons were extremely loath to "cut" and only after years of negative consequences from those decisions (to be clear, the surgeons' decisions, not the patient's), they finally cut, and everything went great! Statistics and different perspectives on those statistics are a wild thing. Ya never know in this amazing world.
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