You wake up in the morning and look at your phone. It’s a total blur. Your child presents you with his homework assignment for review. You can’t read it. At a dinner party you go to the ladies’ room to touch up your makeup. But the task is impossible because you’ve forgotten your readers. You stand at the lectern ready to present at your company’s annual meeting. In a panic you realize you can’t locate your reading glasses. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?
If so, you are one of over 3.5 million New Yorkers and over 110 million Americans who have lost the ability to read due to a condition called presbyopia that affects nearly all of us after the age of forty. The term presbyopia comes from the Greek, meaning old eyes. But for those of us who have acquired this malady, the definition is hardly appropriate. Today’s presbyope is vital, fit and at the top of their game. Up until very recently, the only remedy was to give in, kicking and screaming, to the idea that you now need a prescription for reading glasses. Many of us eventually end up with a multitude of those over-the-counter “cheaters” distributed throughout the house and our place of work because we just can’t function anymore without them. Or perhaps now you even need multifocal lenses either in glasses or contacts because you just can’t see well at any distance. Frustration has reigned—until now. Because in 2015 the FDA gave its approval to the very first of its kind solution for the reading problem—KAMRA—a safe and effective technology designed to restore reading vision in a painless 10-minute procedure
The KAMRA corneal inlay is a microscopically thin, tiny opaque disk composed of an FDA-approved bio-compatible plastic material with a 1.6 mm central opening. Its brilliant method of effect borrows from a simple principle of physics that teaches us that only focused rays of light can enter an eye through such a reduced aperture. When centered over the pupil of the eye, KAMRA restores reading vision at all distances without any loss of far vision. There have been over 8,000 KAMRA procedures performed in the U.S. since approval. More than 25,000 worldwide and collective studies continue to indicate a stellar track record of effectiveness and safety beyond what we as refractive surgeons could have dreamed. In our practice we have now placed over 250 KAMRA inlays and the life-changing results continue to amaze (see the link to our video testimonials below).
For those individuals who have issues with both distance and near vision, KAMRA can be combined with iDesign custom LASIK—something we have named Pan-LASIK, and because of its mechanism of action, KAMRA never has to be changed or modified. And best of all, on the unlikely chance you feel that you don’t like the KAMRA effect—it is completely reversible!
Martin L. Fox, MD, FACS
334 East 37th Street, Suite 210
212.838.1053
