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The suicide of a 26-year-old Pennsylvania police officer over the after-effects of the popular eye surgery LASIK was not an isolated incident, with others saying it left them with agonizing and life changing symptoms, patients and doctors told The Post.
LASIK providers say the procedure is 95% to 99% safe, but one LASIK survivor said she had suicidal ideations for two years after her “disastrous” surgery in 2000.
She also claimed to know of at least 40 people to have taken their own lives because they couldn’t take constant pain and vision problems, developed after the procedure.
“I really didn’t want to stick around at times, but I decided I would to get the word out about how dangerous this surgery can be,” Paula Cofer, 66, of Tampa, Fla., told The Post Wednesday.
“The LASIK lobby and the surgeons will tell you only one percent of patients have issues afterward. That’s not true. There are multiple studies that indicate otherwise.
“The percentage of those with poor outcomes are in the double digits, not one percent. And they know it,” she claimed.
Since LASIK was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1999 over 10 million people in the US have undergone Laser Vision Correction, according to the medical journal Clinical Ophthalmology, which states between 700,000 and 800,000 people sign up for it each year.
Cofer runs the Lasik Complications Support Group on Facebook, one of numerous organizations on social media which have sprung up in response to LASIK procedures gone wrong.
“If you understand Lasik and what it does to the eyes and cornea, you realize you can’t do it on a healthy eye and not expect complications,” Cofer said.
The procedure — Laser-Assisted In Situ Keratomileusis — reshapes the cornea of the eye.
“Not everyone has severe complications but a lot more people are suffering than you know. I got floaters, severe dry eyes, induced astigmatism and severe night vision problems,” said Cofer.
Ryan Kingerski, 26 — the cop who died by suicide after taking time off from the Penn Hills Police Department in Allegheny County, Penn. last August to undergo LASIK — had similar symptoms.
His grieving parents, Tim and Stefanie Kingerski, told CBS News this week about the hell their son went through after the procedure.
The Kingerskis said Ryan began suffering from headaches, double vision, seeing dark spots and floaters — tiny spots that appear as streaks or cobweb-like shapes across a person’s field of vision, they said.
Ryan’s parents told a story similar to that of Detroit TV meteorologist Jessica Starr’s widower, Dan Rose, who said she took her own life after struggling with intense eye pain and vision problems following laser eye surgery.
The 35-year-old mother hanged herself on Dec. 12, 2018, just two months after undergoing LASIK to correct her vision.
“Prior to the procedure, Jessica was completely normal, very healthy,” Rose told WJBK in 2019. “There was no depression … no underlying issue.”
Rose said his wife left behind a 30-page suicide note and videos, which made it clear the decision to end her life was because of the elective surgery.
Morris Waxler, now 89, was an FDA advisor who headed the branch responsible for reviewing data on LASIK between 1996 and 2000, which covers the period it was approved.
It’s a decision he told The Post he regrets — and has been speaking out publicly about LASIK’s dangers since 2010.
“It didn’t matter what questions and concerns I had, because the surgeons were very powerful and still are,” he claimed.
Waxler has previously told CBS in 2019 his own analysis of industry data showed complication rates between 10% and 30% and in 2011, he petitioned the FDA to issue a voluntary recall of LASIK.
“People come in with healthy eyes and all they need is eyeglasses. But when surgeons cut the cornea they are removing nerves and leaving the corneas with odd shapes and some patients will have intractable pain,” he added.
The FDA warns on its website there are risks to undergoing LASIK including losing vision, glare, halos, and/or double vision and other “debilitating visual symptoms”.
However, The American Refractive Surgery Council says on its website: “LASIK is safe and is one of the most studied elective surgical procedures available today … the rate of sight-threatening complications from LASIK eye surgery is estimated to be well below one percent.”
For Abraham Rutner, 43, a Brooklyn electrician, there was hope after his failed LASIK surgery five years ago.
“It’s like you have a layer of oil on top of your eye — it was so hazy and terrible,” Rutner told The Post. “I couldn’t work. I couldn’t drive. I felt like I was still a young man and I lost my life.”
Then he heard about 84-year-old Edward Boshnick, a Miami eye doctor whose optometric practice is dedicated to restoring vision and comfort lost due to a variety of eye conditions and surgeries, including LASIK, keratoconus and corneal trauma.
Dr. Boshnick, whose website is called Eyefreedom, fitted Rutner with something called a scleral lens which fits over corneas damaged by LASIK. Paula Cofer also said she got fitted with the lens, which has helped her too.
Boshnick told The Post “Everyone has different problems when it comes to LASIK, and called it a “BS procedure.”
“It’s the biggest scam ever put on the American public,” he said. “And it’s a multi-billion dollar business.”
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