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Comment by lostmsu | Hacker News Reader

I suspect the halo thing is not an objective problem. People just get alert and start noticing it, or could not see it before due to blurriness. That was my impression after having several conversations with my wife who had LASIK and complained about halos.

It finally convinced her, when several consecutive days I had what she described as "halos" because I was tired and could not properly focus at late night.

Myself having a nearly perfect vision at the time never paid attention to them before she expressed her concert about that effect after surgery.

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I'm not sure in your wife's particular case, but halos are a negative side effect of LASIK in some cases. It is not something that is always there the patient can now see. It has to do with the size of a patient's pupil versus the size of the area that can get corrected. Patients with very large pupils are told not to get the surgery period due to adverse halo effects.

I have large pupils and no halos more than 2 years post surgery.

I have decided against LASIK due to the potential for halos. I am susceptible to optical migraines and when I have one I see halos and it drives my nuts. I would hate to have even a fraction of that experience every day.

I have halos after LASIK and they don’t bother me. I understand how they would have a negative association because you experience them at the same time as a migraine, but they don’t cause me any suffering. They’re just... things that in my visual field that I don’t pay much attention do. When I notice them, they are a gentle reminder of how fascinating brains and eyes are.

Unrelated, but you're the first person I've ever heard who had optical migraines, which I have too. I experience them as shooting lights followed by essentially a shut down in vision in the affected eye. Never thought about Lasik making it worse but glad to never have done it if that's the same experience. It's miserable when it happens.

If you believe my conclusion, the halos after LASIK are not a real problem: there's actually no difference in experience between people who underwent LASIK and complain about halos and a healthy person: both see the same halos under the same conditions (e.g. night time and/or being tired). It is just that people after LASIK suddenly start paying attention to those halos.

I suspect it is a very mild form of post-surgery paranoia. I have a very similar thing after a minor surgery in the abdomen area: I started paying waaay more attention to what happens in my stomach.

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