Anyone use sclera contact lenses? How is it?

[fuzzybabybunny]

I'm looking into getting sclera contacts because I have irregular astigmatism and other contacts have never fit me well, including soft torics and hard RGPs.

I also get a LOT of dry eye with soft contacts.

So... how do you like your sclera lenses?

 

[Viper GTS]

You are a KC patient yes?

Viper GTS

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

You are a KC patient yes?

Viper GTS

KC? Keratoconus? Yes.

Sent from my SM-G900T using Tapatalk

 

[Viper GTS]

Take a look at this guy:

https://laserfitlens.com/

I did this ~18 months ago. It's expensive, and you have to spend a week or more in a tiny town in Texas, but - It's by far the best comfort and vision I've had since being diagnosed with keratoconus.

It's a non rotational custom scleral lens that is CNC'd by a company local to their office in Coppell. The first day you get a bunch of measurements taken, then on day two you have the first set of lenses to try. You get a new set of lenses each day with the refinements from the previous day's appointment and leave with your final real set.

Back then it was about $4,000 with additional cost if time beyond a week was needed. I cut mine fairly short and did M-F, ideally I should probably have been there a couple more days. They don't take insurance, but you may be able to get some trivial amount of reimbursement from your insurance. I got about $300 back. The lenses themselves are not terribly expensive once you've had them designed, if you want a spare set or break one it's $250/ea and deliverable via mail. They have a deal with a local hotel that gives a stupid cheap nightly rate + shuttle service to and from your appointments so you don't need a rental car. His customer base is almost entirely KC + dry eye patients, so you're pretty much his average patient.

Care of the lenses is annoying, but worth the vision. I try to use Menicon Progent on them weekly, otherwise it's Clear Care daily. You'll need to use scleral lens cases which are much larger than the provided ClearCare sterilization case, so you go through Clear Care solution MUCH faster than a normal lens. The little travel bottles are good for about two days worth of use for me. Any time I travel I ship full size bottles ahead or take them in my checked bags. I routinely wear them for 15+ hours with no issues. My night vision is dramatically better than anything anyone else was able to obtain (both via soft/hybrid lenses and glasses).

Well worth it if you can pull off the $4k.

Viper GTS

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Take a look at this guy:

https://laserfitlens.com/

I did this ~18 months ago. It's expensive, and you have to spend a week or more in a tiny town in Texas, but - It's by far the best comfort and vision I've had since being diagnosed with keratoconus.

It's a non rotational custom scleral lens that is CNC'd by a company local to their office in Coppell. The first day you get a bunch of measurements taken, then on day two you have the first set of lenses to try. You get a new set of lenses each day with the refinements from the previous day's appointment and leave with your final real set.

Back then it was about $4,000 with additional cost if time beyond a week was needed. I cut mine fairly short and did M-F, ideally I should probably have been there a couple more days. They don't take insurance, but you may be able to get some trivial amount of reimbursement from your insurance. I got about $300 back. The lenses themselves are not terribly expensive once you've had them designed, if you want a spare set or break one it's $250/ea and deliverable via mail. They have a deal with a local hotel that gives a stupid cheap nightly rate + shuttle service to and from your appointments so you don't need a rental car. His customer base is almost entirely KC + dry eye patients, so you're pretty much his average patient.

Care of the lenses is annoying, but worth the vision. I try to use Menicon Progent on them weekly, otherwise it's Clear Care daily. You'll need to use scleral lens cases which are much larger than the provided ClearCare sterilization case, so you go through Clear Care solution MUCH faster than a normal lens. The little travel bottles are good for about two days worth of use for me. Any time I travel I ship full size bottles ahead or take them in my checked bags. I routinely wear them for 15+ hours with no issues. My night vision is dramatically better than anything anyone else was able to obtain (both via soft/hybrid lenses and glasses).

Well worth it if you can pull off the $4k.

Viper GTS

Cool, thanks.

What has your past experience been with other eyecare options? Torics? RPGs? Have you ever tried non-laserfit sclera lenses or ortho-k?

I'm really bummed out that they are only in Texas. I'm in Australia, so the cost of a flight + $4,000 (which IMO is really high) is a huge letdown. My past RGP lens fitting and purchase didn't come anywhere close to the cost of $4,000. Hell, Lasik can be had for less than this. I have a hard time believing that his technique of optical coherence tomography, wavefront optics, and custom-made scleral lenses is actually truly unique, considering that a scleral lens seems like it's basically a custom RGP lens mated with a custom skirt.

Normal RGP lenses are custom almost by definition, and topography of the eye is something that any Lasik clinic already does, so I'm a little suspicious that laserfit is truly unique on a worldwide scale...

 

[Dr. G.]

Cool, thanks.

What has your past experience been with other eyecare options? Torics? RPGs? Have you ever tried non-laserfit sclera lenses or ortho-k?

I'm really bummed out that they are only in Texas. I'm in Australia, so the cost of a flight + $4,000 (which IMO is really high) is a huge letdown. My past RGP lens fitting and purchase didn't come anywhere close to the cost of $4,000. Hell, Lasik can be had for less than this. I have a hard time believing that his technique of optical coherence tomography, wavefront optics, and custom-made scleral lenses is actually truly unique, considering that a scleral lens seems like it's basically a custom RGP lens mated with a custom skirt.

Normal RGP lenses are custom almost by definition, and topography of the eye is something that any Lasik clinic already does, so I'm a little suspicious that laserfit is truly unique on a worldwide scale...

First of all, thank you Viper GTS - whoever you are - for the nice review. That's a car I would not mind having. This is not a promotion, but I just want to address some points already made.

To "fuzzybabybunny" let me try to address your doubts. Please, if you find someone else who is doing the exact same thing, let me know. I have had a number of patients from Australia, and I just received an email from one the other day. I should post it. He said, and I quote, that the trip was well worth it because if you don't have quality of vision or lenses are uncomfortable, then what good are they no matter how inexpensive? He further stated that remakes would take 1-2 weeks for delivery. Ironically the modern scleral lens is attributed to an Aussie by the name of Don Ezekiel.

I have been developing this since late 2007, and culminated in several patents and others pending on using digital imaging and wavefront for scleral lenses. In 2007 there was no way to accurately map the sclera (or white portion) of the eye. I was the first to use optical coherence tomography to do so. You can search the literature if you want, and the first article ever published was by me in 2008 in a peer-reviewed journal "Eye & Contact Lens." Once I could map the sclera, I could make a lens to follow the shape, and since the eye is not actually round, but asymmetrical, the lens would not rotate. I first did this entirely on Excel spreadsheets, and later migrated to very high end 3D CAD system.

The wavefront part followed after I realized that I had the ideal non-rotational platform. I had patients who still had ghosting and smearing even with ordinary scleral lenses, so this is why I pursued it. I know of and have met just about all of the significant researchers in this field. Most of that work has been done in academia where it remains. Until Laserfit, no lens was stable enough on the eye to provide a good platform, and many of the wavefront pioneers decided to throw in with the LASIK companies. I am a clinician who had a large patient base of messed up corneas, and therefore had the motivation to develop this technology on my own and then take it straight to the clinic for the benefit of my patients. So that's the story, believe it or not.

As far as fees go I routinely see patients in various forums mention fees of $6000, $7000, and all the way up to $10,000 for scleral lenses, but without all of our features.

I wanted to add that a year or so ago I was discussing a referral I was making to an Australian optometrist. I was explaining about Laserfit and was really trying to get her interested in joining me. She said that she really admired me for "working so hard to correct that remaining 5% of vision." She had no idea what this was about because for people who have keratoconus these aberrations account for 50% or more of the visual impact. Today I am willing to bet that there are optometrists who don't have a corneal topographer, and few if any have wavefront aberrometers that are necessary for this kind of work.

 

[KillerCharlie]

I tried them for dealing with really bad lasik-induced dry eye (supposedly they protect the eye surface from irritation when they get dry).

They were awful. I had to get them refit more than once. They are 10x harder to get in than regular contacts because they are rigid (and way bigger than regular hard lenses). I could never get used to them - after a month I had about a 1/10 success rate getting it in my left eye. Once I got it in, my eye was already scratched up from the failed attempts so I couldn't keep them in. Even if I got it in the first try, it didn't fit my eye perfectly and was painful to move my eye around and especially to blink. Then sometimes you get a tiny (or large) air bubble trapped while putting them in and you have to do it over again.

YMMV so you might as well try. If you're too scared off by the price to try them, then your problem isn't bad enough to need them in the first place. I was so desperate for relief from pain that the $600 was nothing.

Edit: these were not custom-built. The eye doctor fitting them had a huge case of different sizes that she tried.

 

[Viper GTS]

I did RGPs pre-transplants, they never really worked for me (ok vision, terribly uncomfortable + corneal ulcers). Post transplant I did soft torics for a while but eventually decided the hassle of contacts wasn't worth the one line or so of extra vision vs glasses. Over the 10 years since then, as the transplants aged, my vision steadily got worse. I was getting to be really borderline for driving with glasses so I decided to give contacts another try. My local eye doctor was not having any luck with contact fitting. I gave him $1000 and got a couple attempts with torics, one hybrid lens, and then vague 'maybe we should try sclerals.' At that point Google led me to laserfit and that was that.

YMMV so you might as well try. If you're too scared off by the price to try them, then your problem isn't bad enough to need them in the first place. I was so desperate for relief from pain that the $600 was nothing.

Pretty much this. When I got tired of not being able to see at night and wanted to fix the problem I was willing to throw stupid amounts of money at it. It was essentially impulse buy territory (although I did do a fair amount of research I scheduled within a couple weeks of finding his site). If the price had been 10x what it was I still would have found a way to do it, though probably after more thorough vetting. I find it hard to imagine that anyone wouldn't spend whatever they could come up with to solve these kinds of issues, and I considered it a bargain at the price it was.

To further expand on the cost perspective. When I list the price as a downside it's only because it won't be accessible to everyone. I'm aware that the roughly $5k I spent including travel is a lot of money for a lot of people, but that does not inherently mean overpriced. When you fully account for the time involved (both the time I physically spent at the office, and the time he spends in the evenings doing the CAD work), the daily fast turn CNC iterations, the costs of maintaining an office + paying staff, etc. it starts to seem really cheap.

As for whether or not anyone else is doing it, I was unable to find anyone else back in latte 2015. If there is anyone else they are not doing a good job of making themselves known. He is (as evidenced by his appearance here), and while I am typically skeptical of relentless self promotion the product is legitimate.

Viper GTS

 

[rcpratt]

I have keratoconus and wear scleral lenses. I tried every different lens known to man (it seemed), had a cornea transplant on my right eye, then finally found these PROSE scleral lens from a doctor at UofM.

My vision does degrade a bit throughout the day as my eyes get dry and the lenses get dirty, but I'm not complaining. I went basically blind in my right eye for three years before I found these lenses -- they do the job.

 

[nitronap]

Cool, thanks.

What has your past experience been with other eyecare options? Torics? RPGs? Have you ever tried non-laserfit sclera lenses or ortho-k?

I'm really bummed out that they are only in Texas. I'm in Australia, so the cost of a flight + $4,000 (which IMO is really high) is a huge letdown. My past RGP lens fitting and purchase didn't come anywhere close to the cost of $4,000. Hell, Lasik can be had for less than this. I have a hard time believing that his technique of optical coherence tomography, wavefront optics, and custom-made scleral lenses is actually truly unique, considering that a scleral lens seems like it's basically a custom RGP lens mated with a custom skirt.

Normal RGP lenses are custom almost by definition, and topography of the eye is something that any Lasik clinic already does, so I'm a little suspicious that laserfit is truly unique on a worldwide scale...

Dude, you simply can not compare this lens to a customised RGP, this is another class on it's own. The lens is a specialised scleral and does not touch the cornea, its very comfortable and the optics in the lens are tweaked to counter your specific cornea aberrations at the micron level. Its like comparing a space shuttle to a go-cart. I went from years of not being able to see, to having better vision than most people, the technology is that dramatic.

I'm also in Aus, I live in Melbourne and made the long haul to Texas for Laserfit lenses in 2013. After exhausting all the local options with dismal results, you know the drill, waiting weeks on end for lenses to arrive only to find they are not right, extremely uncomfortable with results that are mediocre at best. I eventually had enough, the last straw was the specialist optometrist in Melbourne telling me if that if he could not get my vision right with lenses I would have no option but to get a cornea transplant. After a lot of research on the internet I made the trip. Best thing I ever did, these lenses are in a class of their own, all my aberrations are gone and I got 20/15 in each eye, plus can finally see like a normal person at night again and most importantly they are very comfortable. Yes, it's a bloody long flight(26 hours) and a week spent in the US - but in my opinion absolutely worth it. You are welcome to contact me if you want.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Dude, you simply can not compare this lens to a customised RGP, this is another class on it's own. The lens is a specialised scleral and does not touch the cornea, its very comfortable and the optics in the lens are tweaked to counter your specific cornea aberrations at the micron level. Its like comparing a space shuttle to a go-cart. I went from years of not being able to see, to having better vision than most people, the technology is that dramatic.

I'm also in Aus, I live in Melbourne and made the long haul to Texas for Laserfit lenses in 2013. After exhausting all the local options with dismal results, you know the drill, waiting weeks on end for lenses to arrive only to find they are not right, extremely uncomfortable with results that are mediocre at best. I eventually had enough, the last straw was the specialist optometrist in Melbourne telling me if that if he could not get my vision right with lenses I would have no option but to get a cornea transplant. After a lot of research on the internet I made the trip. Best thing I ever did, these lenses are in a class of their own, all my aberrations are gone and I got 20/15 in each eye, plus can finally see like a normal person at night again and most importantly they are very comfortable. Yes, it's a bloody long flight(26 hours) and a week spent in the US - but in my opinion absolutely worth it. You are welcome to contact me if you want.

Who was your optometrist in Melbourne? I live there as well. Were they sclera contacts as well?

 

[nitronap]

Who was your optometrist in Melbourne? I live there as well. Were they sclera contacts as well?

My optometrist in Melbourne was Richard Lindsay.

 

[SandyKJ]

I am getting sclerals due to severe dry eye. Do you think I would benefit from the laserfit contacts, or just standard scleral contacts? My vision is blurry, ghosting and forget about driving at night/

 

[SarahL1979]

I'm wondering if anyone can give me some advice on my scleral lenses. I've recently started wearing them. And at first was in love with them. I was able to see 20/20, I haven't been able to see that well in years!!!! But now I've got this constant fuzzy vision with them. This is even after cleaning them, using the 3% hydrogen peroxide cleaner without the hydro glide, and using my allergy eye drops. I dont know what else to do and I'm getting very frustrated.