A patient from Santa Barbara recently asked me a very common question: can LASIK laser eye surgery treat astigmatism? The answer is yes! In fact, we have been able to treat astigmatism for well over a decade and a half , but the treatments have gotten more and more precise as LASIK has evolved over the years. Today the accuracy is extremely high. Astigmatism is essentially an out of round shape to the cornea in which the cornea is shaped more like a football than a basketball. There are three types of “regular” astigmatism: mixed astigmatism, myopic (nearsighted) astigmatism, and hyperopic (farsighted) astigmatism. The latest versions of  LASIK — and PRK — are able to treat all three types of astigmatism very successfully.  Essentially the goal of surgery is to use the laser to round the football shape into a basketball while also corrected any accompanying nearsightedness or farsightedness at the same time. Anyone who wears astigmatism correcting glasses or contact lenses knows that the alignment of their correction profoundly affects how well they see. If glasses or toric contacts are rotated out of position, the image becomes blurry. With the latest forms of astigmatism correcting LASIK and PRK, laser placement is guided by advanced targeting and alignment systems that use bio-metric landmarks on the iris for extremely precise rotational positioning of the laser beam onto the cornea — typically better than with astigmatic glasses or toric contacts. Today, I consider LASIK correction of astigmatism to be a very mature technology with outstanding results.