AP: Lasering away those pesky, irritating floaters
A floater is not merely a crime novel’s New Yorker face down in the harbor. It may also be a bit of debris drifting about in the eye’s vitreous humor. Big ones, reports the AP’s Matthew Barakat, can go beyond trivial annoyance to impediment – or at least, so says a laser surgeon he interviews. This story is pure consumer health reporting, a pool too vast, and too slight in new science, for The Tracker too often to wade for fear of drowning — ie, becoming a floater of sorts. But the inherent interest and oddity of this one, the seeming common sense of blitzing the occasional bloobie that disrupts vision enough to drive a person to distraction, and the timeless theme of the maverick going against the shared sentiment of the majority, combine into a decent story.
Barakat appears to present the case for judicious lasing of the occasional bit of eye flotsam without producing a mere, unpaid ad for the doctors who do it. Most striking, the surgeon who is his primary source, if he is to be believed, is not out drumming up business recklessly. He says he only does the big floaters – refusing people who come to him complaining of little ones because such people will never be satisfied.
