Dr. Stanley Bruce Teplick, MD

Worst experience ever. My eye is ruined!

My experience was not good. I am writing this 1.5 years post LASIK with Dr. Teplick. The surgery has induced significant double/triple vision or "ghosting" in both eyes at any distance, not correctable by eye glasses. Looking back, I believe the overall issue is that Dr. Teplick uses distance visual acuity as the primary (or even the only) success criteria. If someone reads 20/20 a few weeks or months post LASIK, he considers this surgery a success. Vision QUALITY, on the other hand, does not play a major role in assessing success: In several follow-up appointments, Dr. Teplick repeatedly told me "my bar is high" and did not take my vision quality symptoms very seriously. Post-LASIK, he did very few additional measurements of my cornea to dig into this – something I would have expected from a professional. There are several tools available in his office to assess QUALITY OF VISION, including topography- and wavefront-based (higher order aberrations). Instead of digging deeply into the… root cause, he asked me things like: “Well, are you able to drive a car now without glasses? Were you able to do that before LASIK?”. Or: “Give it a few more months to heal.” Or: “Why would there be such a coincidence that you have the same double vision condition on BOTH eyes?” (Yes, it turned out I DID have the same surgery-induced condition on both eyes.) In my particular case, post-LASIK, yes, I WAS able to read the numbers on the screen with 20/20 vision like probably most of his patients (starting maybe a week post-LASIK through today). Also, yes, I am able to drive a car now without glasses. But I have significant ghosting and double/triple vision, meaning I see everything two or three times. This condition still persists today, so it is not a temporary recovery problem that may resolve. My eyes are basically ruined, even though, yes, coming back to the apparent success criteria: I can still see everything I need to see, I can function in live – even without glasses if I wanted. This ghosting also severely affects my intermediate distance vision (say, 3-7 feet distance), when the duplicate images start to merge to a blur that is not correctable with eyeglasses. Close vision at around 2 feet is mostly good (because the duplicate images merge to a single image), so my symptoms are NOT related to presbyopia. The ghosting also decreases vision contrast, so I often need to wear a head lamp now for daily tasks at home when ambient light is slightly dim. Quality issues like vision contrast and ghosting are things that are totally ignored when he demonstrates that I am now seeing 20/20 with a Snellen chart. They are subjective symptoms, so there is little room for recourse. I don't understand why other reviews are so good. I have to admit I was misled my his good reviews before I had LASIK. What is not clear to me is if my symptoms are rare or more common. What I do know is though that Dr. Teplick does not consider vision QUALITY as an important success criteria. For disclosure, the LASIK procedure corrected more than 5 diopters myopia. If you are considering LASIK, it is difficult to give you a good advice based on my experience. My general recommendation is to find a doctor who also uses vision QUALITY as a success criteria, not just vision QUANTITY (meaning distance visual acuity). In your initial consultation, ask them for specific examples they have seen regarding suboptimal vision QUALITY outcome, and what they have done to address it and if it was successful. Don't get carried away by promises of 'free enhancement' a few months after LASIK. The enhancement would do nothing for vision QUALITY symptoms: in fact an enhancement would often make these symptoms worse (by introducing even more higher-order aberrations that are not correctable with eyeglasses), so free enhancements are just marketing. Enhancements are typically only useful if distance visual acuity wasn't successfully treated in the first surgery which is not very common given that the ablation depth is precisely programmed and triple-checked. So in summary, I was unhappy with BOTH the vision outcome and the way Dr. Teplick handled my situation. The question is NOT whether a condition is rare or not, the problem is that he didn’t follow protocol to dig into the root cause of the surgery-induced ghosting/double vision, in particular TIMELY. He repeatedly threw the ball back at me saying “my bar is too high”, wasting valuable time when things may have been still fixable initially. My bar is NOT high. My vision quality is awful now, and it appears to be too late to fix it. He needs to take patients’ concerns seriously - that’s the core problem. The fact that he has done 50,000 eyes in his career doesn’t change this simple thing.

Very experienced staff. (I think I heard that they have all been there for over ten years doing this!). Dr. Teplick was available at all times and gave his number to be reached after hours if needed. GREAT vision outcome and overall experience! Everyone really knew their stuff and helped me to feel at ease. It has been three months and I am 20/15 :) I highly recommend Teplick Custom Vision

Office staff friendly and courteous. Easy to schedule surgery. Dr. Teplick spent time with me explaining the whole procedure. My results are great!