Refractive surgery, explained plainly
Working guides to LASIK, SMILE, TransPRK and EVO ICL in China — costs at standard rates, honest comparisons, candidacy, and recovery. New guides are added regularly.
LASIK Cost in China (2026)
Standard partner-hospital rates, what they include, and how they compare with US and EU private-pay quotes.
Read the guide → ComparisonSMILE vs ICL, TransPRK vs SMILE
The two head-to-heads people actually ask about, answered directly — then all four paths side by side: prescription ranges, corneal requirements, recovery, reversibility, and price.
Read the guide → CostSMILE Cost in China (2026)
Why SMILE prices above LASIK everywhere, and why the world's highest-volume SMILE market quotes a third of US rates.
Read the guide → CostEVO ICL Cost in China (2026)
What a custom-manufactured lens does to the price floor, the toric premium, the surgical fee and the package price reconciled line by line, what happens to your money if the sizing scans rule ICL out, how often a lens is genuinely exchanged or explanted and who is holding that bill — and how you actually settle a $5,690 bill in China, where the foreign-card ceiling on both payment apps sits below it.
Read the guide → Long-termYou Still Have a Myopic Eye
Surgery reshapes the cornea; it does not shorten the eye. What axial length ≥26 mm means for lifetime retinal risk, what the evidence genuinely does not settle, and why the baseline retinal exam you have in China is the comparison point for the rest of your life.
Read the guide → ScreeningDry Eye as a Gate
Your tear film is measured on day one, after the flights are booked. What gets measured, the three verdicts — proceed, reroute, postpone — what each does to a 3-day or 7-day itinerary, and the six weeks of preparation before you fly.
Read the guide → RecoveryCorneal Sensation & the Alarm That Fails
Every corneal procedure cuts nerves — so “it doesn’t feel dry” and “it doesn’t hurt” both stop being evidence. Recovery by procedure across all four, and a sign-based escalation rule for the late window you spend back home.
Read the guide → AftercareRegression: The Number Nobody Agrees On
Published rates run from 1% to 40% and two survival analyses of the same procedures disagree by forty points — because they count different events. What regression is, what predicts it, and how to tell it from a dry-eye artefact.
Read the guide → DecisionYour Workup Report, Number by Number
Two pages of numbers from five machines, and nobody explains them. What each value is, which instrument made it, what it has to clear — the PTA and residual-bed arithmetic people run wrong online, and which numbers to get in English before you fly.
Read the guide → RecoveryHalos, Starbursts & Night Driving
The four-way night-vision comparison including the one that reflects on our own advice, the mesopic pupil measurement your workup already takes, and the escalation clock for the patient who flies home before the settling finishes.
Read the guide → RecoveryRecovery Timelines, Hour by Hour
Day 0 through month 3 for all four procedures — screens, flights, gyms, pools, and why the PRK timeline online is wrong.
Read the guide → ICL follow-upICL & Endothelial Cell Loss
How noisy a specular-microscopy count really is, where the decompensation thresholds actually sit, and what vault has to do with it.
Read the guide → CandidacyAm I a Candidate?
What the diagnostic workup measures, why one in five inquiries changes procedure, and what rules you out.
Read the guide → AviationPilots & Cabin Crew
Aeromedical stability windows vs the tourist timeline, why ICL clears faster than surface laser, who signs Class 1 and 3 off — and why you declare, never conceal.
Read the guide → CandidacyThin Corneas & High Myopia
The two findings that most often turn a LASIK inquiry into a different procedure — and the options map by thickness and prescription band.
Read the guide → TrustEnhancements & the Fine Print
What no quote anywhere includes, how each procedure handles an enhancement, and what aftercare looks like from another continent.
Read the guide → TrustIs LASIK in China Safe?
The same ZEISS, Alcon and STAAR platforms as Western clinics, the world's highest SMILE volumes, hospital-based care — and how to verify any center yourself.
Read the guide → LogisticsHow Long to Stay in China
3 days for LASIK and SMILE, 3–5 for TransPRK, 6–7 for ICL — the clinical gate behind each number, day by day, plus the washout that starts before you fly.
Read the guide → CompareChina vs Turkey vs Korea
The three big refractive destinations priced side by side, both eyes, dated — and why the "cheapest country" flips with the procedure you need.
Read the guide → LogisticsEnglish-Speaking Care & Aftercare at Home
Where the English actually is, stage by stage — consult yes, technician workup no, theatre scripted — plus the record set that lets your own optometrist take over once home.
Read the guide → CostTransPRK in China (2026)
$1,000–1,500 both eyes, researched July 2026 — the cheapest line on the table, and the procedure people are rerouted to without explanation. The price anatomy and the rerouting logic, decoded.
Read the guide → PlatformSMILE Pro & the VisuMax 800
NMPA-approved February 2025 — what the new platform generation really changes (a sub-10-second lenticule cut, automated astigmatism alignment), what it doesn't (candidacy, the surgery, the price band), and the written-quote question that settles which machine you'd be under.
CandidacyOrtho-K Before LASIK or SMILE
If you wore overnight ortho-k lenses as a child — routine in China and across East Asia — the interval that governs your trip is a Chinese one: a minimum of three months without lenses, from the 2024 expert consensus on preoperative topography screening, not the two-to-four weeks quoted to ordinary contact-lens wearers. And three months is a floor, because stability is a measured trend across consecutive weekly visits, which means the workup that decides your date has to start at home. What stays changed after the washout and by how much, and the one place an ortho-k history has a mechanical reason to affect which operation you are offered.
Read the guide → PlanningBoth Eyes the Same Day, or One at a Time?
Settled for laser — Femto-LASIK, SMILE and TransPRK are done on both eyes in one session as a matter of routine. Genuinely contested for EVO ICL, because that one goes inside the eye. China is where the argument has actually been counted: 357 of 531 qualified ICL surgeons across all thirty mainland provinces were operating both eyes in a single session, while barely half thought it should be the routine. And the number that decides your itinerary rather than your risk — among the surgeons who do separate the eyes, 85% operate the second one the next day. One at a time costs an extra day, not a second trip.
Read the guide → RecoveryAfter an EVO ICL: The First Three Months
An EVO ICL does not cut the corneal nerves — and it still disturbs the ocular surface. A Chinese prospective cohort measured both procedures on one instrument: the tear film dips at one week after an ICL and is back to baseline by one month, where SMILE takes three; the symptom score is slower than the instrument in both. Plus the two things nobody tells an ICL patient — the incision site is a question you are allowed to ask, and being corrected to 20/15 does not protect you from near-work strain, because moving the correction inside the eye slightly increases the focusing effort the same reading distance demands. And why almost all the vault movement anyone will ever measure happens inside these three months.
Read the guide → CandidacyTurned Down at the Workup: What Happens Next
The most expensive thing that can go wrong on a refractive trip, and almost nobody publishes what actually happens. The headline “70% are not candidates” figure is mostly presbyopia in people over 45; in the largest series with a published breakdown, 38.4% of those screened did not go on to surgery but only 12.6% had a contraindication. Under 45 the reasons cluster on two findings — topography and corneal thickness — and both are reroutes to a different operation far more often than a no. Every branch mapped, plus what to settle in writing before the flight is booked.
Read the guide → ICL safetyEndophthalmitis After EVO ICL
The complication that defines any operation inside the eye, and the one consumer pages either skip or soothe. The published ICL figure is about 0.0167% — roughly one case per 6,000 implantations — and it is lower than the cataract-surgery numbers most people find first and misapply. The part that exists nowhere else: the published median interval from surgery to presentation is about eight days, and the ICL itinerary flies you home on day six or seven. Your itinerary against the presentation window, day by day, and the four things to get in writing before you leave.
Read the guide → CandidacyA Cone Found at the Workup
A suspect topography is the commonest single finding that stops a laser procedure, and every page you can find about keratoconus answers a different question — how the condition is treated. This one answers the refractive question. Procedure-by-procedure: which operations come off the table and why flap-free does not mean tissue-free; the one refractive option that removes no corneal tissue; and the arithmetic nobody publishes — the gate in front of it is a demonstration that your cornea is not changing, measured over six to twelve months, against an EVO ICL itinerary of six to seven days. Plus what to ask for before you leave the building if the finding was made in China.
Read the guide → PlatformPRESBYOND in China
The branded presbyopia LASIK you were quoted by name — and the reason it vanishes from Chinese hospital pages. PRESBYOND is a ZEISS software option treating on the MEL 90 excimer, so availability is a question about one hospital, not about China. Includes the randomised head-to-head against conventional monovision now recruiting at Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center in Guangzhou, the Class 1 aviation complication, the neural-adaptation limit that disqualifies more people than thin corneas do, and why we publish no PRESBYOND price band.
Read the guide → PlatformWhat the EVO ICL Actually Is
One manufacturer, one material, two current models. What Collamer contains — including the ~0.2% purified porcine collagen most explainers leave out — what the 0.36 mm central port replaced, how EVO and EVO+ differ, and the supply-chain fact no clinic page carries: the lenses implanted in China are built in Switzerland, and China has had the EVO+ since November 2025.
Read the guide → ICL follow-upICL Vault Too High or Too Low
Your number came back high, or low, and nobody explained it. The 250–750 µm band, what high vault risks (angle narrowing, eye pressure) against what low vault risks (cataract at the front of the natural lens), and the observe → rotate → exchange ladder — including the rung toric patients do not get, and why.
Read the guide → OccupationalPolice, Army, Fire & Seafarer Medicals After LASIK
Two weeks for a firefighter standard, six weeks for UK police recruitment, three to six months for US military accession, six months unfit for lookout at sea: the waits are nothing like each other, and every one of them runs from your surgery date. Plus the serial-refraction problem when surgery happened overseas, and the pre-op measurements that stop existing the moment you fly home.
Read the guide → TripTraveling Alone for Surgery
Clinics contradict each other on the escort question because they are each describing their own rule. The variable underneath it is the oral sedative — plus which procedure makes solo genuinely harder, and what to set up before the hours when your phone is unreadable.
Read the guide → AgeRefractive Surgery in Your 40s
Age changes the target, not usually the candidacy — and full distance correction in a presbyopic eye means readers afterwards. Plus the monovision trial that takes weeks in contact lenses and therefore cannot happen inside a three-day trip, and why ICL reads differently at 45 than at 25.
Read the guide → CityLASIK, SMILE & ICL in Beijing
Where China's refractive surgery was standardised — the first excimer procedure in 1993 and the national consensus written there. The three kinds of provider the city actually has, how the 240-hour visa-free transit window fits a 3-day or 7-day treatment plan, and why the arrival airport shapes everything after it.
Read the guide → AviationClass 1 Medical, Authority by Authority
Two weeks under CASA, thirty days under Transport Canada, six to twelve months under DGCA — the published grounding periods for one operation, side by side, with what each interval is protecting. Plus the split that matters more: which authorities judge the refraction you have after surgery, and which apply a limit to the one you had before it, a number the operation erases and only the operating hospital still holds.
Read the guide → РусскийМатериалы на русском языке
Цены в рублях по курсу ЦБ и прямое сравнение с московскими клиниками — включая методики, где Китай выходит дороже; документы для ВЛЭК после операции за границей; безвизовое окно и его дата окончания.
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