Laser Surgery at Mall Is a Real Eye-Opener

Squeamish shoppers beware: They’re slicing eyeballs at the Fair Oaks Mall.

No, they’re not filming a schlock horror movie. It’s just business as usual at the Visual Freedom Center, believed to be the first eye surgery center to open in a shopping mall.

Passersby can watch the surgeries--intended to correct nearsightedness and farsightedness--live on a television screen.

“Ewwww,” squealed a teenage girl when she saw a close-up of an eye being clamped open.

“Yuck,” said another mall rat as the eye was squirted with anesthetic and the cornea sliced and peeled back, exposing the area beneath, which was then zapped with a laser.

It’s an odd marketing strategy, but for every grossed-out passerby there are dozens who can’t help but stop for a peek.

That’s precisely what ophthalmologist Robert Johnston had in mind when he moved his office to the mall in February and began televising the operations. Bespectacled shoppers see how easy the procedure is and lose their fear, said marketing director Shannon Fredericks.

Patients can choose to close the curtains on the operating room and turn off the television, but only a few do so.

Tien Chau, 23, of Annandale, worked up the courage to have his eyes treated after watching his girlfriend, Thuy Nguyen, 23, have the operation the day before. Chau reasoned that doctors are less likely to butcher him with a crowd watching.

“My thoughts exactly,” said a woman waiting nervously alongside Chau in the waiting room.

The surgery takes about 15 minutes and costs about $4,500 for both eyes.

The operation, which reshapes the cornea so that images properly hit the retina, is called Laser in-Situ Keratomileusis, or LASIK. The center of a nearsighted person’s cornea is pulsed with the laser to reduce the curvature.

In a farsighted person, the periphery of the cornea is pulsed to remove tissue and add curvature.

Laser eye surgery is performed by ophthalmologists across the country, although the Visual Freedom Center is believed to be the first center to be located in a shopping mall, said Jan Beiting, spokeswoman for the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery in Fairfax.

“There’s definitely a buzz about it among our members,” she said.

Since the center moved to the mall from Johnston’s office in Leesburg in February, business has jumped about 40%, with about 15 patients treated daily, Fredericks said.

The center has been so successful that a second shop will open in a Columbia, Md., mall in September. Two more are in the works for the Chicago and Washington-Baltimore areas by the end of the year, Fredericks said.

David Karcher, executive director of the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, cautioned against trivializing the seriousness of the procedure and said this is as close as physicians have come to “going retail.”

Craig Conroy, head of Conroy Research Group and a former mall developer, said the Visual Freedom Center is part of the “doc in a box” phenomenon in which physicians have moved out of their traditional sterile environments to attract customers. People may get sweaty palms when they walk into a hospital, but nobody’s nervous about visiting the mall.

“Malls have become the town squares in many communities, and it makes sense for physicians to locate there,” Conroy said.