I’ve heard advertisements for this guy’s lasik clinic on the radio touting that he has performed over 90,000 surgical vision correction procedures (his website says 87,000).
What counts as a “procedure”?
Running the numbers gives me a “procedure” rate of ~23 per day if you count his 10 years of developing the technology, working 365 days per year.
Is he counting each step of a surgery as a procedure?
Lasik surgery is amazingly fast, and most of the pre and post surgery care is done by an optometrist or ophthalmologist other than the surgeon. When I was an optician I went to a presentation by an ophthalmologist who did Lasik and an optometrist who worked with him. The nickname they used for Lasik was “flap and zap”, and if I remember correctly they said the whole procedure took about ten minutes, most of which was prep by the nurses. As soon as one was done he’d go straight to the next one. I think he only did surgery two days a week, but it was wall to wall on the days he did. This was close to ten years ago, and the procedure may even be faster now.
What he should be counting is 1 eye surgical encounter start to finish = 1 procedure.
AFAIK all medicine follows the same practice of letting less-trained professionals (nurse, hygienist, etc.) do the routine and preparatory work while the senior medical professional (doctor, surgeon, etc.) only does the tricky bits, or oversees the work (when training another doctor/surgeon/etc.).
Why should eye surgeons be any different simply because they have large enough patient base to move straight from their portion of an operation to that same step with the next patient?