The Lasik Gold Mine

Abandoned Gold Mines

The Lasik industry has often been referred to as a gold mine. I think that this analogy is far more accurate than most people think. Gold mines are sources of vast extracted wealth, but they are also examples of some of the worst corporate behaviour imaginable.

Most gold is produced by technology known as cyanide heap leach mining, a process which permits mine operators to extract an ounce of gold from 100 tons of ore and slag.

Vast amounts of ore are piled up and soaked with cyanide, which bonds with the gold and leaches out of the heap to collection points.The gold is removed from the ore, but the slag and cyanide heaps remain.

Over time, the cyanide seeps into ground water, streams and rivers. These leaks will continue to be toxic for several hundred years, rendering vast areas of the mountain West uninhabitable.

Incredibly, many mining companies make little or no effort to clean up these disasters. More often than not, the depleted mine is abandoned, and the billion dollar cleanup is left to the taxpayers. Mining companies use brazen legal gimmickry to enrich themselves while they despoil the land.

What does this have to do with Lasik?

Mining companies, like giant lasik corporations, have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize shareholder equity. Any activity that does not advance this goal is not a priorty to the corporation. Mining companies abandon toxic sites and invest the profits in new sites, leaving the cleanup costs to the taxpayer. But what about "corporate social responsibility"? It comes second to profits.

Lasik corporations, for the same reasons, are pursuing new patients and new profits. The damaged eyes of the their previous patients are not seen as profitable venture, only as a cost to be abandoned as expeditiously as possible. Even though many of the principals of these companies have a medical background, and have presumably read the hippocratic oath at least once, Lasik corporations are calculating, heartless machines that have no problem abandoning their former patients for profits.