LASIK is purely mechanical and generally well-understood and the improvement is directly measurable and involves applying a particular fix and then you're done.

LASIK is purely mechanical and generally well-understood and the improvement is directly measurable and involves applying a particular fix and then you're done. Dentistry can be like that too. As can some orthopedic stuff like setting a broken bone or replacing a hip. But most of the rest of medicine isn't like that. Suppose you have high blood pressure or low blood pressure or balance issues or cancer or joint pain or acid reflux or arthritis or a lack of energy or are overweight. Doctors can give advice and prescribe treatment for any of those but most of it doesn't work very well. The best case might involve continuously taking pills and changing behavior for the entire rest of your life. There's very little where the doctor says "just do this one thing, let me turn this knob over here, and you're all better." In a lot of cases they can't even tell what's wrong, much less how to fix it, much less precisely how much it's going to cost to fix it. In large part because LASIK is optional and usually not covered by insurance, it tends to be a FAR better experience than most other medicine. The pipeline is ridiculously optimized to make the operation fast and efficient and cheap and transparent. It would be awesome to have the equivalent of LASIK centers for every other kind of medicine, rather than the sort of confuseopoly we've got.