Until now I thought LASIK was just one of the things they did to help people on Extreme Makeover. Turns out it’s almost guaranteed to give you better than 20/20 vision.

It’s sure worked for plenty of sportsmen:

Does the upgrade help? Looks that way. Maddux, a pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, was 0-3 in six starts before his surgery. He won nine of his next 10 games. Kite had LASIK in 1998 and won six events on the Champions Tour over the next five years. Three months after his surgery, Irwin captured the Senior PGA Tour Nationwide Championship.

According to Golf Digest, Woods aimed for 20/15 when he signed up for LASIK. This probably didn’t strike Woods as enhancement, since he was already using contacts that put him at 20/15. Now ads and quotes offering 20/15 are everywhere. One LASIK practice takes credit for giving Irwin 20/15 vision. Another boasts of raising Barber to 20/15 and calls the result “better than perfect.” Other sellers promise the same thing and offer evidence to back it up. Last year, they report, 69 percent of traditional LASIK patients in a study had 20/16 vision six months after their surgery, and new “wavefront” technology raised the percentage to 85. Odds are, if you’re getting LASIK, you’re getting enhanced.

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At 20/15, Kanell can read the eyes of defensive backs. Tom Lehman, who will lead the U.S. golf team in next year’s Ryder Cup, says Lasik improved his ability to “judge distances”—a common benefit, according to the technology’s purveyors. Woods says he’s “able to see slopes in greens a lot clearer.” Woods’ eye surgeon told the Los Angeles Times, “Golfers get a different three-dimensional view of the green after LASIK.” They “can see the grain” and “small indentations. It’s different. Lasik actually produces, instead of a spherical cornea, an aspherical cornea. It may be better than normal vision.”

No prizes for guessing the origin of this technology:

Always at the forefront of technology, the U. S. military felt they could gain a comparative advantage in combat if their soldiers could operate with a superior level of vision over their opponent, and they were happy to finance the initial stages of the research into “super vision”. So ophthalmologists got to work. They discovered that the difference between a 20/20 eye and a 20/15 or 20/10 eye is that the “normal”, 20/20 eye still has very subtle irregularities, not just on the cornea (the front part of the eye, which LASIK reshapes), but also inside. LASIK can be used to correct these distortions by adjusting the laser treatment to compensate for them. Eye researchers then turned to astronomers, who had found a way to see distant stars through the distortions of the Earth’s atmosphere thanks to wavefront technology. Each eye became a planet of its own as ophthalmologists learned to map out an eye’s unique pattern of subtle differences. The result: customized treatment, of which the most popular brand name is CustomVue.

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Besides creating better than 20/20 results in more patients, CustomVue also improves night vision. “At night, every irregularity counts because the pupil is dilated,” said Dr. Sandeep Kakaria, Fellow in Refractive Surgery at the Filatov Eye Institute, a research center that specializes in refractive surgery.“ So a technology that is able to correct these tiny bumps and dips will increase visual acuity in low light.

What’s not to like? Well, the price tag I’m guessing. But this has to rank highly on the list of practical body mods out there that are a mature technology.