Last week a patient in my Ventura office who wore contact lenses asked me about infections with LASIK. Many people would assume contact lenses would be safer than LASIK laser eye surgery since LASIK is a surgical procedure. A recent study from the Hamilton Eye Center at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, however, yielded results that some may find surprising. Infection is one of the most dreaded complications of both contact lens use and LASIK. The authors of the study pointed out that the risk of infection with both LASIK and contact lens use is low, but the risk of infection with LASIK was considered to be a one-time risk whereas the risk of infection with contact lens use was considered an ongoing risk for as long as a person continues to use contact lenses to correct their vision. The study was a meta analysis, which is an overview of the most important published literature on a subject. This study reviewed relevant articles published between December 2014 and July 2015. The rate of infection with LASIK was found to be 2 out of 10,000. The risk of infection with ongoing contact lens use was approximately the same at one year of ongoing contact lens use, but then exceeded the infection risk of LASIK after one year and continued to grow from there. In other words, much after one year of continuing to wear contacts instead of having LASIK, the chances of infection become significantly higher with contacts than LASIK. The more years of continued contact lens use, the overall greater chance of infection.  The study emphasizes at a public health level, the choice to continue to wear contact lenses instead of have LASIK places a toll on the US health care system. The study points out that, in 2010, there were approximately 38 million contact lens wearers in the United States and contact lens infection caused an estimated 1 million visits to doctors.