A new study by the US Navy looked at a very important question from the Navy’s perspective: was LASIK better than glasses or contacts for the critical visual needs of a high performance Navy pilot? In other words, the study didn’t look simply at whether or not LASIK improved vision, but at whether LASIK improved the pilots’ ability to carry out their mission.  In the study, the results of 633 LASIK laser eye surgeries on Navy combat pilots were studied. 548 LASIK surgeries were for nearsightedness and nearsightedness with some astigmatism, 60 LASIK surgeries were for primarily astigmatism, and the remaining 25 cases were for farsightedness and farsightedness with some astigmatism. Impressively, 95.9% of pilots felt that LASIK improved their performance as combat fighters compared to their glasses or contacts and 99.6% said they would recommend the laser vision correction surgery to others. Interestingly, these results are almost identical to what I found in a study of results of LASIK surgery I performed on my patients from the Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo offices of the Shapiro Laser Eye Center. I presented the results of this study to the Association for Research and Vision in Ophthalmology (ARVO) Symposium. Our study looked at patient reported outcomes of the latest version of customized wavefront LASIK on 100 consecutive patients from my practice that I personally did surgery on. 100% of patients in our study said their vision after LASIK was at least as good as their glasses or contacts and, paralleling the results of the recent US Navy fighter pilot study, 96% of our patients said their vision actually was better than it was with their glasses or contact lenses. These two studies taken together, with their essentially identical results, confirm that while any eye surgery carries an element of risk, modern customized wavefront LASIK routinely outperforms glasses or contact lenses.