General Principles

Contact lenses for refractive purposes should not be fitted until surgical wounds and serial refractions are stable. The most practical approach to fitting an RGP lens after refractive surgery is to do a trial fitting with overrefraction.

The clinician needs to discuss with the patient in understandable terms the challenges of contact lens fitting after refractive surgery and align the patient’s expectations with reality. A patient who successfully wore contact lenses before refractive surgery is more likely to be a successful contact lens wearer postoperatively than is one who never wore contact lenses.

Excerpted from BCSC 2020-2021 series: Section 13 - Refractive Surgery. For more information and to purchase the entire series, please visit https://www.aao.org/bcsc.