What Are the Real Risks of LASIK Surgery?

The real risks of LASIK surgery in 2026 are small but worth saying out loud: temporary dry eye, glare or halos at night, the occasional need for a touch-up, and very rarely a serious flap or corneal problem. The overall complication rate sits under one percent, and more than 96 out of 100 patients land at 20/40 vision or better. At Visionary Eye Surgery in Plano, I’d rather you hear the honest version from me than the sanitized version from an ad.

How risky is LASIK, really?

Less risky than most people fear, and that’s not me cheerleading, that’s the data.

LASIK carries a complication rate under one percent, and serious complications are genuinely rare. More than 99 percent of patients reach 20/40 vision or better, which is the legal driving standard in Texas without glasses.

So when patients walk into my Plano office bracing for a coin flip, I get to give them better news than they expected. The honest framing isn’t “is it safe.” It’s “which small, mostly temporary effects might you notice, and for how long.”

What’s the most common side effect?

Dry eye, by a wide margin. Up to about 30 percent of patients feel it in the first three months.

The reason is simple. Making the flap briefly disturbs some of the nerves that tell your eyes to make tears, so the signal gets quiet for a while. In dusty, windy, allergy-heavy North Texas, that’s worth planning for, not panicking over.

The part that matters: it’s usually temporary. For most people it settles within three to six months, and I manage it with drops and a plan from day one. If your eyes already run dry, I might steer you toward SMILE, which disturbs fewer of those nerves.

What about glare and halos at night?

Some patients notice starbursts or halos around headlights and streetlights in the first weeks, which is a real thing if you do a lot of night driving on DFW highways.

For the large majority, it fades as the eye heals. Modern all-laser platforms have made it less common than the LASIK horror stories from twenty years ago, which is part of why I do every case with the all-laser method.

Here’s the turn, though. The biggest risk in LASIK usually isn’t the laser. It’s the screening before the laser.

What’s the serious risk nobody names?

The complication I work hardest to prevent is corneal ectasia, where a cornea that was too thin or too weak starts to bulge after surgery and vision worsens over time.

It’s rare. It’s also largely avoidable, because it’s mostly a screening failure, not a surgery failure. The way you dodge it is by measuring corneal thickness and shape carefully and by being willing to say no to the wrong candidate.

That’s why I turn patients away. If your cornea is too thin for a safe LASIK, I’ll point you to ASA/PRK or EVO ICL, which add or preserve tissue instead of removing what you can’t spare. A good no protects you from the one risk that actually keeps me up.

Can LASIK make you go blind?

No. LASIK has never been established as a primary, exclusive cause of blindness.

I say that flatly because it’s the fear patients are quietly carrying when they sit down across from me in Plano. The honest risks are real but small and mostly temporary. The catastrophic one people imagine just isn’t borne out by the record.

So is LASIK worth the risk in Dallas-Fort Worth?

For the right candidate, the math is good. A small, mostly temporary set of side effects, weighed against decades of waking up able to see, is a trade most of my patients would make again.

But “the right candidate” is the whole sentence. The risk profile only looks this friendly when the screening is honest and the surgeon is willing to walk away from a bad fit.

If you want the real numbers for your eyes instead of the average ones, that’s what a consultation is for. I’ll tell you the risks that apply to you, not the ones that apply to a brochure.

How soon do the side effects settle down?

Faster than the worry does, usually, which is its own small problem.

Most of the dry eye and night glare ease over the first few weeks to a few months, and for the majority of patients they’re a memory by the three to six month mark. The eye is doing real healing work in that window, even when the vision already looks sharp on the chart.

What I tell my Plano patients is to judge the result at the finish line, not at the starting gun. If something lingers past where it should, I want to see you, because managing a side effect early is far easier than chasing it late. That follow-up care is part of the procedure, not an extra.

Visionary Eye Surgery | Plano, TX