Professional Boxer's Career In Jeopardy Because of Poor Contact Lens Hygiene

Implications: So how important is contact lens hygiene?  Extremely.  If you don't properly take care of your contact lenses, you risk vision loss. Would you change your bad habits if it were to cost you your professional career?  Most sane, competent people would emphatically say 'YES!'.  Unfortunately though, through ignorance or laziness, not everyone would.

Analysis: Contact lens hygiene has been a big news topic in the contact lens world recently.  Both heads of Bausch & Lomb (ReNu MoisturLoc) and AMO (Complete MoisturePlus) have blamed consumers' poor contact lens hygiene for their solutions' problems with infections.  There is some truth to their arguments.  It is a well-known fact that poor contact lens hygiene puts you at higher risk for developing an infection.  This boxer is an unfortunate, but appropriate, worst case scenario example of this fact.

This article is pretty vague about the details of this boxer's infection.  The author does not report what type of contact lenses he was wearing, the type of contact lens solution (if any) he was using, or the actually microbe involved.  The thing that strikes me as most significant is that he was expected to spend 7-10 days in the hospital until they figured out his prognosis.  It is pretty rare to spend that long in the hospital for an eye infection.  This must be one heck of an infection by one very nasty bug.

So, we all get the take home message from this article - if you've got to clean your contact lenses, use your dog's mouth, not yours.  Just kidding, of course.  I read that the boxer 'cleaned' his contacts with his mouth, and after cringing for a few moments thought, 'What the hell was he thinking?'  Fortunately, this type of improvised 'cleaning' is not very common, but definitely not unheard of.  These are the patients who should consider alternatives.  Obviously, People, if you can't handle the responsibility of cleaning, disinfecting, and caring for your contacts, consider refractive surgery, consider glasses.  But most importantly, consider the fact that if you don't stop abusing your contact lenses, you can lose both your vision, and your career.  I tell my patients who, against my recommendations, sleep in their lenses, "If you were to needlessly lose vision because you contracted a central corneal ulcer, because you slept in your lenses, after we told you not to, you'd kick your own butt for the rest of your life."  I usually see the light come on at this point.