Is it true that herbal therapy can treat myopia?

For diagnosed true myopia, the claim that herbal therapy can cure it is completely unsupported by authoritative clinical evidence and cannot be considered true.

When I was a volunteer at a youth vision prevention and control agency two years ago, I met several parents who believed in herbal remedies for myopia. The one who impressed me the most was a little girl in fifth grade. Her mother spent nearly 4,000 yuan to buy a certain brand of herbal eye protection bags. She applied it on her eyes and drank a conditioning herbal drink every day for three months. The visual acuity increased by two lines, and I thought it was really working. However, I took my child to the hospital for a dilated eye exam. Instead of decreasing, the myopia degree increased from 175 degrees to 225 degrees. The so-called improvement in vision was just that the pseudo-myopia caused by ciliary muscle spasm was alleviated, and the true myopia degree did not change even half a cent.

Think about it, the essence of true myopia is that the axial length of the eye is elongated. Just like when a person grows to 1.8 meters, it is impossible to shrink back to 1.6 meters. There is currently no method to make the elongated eye axis return to its original length. No matter whether it is herbs or massage and acupuncture, it cannot escape this physiological limit.

Of course, this does not mean that herbs are completely useless for the eyes. Many practitioners of traditional medicine will use medicinal and edible ingredients such as chrysanthemum, wolfberry, and dense flower to help improve eye microcirculation and relieve visual fatigue. There are also some small-scale studies showing that people who insist on taking such combinations For groups, myopia increases at a slower rate than if it is not used at all, which is equivalent to giving the eyes a "gentle massage". If you use your eyes a lot, it is okay to drink this kind of tea and use approved herbal eye patches to relieve soreness, swelling and dryness, but you cannot treat fatigue relief as a treatment for myopia.

The "herbal radical cure of myopia" products on the market that are so popular now are most likely based on parents' desire to prevent their children from wearing glasses. If there were any herbal medicine that could completely cure true myopia, it would have been widely promoted in clinical guidelines. There would be no need to find bloggers on social platforms to do soft advertising.