Is it true that herbal therapy can treat myopia?

To be clear, herbal therapy cannot cure true myopia. Its actual effect is mostly to relieve visual fatigue. It only has a certain auxiliary effect on the recovery of pseudomyopia, and it is not a "radical cure for myopia" at all.

A while ago, a parent consulted me and said that her child was in the second grade of junior high school. The last time he had his eyesight checked, he had 100-degree myopia. He listened to the elders’ prescription of boiling water with chrysanthemums, cassia seeds, and honeysuckle flowers to smoke his eyes. He drank a cup of wolfberry and chrysanthemum tea in the morning and evening. After half a month, the eyesight was back to 1.0. I felt that herbal treatment of myopia was real, and I wanted to ask if I could continue to use it to suppress the possible increase in myopia in the future. I performed a dilated eye refraction on my child and discovered that the previous 100 degrees was simply pseudomyopia. To put it bluntly, it was ciliary muscle spasm caused by studying questions for a long time, which is itself reversible. The period of time when I smoked the eyes with herbal remedies and drank the medicine just relaxed the eye muscles and improved the local circulation, so it would naturally return to normal. If I did less studying during this period and ran outdoors more, the same effect could be achieved.

But this "effective" situation is completely invalid when it comes to true myopia. The essence of true myopia is that the axial length of the eyeball becomes longer. You can think of the axial length of the eyeball as the height. After it grows to 1.8m, it is impossible to shrink it back to 1.6m. No matter how many Chinese medicines you take and how many herbal packages you apply, you cannot shrink the elongated axial length of the eyeball.

I have also communicated with many colleagues who are engaged in TCM eye care. They do have some herbal formulas for relieving wind and improving eyesight. After using it for low-degree myopia patients, many people reported that their naked-eye vision has improved. I agree with this, but I have to clarify one common sense: naked-eye vision. Myopia and myopia are not completely equivalent. Some people improve the adjustment ability of eye muscles through conditioning. Even if the degree does not change, they will see things more clearly. However, this does not mean that myopia has been cured. As long as they undergo dilated optometry, the actual degree will not be less at all.

The most embarrassing thing now is that many businesses deliberately confuse this concept and tout the role of auxiliary relief as "curing myopia". Publicity about "removing glasses in 30 days" and "800-degree myopia can be cured" are flying everywhere. I treated a 10-year-old boy two years ago, and his parents believed in a herbal myopia treatment. I spent more than 40,000 yuan to buy a half-year package based on the promotion of the medical agency. I did not let my children wear glasses, applied herbal medicine packs every day, and did eye moxibustion. As a result, a reexamination six months later found that the axial length of the eyeball had increased by 0.58mm, and the degree directly increased from 200 degrees to 425 degrees. It was an unnecessary increase of more than 200 degrees. What a pity.

It’s not like I’m going to kill herbal therapy in one fell swoop. I usually sit in front of my computer and mobile phone until my eyes are sore and swollen, and I can make a cup of warm chrysanthemum and wolfberry tea, or apply a compliant herbal eye patch for 10 minutes. I feel much better. This kind of effect in relieving visual fatigue, It does have a certain auxiliary effect in preventing the progression of myopia, but if you have the idea of "relying on herbal roots to treat myopia and taking off your glasses", you will most likely have to pay an IQ tax. If you are really myopic, you still need to follow the doctor's instructions to wear glasses and have regular check-ups, which are more reliable than any folk remedies.