Is it true that herbal therapy can treat myopia?

There is currently no clinically proven evidence that herbal therapy can cure established myopia. The popular claim on the market that "drinking traditional Chinese medicine for 30 days can lower the temperature by 300 degrees" is basically a gimmick to harvest IQ tax.

Last week, I met a parent of a fourth-grade elementary school student who came to me to check with an "ancestral herbal prescription for myopia." He said that the seller said that by giving the child soles for three months and drinking herbal tea, 250-degree myopia could be eliminated without wearing glasses. I looked through the prescriptions and found that they were all common eyesight-improving herbs such as wolfberry, chrysanthemum, and dense flower. They didn’t have any toxic or side effects, but I still advised her not to have too high expectations. There was a mother of a sophomore in high school who tried a similar idea before. She boiled water with cassia seeds to smoke her eyes every day, and drank herbal drinks with blueberries and lutein for three months. Afterwards, the naked eye visual acuity did indeed increase from 0.3 to 0.5. The whole family was very happy at that time. After a dilated refraction, it was found that the 300-degree myopia was not reduced at all. It was just that the visual fatigue caused by staring at books for a long time and the pseudo-myopia of about 100 degrees disappeared. Only then did the naked-eye visual acuity improve, and the elongated axial length of the eyeball was not even retracted by half a millimeter.

This is not to say that herbs are completely useless. There are indeed many records in traditional Chinese medicine that herbs can improve eyesight and clear the eyes. We usually recommend patients who are prone to visual fatigue to drink some chrysanthemum and wolfberry water, or use mild herbal medicine packs to warm the eyes. It is indeed effective in relieving uncomfortable symptoms such as dry eyes and soreness. For students with poor work and rest habits, it can also reduce the myopia caused by visual fatigue to a certain extent, which is a good auxiliary conditioning method. But if you equate this function with "treating myopia", you are completely off track - to use an inappropriate analogy, it is like maintaining a car that you have driven for several years every day, which can make the car drive smoother and reduce the probability of failure, but you cannot rely on maintenance to restore the deformed wheels to new ones, right?

There are currently many studies on the effects of herbal ingredients on myopia control, but they are still in the animal experiments or small-scale clinical stages, and there is no treatment plan that can be implemented and recognized by authoritative organizations. I have encountered patients who tried random folk remedies before. They bought unknown herbal eye ointments and put them into their eyes. In the end, they induced conjunctivitis and hurt their eyes. It was really not worth the gain.

To put it bluntly, if you are really diagnosed with true myopia, you should first follow the doctor's advice and choose defocus lenses, orthokeratology lenses, and low-concentration atropine, which have been proven to be effective control methods. You can usually use herbal prescriptions for daily relief, but don't put the cart before the horse, spend money and delay your child's degree control.