Is it true that herbal therapy can treat myopia?

There is currently no authoritative evidence-based medical evidence that proves that herbal therapy can cure true myopia. Those online promotions of "drinking herbal medicine for 30 days to remove your glasses" are basically marketing words that covertly change the concept.

I have been working in ophthalmology clinics for almost 8 years, and I have met too many parents who came with various herbal remedies. The one that impressed me the most was the 10-year-old girl I met last year. My mother gave her wolfberry, chrysanthemum and cassia seed tea for a month, and strictly controlled the time she spent playing with the tablet. After the re-examination, her vision returned from 0.6 to 1.0. She pulled her on the spot. I wanted to "justify" this prescription, but I looked through the previous examination records. When the girl came here for the first time, she just went on summer vacation. She hid in bed every day for half a month and watched animations. After dilating her pupils, she only had 50 degrees of pseudomyopia. It should have recovered after a good rest. The herbal medicine relieved eye fatigue at most, and it was not a "cure of myopia."

Of course, this does not mean that herbal therapy is completely IQ tax. The eye-improving prescriptions in traditional Chinese medicine have their own applicable scenarios. For example, office workers who often type on the computer drink tea with chrysanthemum and dense flowers for a week. Many people can feel that the dryness and soreness of the eyes are much less severe. This is true, but this kind of "comfort" and "no fogging when seeing things" is essentially that visual fatigue is relieved, and myopia is not really cured.

You must first understand what true myopia is. Either the curvature of the cornea is too convex, or the axial length of the eye is elongated due to improper use of eyes. These are real organic changes. To use a simple metaphor, this is the same as if your height has grown to 1.7 meters, it is impossible to shrink back to 1.6 meters by drinking some herbal medicine. Currently, there is no method to reverse true myopia in the world, let alone ordinary herbs.

The trick that many businesses are playing now is to attribute the recovery of pseudomyopia to herbs, or to claim that ingredients such as lutein and bilberry extract, which can help the retina resist oxidation and reduce blue light damage, can "reduce the degree." In fact, these ingredients can at most help reduce visual fatigue and reduce the speed of myopia progression, and are completely different from "treating myopia." In the past two months, I met a second-grade child. His parents listened to WeChat merchants and spent more than 6,000 on a herbal myopia package. He also drank granules and applied medicine packs. He didn’t have an eye exam for half a year. When he finally came for a check-up, the reading had increased by 200 degrees. He also had a patch of eczema around his eyes because of the stimulation of the medicine packs. It was not worth the gain.

To be honest, if you use your eyes a lot and want to drink some mild eyesight-improving herbal tea to relieve your fatigue, it’s absolutely fine. After all, there’s no harm in choosing regular ones. But if you really hope to use it to eliminate hundreds of degrees of myopia, or even just take off your glasses, then it’s really better to save some money and get suitable glasses, and spend an extra half an hour every day to go outdoors and bask in the sun, which is much more useful in controlling your degree.