Is it true that herbal therapy can treat myopia?

Let me give you a solid background first. Currently, there is no authoritative evidence-based medical evidence that can prove that herbal therapy can cure diagnosed true myopia. Those herbal myopia treatment products on the market under the banner of "taking off glasses in three months" are basically IQ tax.

I met a 16-year-old girl at the optometry clinic last year. Her mother came across a certain herbal eye protection package through a short video. She said that by drinking wolfberry and cassia seed compound tea + applying herbal eye ointment around the eyes before going to bed, she could lower her prescription without wearing glasses. It took almost an hour. Wan bought it for half a year, but after using it for three months, my child kept wearing it because he felt that wearing glasses would affect the effect. During the reexamination, the reading not only did not drop, but increased by 100 degrees. The eye area was also red for less than half a month due to allergies to the irritating ingredients in the eye ointment.

If you want to directly say that herbs are of no use to the eyes, that would be too absolute. I have many Chinese medicine colleagues around me. They usually prescribe some liver-clearing and eye-clearing tea substitutes to patients with severe visual fatigue, or use cold compresses containing mint and mugwort to apply on the eyes. If they encounter pseudomyopia that has just appeared - to put it bluntly, it means that the ciliary muscles are spasmed and stiff after staring at the screen for a long time. After using these methods to relax, the blurred vision will indeed improve. Many people mistakenly think that their myopia has been cured by herbs because of this. In fact, even if you don’t use these methods, if you look into the distance for half an hour on time every day and use your mobile phone less, pseudomyopia can be alleviated.

There are indeed many traditional Chinese medicine hospitals doing relevant clinical research. I read in journals before and saw a small sample test by a Chinese medicine doctor in a certain province. Myopic children aged 8 to 12 were given herbal tea drinks according to their physical constitution, and combined with daily intervention on their eye habits. After half a year, the average increase in myopia in these children was higher than that of children who only wore ordinary glasses. The control group with frame glasses was more than 40 degrees lower, which shows that the appropriate herbal solution does have a certain auxiliary effect in delaying the progression of myopia in teenagers, but it is only a "delay". In terms of pulling back the elongated eye axis and curing true myopia, there is currently no defensible research data to support it.

In fact, to put it bluntly, true myopia is just like how tall you are. If you grow to 1.7 meters this year, you can’t expect to shrink back to 1.6 meters after drinking a few doses of Chinese medicine, right? For every additional 1 mm of axial length of the eye, the degree of myopia increases by about 300 degrees. This organic change is irreversible. Currently, what can be done is to either wear glasses or orthokeratology lenses to correct vision, or wait until the degree stabilizes in adulthood to undergo refractive surgery. Other conservative methods can only relieve visual fatigue and delay the degree of myopia, and cannot achieve a "cure" effect.

I usually meet people who come to ask about herbal remedies for myopia, and I will tell them that if they feel comfortable using it, it is okay to spend a small amount of money to buy it to relieve visual fatigue, but do not spend a lot of money with the expectation of "curing myopia". If you really want to prevent and control myopia, it is better to go out for an extra two hours a day, lie in bed less and use your mobile phone, and go to a regular institution for regular optometry review. It is more reliable than any folk prescription.