Improving Vision With Chinese Medicine

Researchers in Hong Kong have found acupuncture to improve the eyesight of children suffering from lazy eye.

Two studies found that a course of acupuncture along with wearing spectacles improved the eyesight in almost 60 per cent of children aged 3 to 6, compared with 14 per cent of those who wore glasses alone.

Lazy eye, or amblyopia, is a condition that affects around 4 per cent of children under 6 worldwide. It occurs because the brain does not acknowledge signals from one eye and, left untreated, can cause loss of vision and depth perception.

It is usually treated by occlusion therapy, covering the good eye with a patch to train the lazy eye, and also with spectacles. The Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at Chinese University in Hong Kong and Shantou University in southern China did the research, involving 171 children.

In the two clinical trials, two groups of children, aged 3 to 6 and the other aged 7 to 12, were given acupuncture as supplementary or alternative therapy. The needles were applied to five points on the head, ankle and hand five times a week.

In the younger group, an improvement was seen in 57.5 per cent of those who underwent acupuncture within 15 weeks, compared with 14.6 per cent of the children who were treated with spectacles only.

In the older group, an improvement was seen within 25 weeks in 42.1 per cent of those who underwent acupuncture, compared with 30 per cent of those who wore spectacles only.

Professor Dennis Shun-chiu Lam, who led the research, said the acupuncture accelerated the treatment response, improved the overall treatment results and shortened the total treatment duration.

He said the study also opened up the potential use of acupuncture in treating other eye disorders and diseases. In addition to lazy eye, there are acupuncture and herbal strategies for treating such eye disorders as macular degeneration.