Traditional Chinese medicine, which consists in puncturing the right places in the body with needles, is also helpful in the treatment of amblyopia, i.e. lazy eye disease – reports Reuters agency.
Children struggling with the lazy eye problem are treated by putting a healthy blindfold on their eyes. Its task is to force the lazy eye to be more active. However, as it turns out, acupuncture gives almost identical results to the band.
About 5 percent of people in the world suffer from amblyopia. The disease is where one eye can see less than the other, hence the name lazy eye. It most often contributes to vision problems among children. 30-50 percent of amblyopia cases are due to differences in myopia and farsightedness in both eyes.
Prescription glasses or lenses can solve the problem, but only if it is detected relatively early. Otherwise, especially in children under the age of 7, eye patches and drops are used. All these methods are quite burdensome and inconvenient. The acupuncture treatment turns out to be equally effective, but there is no need to stick in needles for days.
Chinese medicine used acupuncture to treat many ailments. Today, the West is also resorting to this method of treatment more and more often. Conventional medicine, however, still lacks knowledge of the effects and effects of acupuncture, says Dr. Robert Ritch of the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary.
To see if acupuncture could actually help the lazy eye, Ritch and fellow scientists in China studied 88 children aged 7 to 12 who had the disease and had been wearing corrective glasses for at least 16 weeks.
Half of the group were asked to wear the blindfold on their healthy eye for at least 2 hours a day, while the other half received acupuncture treatments 5 times a week. Total treatment duration for both groups was 25 weeks. All children were also given a pair of corrective glasses to work for an hour a day on some activities that do not require distant vision.
At the end of the treatment, it turned out that at least 7 out of 10 children had a significant improvement in their vision. In addition, children who used acupuncture showed more than twice the improvement in health than children who used armbands.
Scientists are cautious in their rulings and do not urge parents of children with lazy eye to throw away the blindfolds and choose acupuncture. The study did not include a large number of patients, and there are few professionals in the world who can properly puncture the body. In addition, it is not very practical – take the child 5 times a day for treatments instead of using drops and wearing the headband at home. (PAP)