A novel study suggests that acupuncture which is an ancient Chinese therapy can act as another elective treatment for amblyopia also called lazy eye apart from patching. Amblyopia is a chaos of the visual system, in this disease the vision of one eye is reduced because the eye and brain do not work together properly.
The eye looks normal but it is not being used normally because the brain is favoring the other eye. Sometimes is also known as lazy eye. The normal treatment for lazy eye is eye surgery, glasses and contact lenses, which are used to correct the disorder.
Acupuncture is Chinese therapy in which, with the help of sharp and thin needle, certain areas of body are activated in order to relieve pain. The new study said that piercing needle into the points which are connected with vision could potentially treat lazy eye in some grown-up kids.
To verify the effects of acupuncture in improving vision in kids with lazy, a trail was conducted by researchers from Shantou University and Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shantou, China, on eighty-eight children aged seven to twelve with anisometropic amblyopia. Forty-three kids receive five sessions of acupuncture weekly.
Acupuncture is provided at various points like face, head, hand and leg in each session and left in for fifteen minutes. Remaining forty-five kids were given two hours of patching of sound eye in routine and they were also told to do as a minimum one hour per day of near-vision activity like writing.
After fifteen weeks, kids who took acupuncture therapy, the problem of lazy eye was resolved up to fort-one percent while those received eye patch the problem resolved up to seventeen percent. Also visual activity improved by more than two lines in kids with acupuncture and nearly two lines on vision chart in kids with patching.
These outcomes of the study suggest that effect of acupuncture treatment is comparable to that of patching for anisometropic amblyopia in grown–up children, explained authors of the study. They are doubtful how the acupuncture for amblyopia might work. Further study is required to verify acupuncture in treating amblyopia.