Does oral medicine cure myopia?

  Many oral medications and eye drops are misleading to consumers in terms of publicity. In principle, there is no scientific basis for medications to treat myopia, and they can only be effective in the short term for maintaining vision and relieving visual fatigue, but long-term use is harmful and unhelpful. Most of these drugs use the principle of inhibition or excitation of the eye ciliary muscle to improve vision in the short term, but this approach only improves the function of distance viewing, but has no effect on the prevention of myopia. The inhibition or excitation of the eye muscle is equivalent to anesthesia, and the eye’s ability to adjust the degree of myopia is reduced in myopia, and can only try to lengthen the axis of the eye, and for every millimeter of lengthening, myopia will be strengthened by 300 degrees, which is very likely to cause irreparable axial myopia.  Many ophthalmologists agree that oral medication for myopia will not be effective. Myopia is a deformation of the eye axis, and this change cannot be reversed by medication. Therefore, there are no medications that can cure myopia, and wearing glasses and having surgery are still the most basic methods of treating myopia. Moreover, the side effects of these drugs cannot be ignored during the growth phase of adolescents.  Since there is no very effective way to prevent and treat myopia, more and more people are wearing myopia glasses, and students, parents and society are eager for some ways to control the development of myopia. To meet this need, a large number of myopia prevention and treatment eye drugs, oral medications, small devices and various physical therapy means such as ultrasound, magnetic therapy, etc. are dumped in the pharmaceutical market in large quantities. One by one, these myopia prevention drugs or devices are being eliminated because of the lack of recognized and scientific arguments for their effectiveness. In fact, on the one hand, a large number of advertisements advertise the effectiveness of certain drugs or devices in treating myopia; on the other hand, the number of students with myopia has increased dramatically. This fact fully illustrates that the therapeutic effect of those drugs and devices is highly doubtful. Therefore, primary and secondary school students with myopia and their parents must be cautious about using the drugs and devices available in the market for myopia treatment. Not only are they unreliable, but some of them are not only ineffective but may also cause adverse consequences to the eyes.  The treatment of myopia is a major problem in the medical field, and there are various ways to treat myopia on the market in China. The National Student Myopia Prevention and Treatment Expert Steering Group has reviewed more than 50 kinds of anti-myopia supplies, some of which can relieve visual fatigue to improve vision, some have a relieving or therapeutic effect on pseudomyopia, and some can play a role in diagnosing or treating pseudomyopia and preventing true myopia. However, none of the items reviewed had a definite therapeutic effect on true myopia.  Myopia is the most important type of refractive error among the most common conditions in ophthalmology, with a prevalence of about 33% in our population, or nearly 400 million people. Many people believe that there is a difference between true and false myopia, and that false is a reversible or early stage of true myopia, which are actually unscientific concepts. In the first place, except for the 1% of high myopia, the essence of myopia is only equivalent to a camera focus blur from the optical point of view. The physiological requirements for refraction change with age throughout a person’s life, so for the vast majority of myopic patients, there is no need to be overly concerned. The popularity of pseudomyopia reflects people’s eagerness to correct myopia, and is accompanied by certain artificial commercialization factors, which makes a wide range of “treatment for pseudomyopia” available, and also makes people go further and further away from the scientific treatment of myopia. Therefore, I hope that parents do not blindly believe in this concept, once the child’s vision problems should be found early to take the child to a professional medical institution for diagnosis and treatment.