11:59 am HKT
Apr 21, 2015
Environment & Health
Chinese Children Rub Eyes to Improve Vision
Every day, millions of Chinese children sit at their desk and diligently massage around their eyes in an attempt to improve their eye health and vision.
These acupressure eye exercises, based on traditional Chinese medicine ideas, have been carried out by decades of schoolchildren in China and are thought to help stave off near-sightedness, also called myopia. Rates of myopia among the country’s youth have reached epic proportions, with one 2015 study of Beijing high school students finding that 80% of youth studied were near-sighted.
But very little high-quality research exists about whether the eye exercises really work, say vision researchers. The few studies that have tried unpack the usefulness of the practice have found no strong link between the exercises and lower rates of nearsightedness. For instance, results from the 2013 Beijing Myopia Progression Study, which studied 409 school children, showed that there was a “modest” effect of relieving temporary vision symptoms, like eyestrain and headaches, but no benefit to preventing myopia.
Students in the classroom do eye exercises to help combat myopia.
THEODORE KAYE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The impact of eye exercises is difficult to study because they are considered valuable by so many people in China. From that perspective, withholding the exercises from some children – the best way to study whether they have the desired effect or not – might be considered unethical by some people, says Ian Morgan, a retired professor at the Australian National University who conducts research at the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou.
Other studies on eye exercises are still underway, but are unlikely to show much effectiveness in preventing myopia, says Jost Jonas, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, who studies myopia in China and India. If the exercises really worked, the rates of myopia wouldn’t be so high, he says. “I would believe that they do not work very strongly, otherwise [the effect] would show up in these studies,” he says.
Rather, the finding that the amount of time spent outdoors is linked to lower rates of myopia is “without doubt much stronger,” says Mr. Jonas.
–Shirley S. Wang