The December issue of the Archives of Ophthalmology published a small Chinese study that found acupuncture worked better than an eye patch in older kids with lazy eye. Below are some excerpts from an article about the study, written by Alan Mozes for HealthDay.

~ Acupuncture may be an effective way to treat older children struggling with a certain form of lazy eye, new research from China suggests, although experts say more studies are needed.
Lazy eye (amblyopia) is essentially a state of miscommunication between the brain and the eyes, resulting in the favoring of one eye over the other, according to the National Eye Institute. ~

~ Study author Dr. Dennis S.C. Lam, from the department of ophthalmology and visual sciences and Institute of Chinese Medicine at the Joint Shantou International Eye Center of Shantou University and Chinese University of Hong Kong, and his colleagues report their observations in the December issue of the Archives of Ophthalmology.

In the search for a better option than patch therapy, Lam and his associates set out to explore the potential benefits of acupuncture, noting that it has been used to treat dry eye and myopia. Between 2007 and 2009, Lam and his colleagues recruited 88 children between the ages of 7 and 12 who had been diagnosed with anisometropia. ~

~ After about four months of treatment, the research team found that overall visual acuity improved markedly more among the acupuncture group relative to the patch group. In fact, they noted that while lazy eye was successfully treated in nearly 42 percent of the acupuncture patients, that figure dropped to less than 17 percent among the patch patients. ~

Read the whole article in HealthDay – Acupuncture Might Treat Certain Kind of Lazy Eye