Herbal Drugs and the Eye

It is a beautiful day today and the week has been great, I trust things have been going well with you? Today is the first-day post-Val's day, how was the feeling at your working place and with colleagues and friends. Well, I managed to receive some belated Valentine's day messages though but basically, the day was working as usual.

So I am here again today at your doorstep and as usual we are going to discuss the eye today. Today's discussion would be based on a patient I had come in today and a few others I saw the previous week who had the same thing in common about the topic for the day. It is going to be an interesting one and so I would encourage you to read on so it may benefit you and or your friends, family, and neighbors.

Discomforts of the eye can be quite troubling and there are lots of conditions that affect the eye which come with an array of medical solutions, some issues of the eye may require surgical intervention, examples being cataract, retinopathies, glaucoma, cancer, etc whereas others may just require topical medication. Examples of these would be dry eyes, conjunctival hemorrhages, and the like.

Then some require systemic intervention or a combination of both systemic and topical, like ocular hypertension secondary to systemic hypertension, allergic conjunctivitis or allergies generally, maculopathies, etc. But based on my years of studies and experience I am yet to come across an ocular condition that demands the use of herbal concoctions on the eye. This is not something should be doing and for the safety of our sight, we should stop.

Now before you jump to a conclusion, I understand that drugs come from herbs, plants, trees, etc, however, if you study pharmacology you will come to know that every drug is a potential poison and that the difference lies only in the amount, the quality or quantity of content, the dosage, the concentration, I think you get the point I am trying to raise?

And so the things we put in us ought to be regulated well to ensure that we get the best out of it and that our health is intact. The eye is such a delicate organ that it responds easily to anything that happens to it or the system. Its nature of it demands that drugs used on it are well moderated and concentrations are in smaller quantities.

And so you will find most eye drops having a concentration of the active ingredient ranging between 0.5% and 2%, thus as high as it goes and these drugs still work very well and are quite effective in achieving the needed results because the eye is quite sensitive. Let me tell you how sensitive the eye is in this case scenario. I had a patient come in with low pressure around 5mmhg getting to hypotony and the person was in severe pain as a result.

What happened was that she didn't follow the dosage requirement for her glaucoma treatment well and so it ended up going below the range and we needed to raise it back quickly to ease her pain, to do this, she was given 1% pred eyedrops to use within 2 hours interval and in less than 12 hours the pressure was able to come back to the range. Thus how reactive the eye can be.

Now why am I emphasizing this, herbal medicine is still a relatively new field, at least in Ghana, things are now being done better and degree certifications are being ushered out as individuals get proper training in the proper administration of herbal products in their raw form however they are yet to reach eyecare and so using herbal products on the eye becomes a dangerous act.

This is because the concentration of the active ingredient is not well regulated and so it being too powerful can easily cause more harm than good and in worse case scenarios vision would be lost just as how you can easily lose your life to an overdose. Then there is the fact that herbal medicine practitioners ain't trained in the act of eyecare and thus are automatically disqualified from administering ocular medication.

I seem more passionate about today's discussion because I had my patient lose her sight to the use of herbal drugs on the eye. Well, it was her fault to begin with because I do not understand why she agreed to let someone put a leaf extract on the eye because the person said it would cure her cataract and she wouldn't have to do surgery, it wasn't done once, but over several times and then when she realized that now she can't even see as she was initially seeing she rush back to the hospital.

At this point, the cornea had scared from the epithelial erosion that occurred with the high concentration of the leaf extract and because light cannot pass through the scar she cannot see. her fear of surgery which led her on this path has inevitably cost her her vision, she regrets her actions and wishes we could do something to aid her vision but the only thing we could do was a cornea transplant which she cannot afford thus the first issue, the second being we do not have surgeon around for that.

And this wasn't the first time something like this happened, I have encountered it a couple of times, just this month, this week, and the previous week. And so I had to bring this up in my writings, someone out there could be on the verge of losing sight of these acts, be a good friend or a neighbor and encourage them to seek proper consult at the hospital for sake of his or her vision. It is better late than never.

The issue of herbal products causing people to lose their vision is a sad thing we hear on the daily as eye providers, sometimes you meet people with dislocated lenses telling you about an unorthodox procedure they received from a herbal practitioner who tried to remove their cataractous lenses for them, and It makes me wonder, why on earth did they agree to it in the first place.

But then, illiteracy is killing people literally and it is incumbent on me as an optometrist to propagate the message of ocular health and safety habits out there that one may hear and do better for themselves and for their eyesight. And so let's be our brothers, keepers, let's love our eyes, let's have regular eye care examinations and when in doubt, please always consult a professional. Thanks for today and for your time, be safe.