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Blog
October 26, 2026
Acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) have not been shown to treat glaucoma, keep eye pressure down over time or slow vision loss. In small trials, acupuncture, acupressure or electrical stimulation of acupuncture points lowered eye pressure by about 1 to 5 mmHg for minutes to a few weeks, and a 2020 Cochrane review concluded that reliable conclusions cannot be drawn from the evidence. Chinese herbal medicines have mostly been tested in small, low-quality trials, and the most careful trial of ginkgo found no benefit. Needling close to the eye carries real, if rare, risks. If you choose acupuncture or herbs, use them alongside your drops, laser or surgery, never instead of them, and tell your eye doctor what you are taking.
Netra Eye Institute is an acupuncture and Oriental medicine practice, and we are often asked whether these therapies can help glaucoma. This guide sets out the evidence as it stands, including where it does not support what many websites claim. For glaucoma itself, including the types, tests and treatments, read our glaucoma guide.
| Question | What the evidence shows |
|---|---|
| Can acupuncture lower eye pressure? | Slightly, for minutes to weeks, in small trials. No lasting effect has been shown |
| Can it slow glaucoma or save vision? | Not shown. One small 2026 trial reported slower field loss, but it needs confirming |
| Can Chinese herbs treat glaucoma? | Not shown. Most trials are small and of low quality |
| Does ginkgo help? | One small positive trial was not confirmed by a later trial or a 2025 review |
| Is acupuncture near the eye safe? | Serious injury is rare, but needling beside the eyeball carries more risk than needling elsewhere. Eye perforation and bleeding behind the eye have been reported |
| Can it replace my drops? | No. Keep every prescribed treatment and every check-up |
Classical Chinese eye medicine grouped several blinding eye diseases as the “five wind internal obstructions” (wu feng nei zhang). Chronic open-angle glaucoma is usually linked with qing feng nei zhang, the “blue-green wind internal obstruction”, described in a 2018 Chinese guideline as intermittent eye fullness, poor vision and a narrowing field of vision. The acute, painful attack of angle-closure glaucoma is traditionally called lü feng nei zhang, the “green wind internal obstruction”.
TCM sorts these conditions into patterns based on symptoms, tongue and pulse. The guideline lists stagnation of liver qi, blood stasis with fluid retention, phlegm-dampness, and, in later stages, deficiency of liver and kidney yin. These are traditional descriptions. They are not how glaucoma is diagnosed today, which depends on eye pressure, examination of the optic nerve and visual field tests, and they do not tell you how fast your glaucoma is progressing. A sudden painful red eye with blurred vision, halos, headache or vomiting can be a sign of an acute angle-closure attack and needs emergency medical care straight away.
The best summary is the Cochrane review “Acupuncture for glaucoma”, last updated in 2020. Its searches ended in 2018, so newer trials, including the later Taiwanese trials below, are not part of it. It found only three completed randomized trials, with 137 participants in all, and every trial had a high risk of bias in at least one area. The reviewers rated the certainty of every result as very low and concluded that “it is impossible to draw reliable conclusions from available data to support the use of acupuncture for treatment of patients with glaucoma.” They found no evidence of an effect on visual field or visual acuity. They also wrote that, for ethical reasons, trials testing acupuncture on its own against standard treatment or a placebo are unlikely to be justified where standard glaucoma care is available. They suggested that trials adding acupuncture to standard treatment might be worth doing.
The main controlled trials, including the three in the Cochrane review and three published since:
| Study | What it found |
|---|---|
| Ear acupressure, Taiwan (33 people) | Pressure was lower than with sham points at 4 weeks and returned to its starting level 4 weeks after stopping |
| Electrical stimulation at foot points, Taiwan (82 people) | One 20-minute session lowered pressure by about 2.5 to 3.5 mmHg more than the control group over the hour that was measured. Nothing was measured after that |
| Needling, UCLA (22 people) | Half dropped out, including 3 withdrawn for needle sensitivity or a pressure rise in the other eye. After 12 sessions there was no change in pressure, vision, visual field or optic nerve; pressure rose slightly right after needling |
| Acupuncture vs sham, Taiwan (45 people) | In the hour after each session, pressure fell about 1 to 1.7 mmHg with real needling and did not fall with sham, over 4 sessions in 2 weeks. Pressure rose briefly right after every session, including sham sessions |
| Normal-tension glaucoma, Taiwan (40 people, 2026) | Reported slower visual field decline over 24 weeks than sham, with no treatment-related side effects. But the sham (seeds taped over the same points, with no needles) may not have hidden which treatment patients had, standard visual field scores did not improve significantly, and the authors call for larger, double-blind trials |
| Blood flow, Germany (56 people) | One measure of blood flow to the eye rose 10 minutes after a session; retinal blood flow and pressure did not change |
More recent reviews reach the same place. A 2025 analysis of 21 studies of acupuncture for glaucoma and other degenerative eye diseases found no significant effect on eye pressure or vision. It did report a better overall “effective rate”, a loosely defined measure used in many Chinese trials. A 2026 review of 22 studies of eye conditions including glaucoma and dry eye found no conclusive evidence that acupuncture works. Another 2026 review found only 6 sham-controlled glaucoma trials and found their reporting generally poor. Some acupuncture researchers argue that sham needling may not be truly inactive, which could make real effects look smaller, but that debate does not change the bottom line for glaucoma: no lasting benefit has been shown.
Studies have used points next to the eye such as Jingming (BL1) and Qiuhou (EX-HN7), points on the head such as Fengchi (GB20), ear points and points on the feet. No point or combination has been shown to treat glaucoma. Pressing or massaging points around the eye is not a treatment either. Do not press on the eyeball itself, especially after glaucoma surgery, unless your surgeon has told you to.
Most studies of Chinese herbal medicine for glaucoma come from China, are small and short, and use outcomes such as an overall “effective rate” that are hard to compare with standard glaucoma measures. A 2016 analysis of 11 trials of herbal medicine added to glaucoma surgery reported better vision recovery and slightly better visual fields, but all the trials were small, all took place in China, and the analysis did not look at eye pressure. A 2018 Chinese guideline for herbal treatment of open-angle glaucoma rated almost all of its recommendations as based on very low quality evidence or expert opinion, and acknowledged the low quality and possible bias of the trials.
Herbal products carry other risks. The US Food and Drug Administration does not approve dietary supplements for safety or effectiveness. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health warns that some Chinese herbal products have been contaminated with heavy metals, pesticides or undeclared drugs (including the blood thinner warfarin), or have contained the wrong herb. The NIH LiverTox database notes that a few have been linked to liver injury. There is a case report of eye pressure staying high until a patient stopped St John’s wort, which can change how the body handles some medicines. If you take any herbal product, tell both your eye doctor and the person prescribing it, and never stop prescribed treatment because of it.
Acupuncture in general is low risk when done by a trained practitioner with sterile, single-use needles. In a review of 21 prospective studies, about 9% of patients had a side effect, usually mild, and about half of these were bleeding, pain or redness where a needle went in. Serious events happened in about 1 in 10,000 patients. The FDA regulates acupuncture needles as medical devices and requires them to be sterile and for single use.
Needling close to the eye is different. A 2023 review of published cases found 15 eyes with serious injuries after acupuncture around the eye, including 10 needle perforations of the eye, bleeding behind the eye and damage to the optic nerve. Glaucoma was the most common reason people had sought the treatment. Some of the injured eyes recovered useful vision after surgery, but others did not. A 2026 report described bleeding behind the eye after needling around it. When the patient reached the emergency department 90 minutes later, eye pressure was 79 mmHg and the eye could not see light. An emergency procedure to release the pressure restored sight to 20/25, though scans still showed some lasting nerve damage. Such injuries are rare, but they can be permanent, and fast treatment matters.
If you have acupuncture and have glaucoma:
A 3-week trial in 90 people found that daily mindfulness meditation lowered eye pressure, but it compared meditation with a waiting list, so patients knew their group, and it needs repeating. A bout of aerobic exercise lowers pressure for a short time, while head-down yoga poses raise it. Nicotinamide (a form of vitamin B3) is being tested in large trials, which had not reported results as of October 2026. Cannabis lowers pressure for only a few hours and has side effects that make it unsuitable as a treatment. Our guide to how to lower eye pressure naturally covers these in more detail, and our guide to whether glaucoma can be cured explains what treatment can and cannot do.
In a survey of 1,516 people at two Canadian glaucoma clinics, 10.9% were using complementary or alternative medicine for glaucoma, most often herbs, and 62.5% of them had not told their ophthalmologist. A small number had cut back on prescribed treatment because of it. Glaucoma damage is silent and permanent, so any time with uncontrolled pressure risks losing vision you cannot get back. Your eye doctor can check for interactions and make sure nothing is replacing the treatment that protects your sight.
We ask first that you have an ophthalmologist or optometrist managing your glaucoma, with a target pressure and a monitoring plan. If you do not, arranging that comes before anything else. We then review the pressures, scans and field tests you already have, and look at factors around the optic nerve that a busy eye clinic may not have time for, such as night-time blood pressure, sleep apnea symptoms, exercise, diet, stress and sleep. We do not set pressure targets or change glaucoma medication, and nothing we offer replaces drops, laser or surgery.
We offer acupuncture and, where appropriate, Chinese herbal medicine within Netra Restoration Therapy (NRT), and we check every herb against your medicines. NRT is adjunctive. It does not lower eye pressure, regenerate the optic nerve or restore lost visual field, and we do not claim that it slows glaucoma; that is a question only a controlled trial can answer, and no controlled trial of NRT has been done. For field loss that is already there, low-vision optometrists and occupational therapists help with daily tasks. If you choose NRT, it is offered only alongside that care and your glaucoma treatment, never in place of them. Learn about Netra Restoration Therapy, blood flow and the optic nerve and low-vision rehabilitation.
Only slightly and briefly, as far as trials show. Small studies found pressure about 1 to 5 mmHg lower for minutes to a few weeks, and two found it rose briefly right after a session. The 2020 Cochrane review rated this evidence very low certainty. Acupuncture cannot replace pressure-lowering drops, laser or surgery.
No. No treatment can reverse glaucoma damage, and acupuncture has not been shown to slow it. One small 2026 trial in normal-tension glaucoma reported slower field loss, but it needs confirming in larger, double-blind trials. Glaucoma is controlled by lowering eye pressure with proven treatment.
It has not been shown to. Herbal formulas and acupuncture have been studied mostly in small, low-quality trials, and none has reliably shown that they lower pressure over time or protect vision. TCM ideas such as liver qi stagnation are traditional descriptions, not a way to diagnose or monitor glaucoma.
Herbs studied include ginkgo, goji berry, Erigeron breviscapus and formulas such as Qi Ju Di Huang Wan. None has been proven to help glaucoma: the careful ginkgo trial was negative and the goji trial found no benefit. Some herbs, including ginkgo and Dan Shen, may raise bleeding risk, and the FDA does not approve supplements for safety or effectiveness before they are sold.
It has not been shown to. A small 2003 trial reported better visual fields after 4 weeks, but a 2014 trial with the same dose found no difference, and a 2025 review found the evidence insufficient. Ginkgo may increase bleeding, especially with blood thinners or before surgery, so talk to your eye doctor before taking it.
Trials have used points next to the eye such as Jingming (BL1) and Qiuhou (EX-HN7), points on the head and neck such as Fengchi (GB20), ear points and foot points. No point has been shown to treat glaucoma, and points beside the eyeball carry the highest risk of injury. Pressing these points yourself will not control eye pressure.
General acupuncture is low risk with a trained practitioner and sterile needles. Needling right next to the eye has rarely caused perforation of the eye or bleeding behind it. Tell the practitioner about your glaucoma, past eye surgery and any blood thinners, ask whether needles will go near the eye, and seek urgent care for eye pain or vision changes.
No. Stopping drops lets pressure rise without symptoms, and glaucoma damage is permanent. If you want to try acupuncture, use it alongside your prescribed treatment, keep your drops on schedule and keep every eye appointment.
Acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine are not treatments for glaucoma. The evidence shows small, short-lived changes in eye pressure at best, and no proof that they protect vision. Herbal products can interact with medicines and cause bleeding, and needles near the eye can rarely cause serious injury. Keep your drops, laser or surgery, keep your eye doctor informed about anything else you use, and keep every check-up.
Medical Disclaimer: This article provides general education and is not medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Glaucoma needs assessment and treatment by a licensed eye-care professional. Do not start, stop or change eye drops or other prescribed treatment because of acupuncture, herbs or supplements, and tell your eye doctor about anything you take. Sudden eye pain, a red eye, blurred vision, halos, headache or vomiting needs emergency care. Acupuncture and other integrative care at Netra Eye Institute are not a way to lower eye pressure and must never delay or replace glaucoma treatment.
