Trichy: Can breast milk or hen’s blood be used to treat eye infections. How about inserting a thin iron rod into the eyes to take out foreign bodies? All these and more are among the crude and unsafe practices being employed in villages in the district leading to loss of vision.Programme manager in-charge of Trichy District Blindness Control Society (DBCS), T Manimegalai, said that despite the availability of primary health centres (PHCs) across the district, when it came to eye treatment, people in villages predominantly went after myths and opted for unsafe practices. “Unsafe treatment practices are still prevalent in the villages. Breast milk and hen's blood are the ones that are commonly used by them to treat eye infections – both of these do not have even one positive effect in the treatment. If at all they have an effect on the cornea, it is in a bad way,” Manimegalai told TOI. Castor oil, dew drops and leaf extracts are also wrongly believed to be effective in eye treatment by the villagers.Head of the department of ophthalmology at K A P Viswanatham Government Medical College, Dr R Parthiban Purushothaman, said that he had been getting a number of patients whose eye infections or other related diseases had worsened due to unsafe native treatment. “The so-called native treatments – including the usage of tongue to remove foreign body – can lead to fungal infections which are very hard to treat. In fact, I have been getting a lot of fungal corneal ulcer patients due to this wrong practice,” he said.Director of Rehabilitation Centre for Blind Women, Priya Theodre, who expressed a similar point of view, added, “At least if the eye is affected by such native therapy, there is a possibility of treating it. But if the nerves are affected, due to practices like ring treatment, they eventually lead to vision loss.”When asked about the efforts taken by Trichy DBCS to create awareness among the people in these village against such safe methods of treatment, Manimegalai said, “Refractionists at PHCs now take extra effort to educate the patients about treating eye infections and refer them to hospitals if needed.”

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