Anybody heard of castor oil for cataracts?

[Kentuckienne]

I have a family member who's developing cataracts, and she found a bunch of people who claim to have cured their cataracts by putting purified castor oil right on their eyeballs. She's trying it. I was paranoid about eye infection and talked her into at least transferring oil from the bigger bottle into small sterilized ones as needed. She says she puts a drop in at night, and it doesn't cause any blurring of vision.

There does seem to be a lot of anecdotal evidence for this. Has anybody else heard of this? And if it does work for some cataracts - what do you think of trying this with avian cataracts, since there is no other treatment for them?

 

[Kentuckienne]

Studies showing some success in using castor oil to treat dry eyes:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12414410?dopt=Abstract

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17251808?dopt=Abstract

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149291815000090

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3585441/

 

[jhsatx]

Castor Oil was the preferred treatment for dry eye many decades ago.

The Bad news
Cataracts are age related, 75 yrs is about the age where "everybody" will have/want to address the issue of decreased visual acuity due to the clouding of the crystalline lens.

Good news
Replacing the inner ocular lens takes minutes and has unbelievably high success rate with minimal recovery.

There are enhancements with laser, post procedure, that may allow distance and near vision without the need of corrtive lenses.

I'm more a fan of the older technology where the new lens implanted requires near vision correction with minimal to no correction for distance vision.
Feel free to pm me if my explanation sux.

 

[Kentuckienne]

I tend to agree since I haven't seen any actual test results for cataracts, just people's personal stories. I wonder if it might help some parrots who have eye problems, because nobody's going to do cataract surgery on a bird, and it seems a shame for them to just suffer in blindness.

 

[SailBoat]

This is one of those highly specialized topics that are best started with your Avian Vet. In larger population centers I am aware of Animal Opthalmologies. There are such great differences between Parrot and Human eyes that I would not recommend trying anything without a discussion with one's Certified Avian Vet first.

 

[Zlata21]

The good news is that castor oil is a very old natural remedy which can treat the eyes are get rid of cataracts over time. Castor oil was the preferred treatment for dry eye many decades ago.

 

[Cardinal]

The good news is that castor oil is a very old natural remedy which can treat the eyes are get rid of cataracts over time. Castor oil was the preferred treatment for dry eye many decades ago.

There are no side effects. Can it say be used on normal eyes, about once a month as a precautionary or preventive measure?