Reduce Inflammation With Red Light Therapy - Dr. Anderson on Infrared, Sauna, and Red Light

On this particular episode, what we want to talk about is reducing inflammation by the use of photodynamic therapy, but specifically red light therapy. Hey, Dr. A, welcome to my YouTube channel. I've been working in research and teaching in the integrative and naturopathic medical spaces for 30 years now, and I've been seeing patients for decades. And I use this channel and the associated podcast to answer questions, to do a lot of patient education, and that's what we're going to do today. So, So the first thing that we want to talk about really is how is it that the use of red light therapy as a photodynamic therapy or photobiomodulation, as we like to call it sometimes, is able to help modulate the inflammatory process inside the body? So we covered this a lot more deeply in a different episode that we will link at the bottom where we went really, you know, a lot into penetration of light and wavelength and all of that. But just to kind of remind us, if you haven't seen that episode yet. The way that red and near-infrared works is first it's on a spectrum, literally the visual spectrum, and the visual spectrum ends at red and then goes into infrared, which is beyond what we would see with our naked eye. It is measured different ways, but in nanometers usually you hear, and you know, red is somewhere of 600 to 700 nanometers and each chart you look at will have it a little bit lower, a little higher or something. That's fine. That's how all the charts are. But red, you know, usually you get a red light generator, it's going to be 610, 650, something like that. Near infrared, which is the most commonly combined with red, NIR, is 700 to 1400 nanometers. And usually the near infrared devices are going to be putting out 810 to 880 nanometers. And that's just because that's the most common light device emitters that are used in those sort of things. Most of the time while you can get benefits from red visible light all on its own, especially applied topically. What we recommend to people and what we use clinically in a medical setting would be a combination of red and near-infrared either working continuously together or maybe cycled so that you had some time with red, some with near-infrared, and they would cycle back and forth because the penetration depth is different. Okay, so red will still help you, but red near-infrared is going to be even more— the deep penetration is going to help you more. So if you want all the background on all that, again, go to the other one that we're going to link, and I get a lot deeper and geekier into that sort of stuff. But what we want to consider as we're looking at this is, number one, red light and the infrared spectrum, especially near-infrared under these circumstances, does get through the skin, and it either gets down to the subcutaneous fat or into the muscle. Near infrared gets a little bit deeper, and we're going to affect a number of things. One is obviously all the layers of the skin, subcutaneous fat, but also around the subcutaneous fat are billions of very small arterioles and capillary bed, miles of capillary bed. And so we're affecting the circulation, the circulating blood, but also we're affecting tissue immune cells. When we affect tissue immune cells, those are a lot of the times our first responders, especially if you were to like cut yourself or something like that. We know we bleed when we cut ourselves. But there's also tissue immune cells that are waiting, and they might be helping out in the immune response. So our immune system is connected to our integument, the stuff that holds us together. They're not, not always in the blood or the bone marrow or the lymph nodes or something. So we're going to affect all that. Now, if we do near-infrared and we get down to the muscle, we're not only affecting everything I just said, but now we're getting the muscle, which has highly metabolic cells in it. Being muscle cells, they're highly metabolic, lots of mitochondria there. And the muscle has Huge amounts of blood moving through it. So we're affecting circulating blood, which then has all the circulating immune cells and all that. We do that to a little degree up in the subcutaneous, and we do it to a huge degree down inside of the muscle. So this is how mechanically we are doing it. And this is why in medical situations, if we can, we usually do both red and near-infrared light or cycle them so that we get a deeper effect into the body. Now, As I mentioned in the other one, there is also far infrared, which has different characteristics. And we're going to talk about that completely separately because it's best not to mix and match those topics. So the first thing is, what's it going to do for me? Well, the way it's going to affect the tissue cells, whether they're part of your skin or your connective tissue or your subcutaneous fat, blood vessels, those immune cells I said that hang out inside the tissues and the integument or the direct muscle cell tissue and all of that, it's going to affect it. All through mitochondrial activity. And to just quickly recap our other video, how it affects that is it increases mitochondrial activity, which increases cellular respiration and metabolism, but it protects that increase in metabolism by decreasing oxidative damage. And then through a couple of other means helps to improve cell healing. So we put all those things together. If I'm an immune cell, I'm going to do my job as an immune cell better and faster, which is what we kind of want with them. And it's not that it's going to make your immune cells go crazy. It's that it's going to put it back up to its normal level, right? We often use these things with people who've been sick a long time, so they're not working at their normal level. If I'm a blood cell, I'm going to improve my redox capacity and some other cool things that go on. If I'm a muscle cell or a fat cell or whatever, I'm going to improve my metabolism, which is going to make me a healthier type of cell. So that's kind of how it's going to work and it's gonna work on all those levels because once you affect the mitochondria, it doesn't matter where you're going to improve it, but you're also, remember, gonna protect it from the extra amount of cell respiration by cutting off the oxidative components of what's going on. So that's a big, you know, kind of how to, how it's working, all that stuff. Again, the other one, a lot more geeky. We went longer on that, but this one I wanna talk about. Okay, so why would that help me with inflammation? And then how do we apply it, where, where are you gonna use these things, right? So the first thing is gonna be, it's gonna help with inflammation because it's gonna help with cellular respiration, which just like our respiration where we breathe air in and breathe air out, it helps to take good stuff in and we breathe bad stuff out. And then the cycle goes on. But when your cells do that, the other thing that they do naturally is they take the trash out. And inflamed cells tend to hold onto more trash. So red near-infrared light therapy is going to help to improve the movement into the cell of good stuff, improve the oxidative capacity and the redox status, and improve the actual energy production. But also then that is gonna improve the exit of the garbage. Now, one side note, very important, this is supported extremely well by staying hydrated because if you are dehydrated, that whole process of putting the good stuff in and taking the trash out slows down. So one of the primary things that you can for yourself, especially if— well, just if you're living. But if you're doing red light or near-infrared therapy, stay really well hydrated. Okay? That's going to be very good. The other thing you can do to support it if you're able is to just physically move your body because that'll pump more blood through and turn more blood over. So that's how it's going to help on the inflammatory side. You're going to take more junk out. Inflammation is metabolic junk. You take more junk out. So the forms you might see, and again, there's either slight or great difference between the forms that you would see, you know, that you might be buy over the counter versus what you might see in a medical office. But generally speaking, some of the things are going to look the same. So the first thing is panels or pads. So you might see a red near-infrared, like a mat, and it might be small that might fit over, you know, your neck or the back of your head or shoulder or something like that. Or you might see a large one that's made to fit over your entire torso, or in at least in some of the medical uses, you might see one that's, you know, as long as the average human. So it fits over their entire body. So pads or panels are one of the main ways these are done. Now, one of the things, and we don't get into it too much because it, it really gets more into the medical prescribing, but if you are going to have a device that has a, you know, big separation between the device and, and the human, you often need more power. And that tends to be used in certain instances in medicalized sort of devices. But if you're trying to use it, you know, an over-the-counter version, at home for your, for your sore shoulder, or, you know, we, we use it a lot with lungs and heart and pelvic organs and stuff after COVID or in long COVID. If you can lay on it, it's better. Now, if you can lay on it with either very light clothing, like a t-shirt or, or no clothes, that's gonna work even better because you have direct contact, but it will go through light t-shirt material, for example. There's also infrared saunas, and many of them are far infrared. And I wanna talk about far infrared separately. But you may run into a, say, a mid-infrared or a near mid-infrared sauna. And the reason that those work is they do get down to the level of the muscle and depends on the wattage and all of that, how they work. But one of the things to keep in mind is, and again, we'll do a far infrared all on its own. If you're using an infrared sauna, they're usually of the proper power output to get whatever their band of infrared is into your muscle and heat your muscle up, which is why you're your body would then heat up. Now, of course, they're going to heat up your lungs, et cetera, as well. There are also different devices made for local use. So you might see a red near-infrared lamp and you would think, well, you know, I'm not going to read under that, right? But a lot of those are made for what we call appendicular work, where you might want to, you know, just have a gooseneck lamp that you could aim at your shoulder so you could sit in a comfortable position and aim it at one body part. And that's used a lot for healing in orthopedic circumstances. The other is the world of either helmets or head devices that are used for central nervous system activity, and there's a fair amount of research on neuroinflammatory disease, post-concussive healing, many other things such as memory, etc., where their use of a helmet or another type of a head device will actually get the infrared rays into the brain, and the penetration is actually quite good nowadays with. What we know. We didn't used to think it did, but you may see something that either literally looks like a helmet or might look like, you know, kind of weird headgear. It might look like orthodontic headgear, but it's got these light diodes on it. It's got oscillation of wavelength and all of that stuff to be able to do it. Now, I often get the question, well, which one is best? Well, it really depends what you're treating. So if you have a post-concussive problem and we send you to the clinic that does photodynamic therapy, they are going to set you up with either a helmet or headgear type device, because that's going to be the most specific to the place where you had your problem. During COVID especially with earlier variants, where people were having a lot of respiratory problems after, and there was some really good research done on this, which I have done other videos on, we'll probably link those down below. But what we would do with people, especially, you know, during COVID where people were less mobile, they might not be able to get in the office, or, you know, maybe, you know, they were still You know, not not out of quarantine. We would have them order a red near infrared light pad that was hopefully big enough to cover their chest, and two if they could, and have them lay on one and put the other just draped across their chest. Or in the case of a lot of people who had like pelvic organ dysfunction and long COVID, we put it top and bottom over the pelvis, and then we would have them use that. If you're doing a specific orthopedic type of recovery and repair, then we would have you do a pad. And now there's all these pads that, you know, are made just for shoulders and knees, for example, or other parts of the body. But you could just take a plain old pad that you might use for your back and you, you can wrap it around your shoulder or your arm or your elbow or something like that. And it's going to work just fine. So really they all work if you get the right wavelength. So something in the red, something in the near infrared, they're going to work just fine. And if you're looking at over-the-counter use, they're going to be very similar. Okay. You do want to do some due diligence on whatever company you buy these from. Make sure that they're legal to use where you, wherever you live, make sure. And then in North America, they're UL listed. So they're, you know, safe electrically speaking, et cetera. And then the way to cycle them is very broad. Now, this is just what our experience is. This is not medical advice for you. If you're recovering with long COVID or you have other issues that you're dealing with, orthopedic things post-concussion, please talk to some healthcare provider who, you know, knows about phototherapies. But generally speaking, we would ramp people up to about 20 minutes to 30 minutes of use of the red near-infrared. And like when people get home from the hospital, we would do it 2 or 3 times a day on the chest or the pelvic organs, etc. After the first week, we would try and get them to do it every day for a week or 2, and then we would start to spread the treatments out depending on how quickly they were getting better. But usually 1 to 2 weeks of daily And then they might go to every other day or five days a week or something like that, and then taper off. Because remember, the goal of this therapy is to get you so that your cells are working up to normal speed again, which they're not when you're sick or after surgery or after trauma, and so that they're recovering as they are supposed to do. And so you should start to then get better. But remember to do the other things: stay hydrated. Move your body to the degree you can to keep the blood moving. And the other thing that we always caution people with, everyone has different ways they react. Some people with red near-infrared light get very tired and they sleep really great after they do it. Other people get buzzed up because the mitochondria are actually working for the first time. And so we always tell people, the first time you do it, try it like during the morning or the daytime. And if you feel buzzed up, don't do your last treatment, you know, before you try and go to bed. If you're like some people where they do the treatment and then, you know, they're ready to go to sleep, great, you can do it before you go to bed. But that's just a little, you know, for your information there. So what we talked about today is red light decreasing inflammation, helping normalize cellular activity, and helping healing. I'm Dr. A. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you everyone who's joined our community. Like, share, subscribe if you haven't, do the notifications. We're going to tag some other videos here somewhere on the screen, and we'll also put some links to some of the other red light content and other stuff you might be interested in. I'll see you all on the next video.