The Incredible Impacts of RED-LIGHT THERAPY

What I want to talk to you today about are benefits that can be found in the spectrum of red light therapy. And this one I want to get into, why is it becoming so popular? Why are we hearing about it so much? And what are the parameters around which the red end of the spectrum of light works, medically speaking? Welcome to my YouTube channel. I'm Dr. A, and I have been involved in teaching and research in the integrative and naturopathic community for 30 years now. And I've I've been seeing patients for decades and I use this channel to answer a lot of questions and do patient education. So let's dive into this. So the first thing is, what is, you know, quote, red light therapy? Because you might think, well, you know, am I going to paint a light bulb red and, you know, that'll help heal me somehow? And to a degree that might happen. But normally we talk about red light therapy, especially under the auspices of the medical therapy called photobiomodulation. And there's other names for it as well, phototherapy, et cetera. What we're really talking about is either using light in the red end of the photodynamic spectrum or in the near or far infrared end of the spectrum to effect healing. What we want to talk about today is what we call red/near infrared or red NIR. And the reason why I talk about that is that's the most commonly used, especially over the counter, but really in North America, probably the most commonly used medicalized type of medical light therapies that you're going to find. So these are really very useful. Then we just want to demystify it a little bit. So the spectrum is measured in a small unit of measurement called nanometers, and it has to do with the wavelength that that color occupies in the spectrum. So red is going to be somewhere around 600 to 700 nanometers, give or take either direction. And depending on the chart that you find online, you'll see it scooted one way or the other, but somewhere up there in the 700 range. And then infrared nowadays is divided actually into 3 categories, infrared A, B, and C, which you also will hear talked about as near, mid, and far infrared. So those are going to start where red light ends. So we're going to start around 700 to 1,400 nanometers for near infrared, and then 1,400 to 3,000 for mid or B, and then above 3,000 for far infrared. But because most of the light therapies that you're going to see, and especially the over-the- encounter ones or the things that you might see recommended online are going to fall in the red/near IR. You're going to be having either a broad group of LEDs or laser devices or whatever that are going to generate 600 to 700 to cover red and then 700 to 1400 nanometers to cover near infrared. And a lot of times what will happen, because the modulation is kind of manipulated by the types of light devices that are in the either the tool or the pad or the light device, et cetera, is you'll usually have some red ones that are tuned to a certain red spectra, like 610 is common. So you're well into the red end of the spectrum. And then your near infrared might be 810, might be 880, et cetera. So rather than having sort of this broad band of 600 all the way to 1400, you're actually gonna probably have, like I say, a 610, 630, 650, something like that to hit red. And then something in the neighborhood above 800. Like in 810, 880, 850, sometimes other things. So then you're hitting red and near-infrared. Now, one thing that you want to look at on devices, if you have them, or maybe you're going to a clinic to get them, is some devices have just one setting at a time. Some devices are only red or only near-infrared. And then some devices have the opportunity to have multiple settings or cycles. And there's different benefits we'll talk about next with regard to the different spectra. And how deep they get past your skin, and then what kind of benefit that's going to have downstream on your cells. So, for example, in a clinic that I send people to, they have multiple different types of devices, but one is a light bed, and the light bed has the option of red only or near infrared only, or a cycle going between red and near infrared, or a continuous where all of the light devices are on at the same time. So you're getting continuous red near infrared. red as you go. So you can do this a number of different ways. Now, in order to do that with most of these medical light beds, those can be the more expensive type of light devices, et cetera. So if you're looking, you know, for a lot of the online product, do your due diligence on the company, make sure they're actually, you know, rated and UL listed and they sell the proper things. But if possible, say you're going to get a pad, which is real common, and you're going to do therapy for some chronic illness or healing from a surgery or something like that, then if possible, want to have a combo of a red spectrum like a 610, 650, whatever, and a near-infrared like an 810, 880, something of that nature. So they're both mixed in there. Now you still get benefits with both, but if you can get both going at the same time, in my mind, you get sort of a broader coverage, if you will. So the next question that comes up, which is really the question we should all be asking, is from a medical point of view or a biochemical point of view, what is going on? Why do These light wavelengths go through the skin. Well, then what are they doing once they get there? Well, the first thing is that when we're looking at red and near-infrared, what we are going to get is red light is going to penetrate through the skin and it's going to get all the way into what's called the subcutaneous tissue. So that's a fat layer. Okay. Now in the back of your hand, it can be very thin or almost nonexistent microscopic, so to speak. In other areas like the fleshy part of your arm, it It might be a centimeter thick. It might be thicker than that depending on how big the person is. So the first step is to get into the subcutaneous. So red light gets to the subcutaneous and you might say, well, that doesn't seem very far, but here's the reason it's important. In the subcutaneous tissue and around it is a giant network of literally billions of tiny capillary and arteriolar beds, et cetera. So there's a lot of circulating blood going through. So the red light's going to have access to that. It's also going to have access all the way from the top of the skin through to the subcutaneous to cells of our immune system that are hanging out in different places. So we usually think of cells of the immune system hanging out, you know, in the bone marrow or, or floating around in the blood or in the lymph nodes or something like that, which is true. But also we have immune cells all over our body that are not in any of those places. They're in our tissues and they're sort of first responders. So the red light is going to get to the Tissues itself. We also have access to that superficial layer of fat, the subcutaneous fat. And if you were to cut somebody open in different areas, what you would notice is once you got past the dermis, you would see a layer of yellow fat cells, and that is the subcutaneous fat. What you'd also see there is a big network of very tiny blood vessels like we mentioned. So red gets all the way down into there, which is really pretty good. And then near infrared and further into the spectrum. Goes through the subcutaneous into the muscle itself. Now, once you get to the muscle, you're picking up all of the things on top that we just mentioned in the epidermis, the dermis, the subcutaneous, the local immune cells, and the vascular network. And then once you hit the muscle, you get— pick up 2 huge things. One is the muscle. So your skeletal muscle below the subcutaneous fat is what moves you around. One of the most large organs in your body that has highly metabolic active cells. So we're going to get right to them and their, you know, mitochondria in their cells and their metabolism. But the other thing about the muscle tissue is we now add not just the fine layer of, you know, billions of little arterioles and capillaries and things of sub-Q, but now we're adding a lot of massive blood flow that we have access to. So once we get into the near-infrared and further into the spectrum, we now get to the muscle tissue, which not only affects all above-mentioned things, but also it affects everything flowing through the muscle. Your muscle is extremely well-perfused with blood, which is not just going to stay here. So if I put a, you know, red near-infrared pad on my shoulder and my arm, I'm not just treating the muscles and the skin and the subcutaneous there. I'm treating the massive amount of blood flow that's going to flow through that area that the pad is on. And so you can start to see that you're going to have a systemic effect. Now, as I said, red is fine all on its own. You get a 610 pad or a 650 or a 680 pad, you're gonna get red light effect. You're gonna affect all those surface tissues. You're gonna affect the immune cells. You're gonna affect all those miles of capillary beds and the subcutaneous fat, et cetera. If you add on or you cycle in red plus near-infrared, then you're going to add in the deeper layer, the bigger amount of metabolic tissue being the muscle, and then the larger amount of blood flow going through, which means also then the red blood cells, white blood cells, and other immune cells are going to benefit as you use near-infrared type of procedure. So there's lots of different ways to do it. But when it comes to dosing, what we're really thinking about with dosing is what kind of spectrum can I get? Then how long should I do it? And then how often? But before we get to that, let me just break down what is the benefit for my cells? Well, Well, once red and near-infrared light get to the mitochondria inside your cell, they're going to do a group of things. The first thing is they're going to directly turn up the energy inside of your cells. And they're going to do this through affecting the mitochondria and the rate at which oxidative phosphorylation goes through your mitochondria. So your cellular respiration is going to speed up. So that's the first thing. The energy's gonna go up. When you raise energy, one of the things you will do, especially if you've been sick, but even under the best of circumstances, is inadvertently you're going to create cellular respiration, but you can throw off a lot more oxidants, a lot more free radicals, pro-oxidation. Well, it turns out that a nice benefit of red and near-infrared light, depending on how deep they're going, is that they directly decrease the free radical buildup and the oxidative formation. So you're getting the benefit of energy without the benefit of oxidation because the red light is taking care of that. And then through those and some other means, you are going to help the cell not only to kickstart and to work faster, but you're going to help the cell to build up more healing capacity. Because if you have a sick cell that is running slowly and the mitochondria in the cell are running slowly, it cannot heal like it ought to. This is one of the reasons why in In the medical research, and now with some human research that's been done, people who got exposed to red near-infrared therapy, for example, in their lungs, had better outcomes when they were hospitalized with COVID And during the darker days of COVID when we were trying to get people over long COVID and getting them out of the hospital and they'd be very sick, we did a lot of home therapy where they would just order a red light mat online or 2, and they would do a therapeutic Red near infrared over wherever was bothering them. Might have been their pelvic organs, might have been their chest, could be just about anywhere where you do that. Now to wrap this up, the final part is kind of the dosing. And as we say at the beginning of all of these, this is for information only. I'm not your doctor, so you shouldn't take anything I say as medical advice. Just explaining how these things work. If you are going to do photodynamic medical therapy, please work with somebody who's licensed to do that. But the basics of dosing essentially are going to be light wavelength, power, and then time. So there's 3 aspects of dosing. But generally speaking, for example, when we would have our patients get home from the hospital from COVID and they were going to do a red near-infrared mat therapy, you know, over their chest, let's say they had lingering pneumonitis or something like that. What we would do if they could get 2 mats is have one on the back and one on the front because that mimics the research that was done. And then we would have them run them with red near-infrared both running And then we would run them for somewhere between 15 to 30 minutes on both sides of them, 2 to 3 times a day. Now again, if you're going to be doing a more medicalized therapy or a low-level laser therapy or something with a lot more wattage power, etc., you really need somebody who knows exactly how to dose those things. But with these home units, that's what we were doing. So if they were acute, meaning they did just recovered at home or they just got home from the hospital, we would have them. do that every day for maybe 2 weeks and then kind of titrate backwards to whatever they needed. It might've been 5 days a week after that for a little bit, or 3 days a week, et cetera. But generally, the more you can do on the front end, the better. Now, the one thing that you do need to keep in mind is whether you're doing it over your shoulder or over your chest or your pelvic organs, or maybe the big muscles in your legs, you need to remember that you're going to be kicking up your mitochondrial activity, which kicks up the metabolism. So If you're prone to things, you know, like feeling woozy when you don't eat for a while or something like that, metabolism is going to speed up. Now it does actually level your blood sugar out, but still, if you, if you haven't been eating in a long time, you might feel very hungry afterwards. You might feel like you don't want to go to sleep. So we recommend people don't do it right before bed unless they know it makes them tired. Some people it does, but because of the mitochondrial increase in activity, some people would actually feel this increase in energy and then they'd be like, well, I was planning to go to bed. But now you're going to stay up for a while and kind of burn that energy off. That's the one caveat that you want to think about with it. Generally speaking, the pads that you can get over the counter are going to be red, near infrared, or both. They're going to be at a wattage that's fairly moderate, but it's still going to penetrate like we said, and they're going to be extremely safe. So used as the manufacturer recommends, they're going to be extremely safe. If you're going to do anything else that kicks it up a notch into laser therapies or other stuff, please work with a healthcare provider who does that type of therapy. All right. Well, this is one of a series that we're going to do about red light therapy. I'm Dr. A. Thanks so much for all of you who have joined as subscribers to the channel. If you haven't, please like, share, subscribe, do the notifications. We really, really appreciate it. We're building quite a community for patient education here, and I will see you on the next one. Look at the links that we're going to put here. Check out the description box as well. Thanks.