LED LIGHT THERAPY – INFRARED LED LIGHT THERAPY
I attended the advanced LED class that you taught a few Sundays ago and I came upon this article about infrared LED light therapy and wondered what you thought. It seems to contradict everything you told us. Do you have any feedback for this??
Thanks,
Shawna Thompson
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Hi Shawna,
Thanks for sending this over. This is not the first time I have seen this article or reference to this study. Unfortunately, the German study that this article refers to was actually funded by a company that first came out with a green tea cream and they were trying to establish a “need” for the cream. The company recommends that the cream will prevent any potential problems with infrared and aging. This study is not considered creditable in the scientific world because it is not a blind or double blind and it does not give all the facts so take the info with a gain of salt and until something factual comes out, I wouldn’t be to concerned with it especially since there are over 2500 other studies that contradict their findings and show that Infrared light is actually extremely beneficial for cellular health and cellular repair. If you purchase and read the German study you will see that during the study they inundated the body with a mass amount of full range infrared light from the 700nm range all the way up to the 1400+ nm range. They also applied the light for over an hour and the joule output was 350 up to over 700. This is an immense amount of heat and far surpasses that of our system or any other LED system on the market. I image that exposure to that much heat is going to cause some damage similar to what a laser does possibly.
However, there is some info I would like to point out form this article so you know what IR does actually do and what it doesn’t. The main thing this study talks about is how the level of MMP’s and ROS are raised by the exposure to the IR light. However, if you remember for the class, I discussed how the initial exposure of LED light can raise these levels because of the increased cellular turnover and “waste i.e. ROS” produced (and you can use an anti-oxidant mask before or after the treatment to counter act this) but then these levels go down as the body starts producing high levels of SOD’s which fight ROS. This German study only focuses on the immediate and short term effects of exposure to IR light. However, the long term effects show a substantial increase in collagen and elastin growth (remember the collagen bundles I showed you) which could not occur if we continued to have large amounts of MMP’s and ROS in the body. The significant increase in ATP production caused by exposure to IR light is able to allow the body to clean up the “waste” that is produced and it also allows the body to create collagen after the age of 35. I guess what I am trying to say is the long term benefits (which this study does not address or focus on) far out weight the short term waste that is produced from an increase in cellular turnover.
I have attached a list of studies that counteract the German’s claim and the global solar index from WHO (World Health Organization) http://www.who.int/uv/publications/en/UVIGuide.pdf as well as a site that focuses on just infrared benefits.
http://www.earthtym.net/ref-far-infared.htm
Please let me know if you have any additional questions or need any more information.
Kind regards,