Red light therapy

[Marquis]

I've had an interest in the therapeutic potential of red/infrared light for some time, and whilst published and anecdotal evidence suggests it can be very helpful for an extremely wide variety of conditions (I've found it helpful for hair loss myself, although I know we all by now realise the relative insignificance of a few strands of keratin on our heads), I'd approach it with some caution as it's known to produce a bi-phasic response - that is to say, whilst the right dose can be healing, too much will produce no effect, or possibly even a negative effect.

There are a lot of factors to consider when dosing - as well as the wavelength of the light and the dosage, one must also consider power, which is dictated by both the power of your device and its distance from your body (most manufacturers will provide a guide of energy density at various distances). For instance, most of what I've read suggests that a dosage of, say, 1 Joule over 2 seconds (so a power of 500mW) would not produce the same biological effect as the same dosage over 500 seconds (power of 2mW). Then add to that the confounding factor of the tissue penetration rate/depth of various wavelengths of light, none of which any of the literature I've read seems to agree upon...

I believe the safest way to apply light therapy is, at least initially, to attempt to reproduce dosage methods that were found to be healing in studies, and then perhaps to experiment around that dose based upon your body's response. Most of the studies on mammal tissue suggests 6 joule/cm2 (at the surface - the studies tend not to consider penetration rate), generally applied at a relatively low power over several minutes, to be both safe and effective. I'd encourage anyone interested to read the studies themselves, rather than taking their information from bloggers or salespeople, as I've seen some irresponsibly high dosages suggested due to misinterpretation of the studies/dodgy mathematics - one blogger mistakenly recommends dosages as high as 707 J/cm2 of infrared light for the thyroid, when the authors of the study the blogger cited actually used only 2 J.

That being said, an overdose of red light seems in most cases to simply be ineffective, as opposed to actively harmful, and I don't want to stop anybody from exploring a therapy that may be extremely helpful, as the true method of knowledge is experiment. Ultimately, I think red/infrared light therapy should be reserved for those who have already made some progress or recovered, and have health-barometers such as morning erections to gauge their reaction to it upon, rather than those in the lowest pits of PFS, where it's hard to gauge your bodies' response to any treatment, and who may not realise if overdoing the light therapy is holding them back.

Edit: A link to a useful guide on calculating dosages: Complete guide to light therapy dosing - Red Light Man