The health benefits claims of Red Light Therapy and whether or not it works.
The health benefits claims of Red Light Therapy and whether or not it works.
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hi and welcome back to Get Fit Guy. This is coach Kevin Don. I feel like the name of this podcast should really just be changed to the critical thinking podcast because every single week I feel like all I'm doing is swimming against the tide of influencers and non-critical thinkers who share a bunch of pseudoscientific claptrap, which everybody else seems to fall for and I have to be here like it's Groundhog Day debunking everything.
This week when I had a look in the Get Fit Guy emails there was an email from someone that wanted to come onto the show to talk about such pseudoscientific stuff. I'll read the email out to you:
"Greetings Dr. Jonathan..."
OK so first of all nobody talks like that apart from Mr. Spock. Greetings is not the way you start an email unless you are from the planet Vulcan. Second of all Dr. Jonathan hasn't even hosted this podcast for well over a year, maybe a year and a half. So the guy’s obviously not an avid listener anyway.
"Greetings Dr. Jonathan,
Hope you're doing well. I'm reaching out to you today because Joe Rogan has finally come around to the powerful benefits of red light therapy and he has been talking about it a lot on his show (So first is this is just a massive amount of rhetoric. It’s the voice from authority fallacy, which is an informal fallacy, but still fallacious. I literally couldn't care less what Joe Rogan talks about on his show). Anyway, this is great news for the red light therapy scene in general and great news for other podcasts too. There's a huge spike in people searching for red light therapy information and podcasts are a great way to get the message out. If you're interested, I'd love to get onto your show and we can talk about red light therapy and hopefully keep the wave of interest going. I think right now is a great time to ride the Rogan wave because you probably know when he talks about something it goes viral. Let me know if you're interested and we can make it happen,
-Bryan."
Well Bryan, to quote Hamlet act three scene three line 87; “NO”.
I will, however, use this opportunity to save my listeners from this. Disclaimer: If you thought I was wrong about 5G, you might want to stop listening now.
As usual, let's just have a little bit of background about what red light therapy is. To put it simply, red light therapy, also known as red LED light therapy or red and near infrared light therapy is a type of treatment in which light emitting diodes or LEDs, emit light of specific wavelengths. Usually somewhere between 630 and 750 nm. The sun emits red light also, the red light being most prevalent in the morning and at sunset.
Now, what about the health claims? Well, if you have been following this podcast for a while, you will know that usually, the more things that an intervention claims to cure, the less things it actually cures.
So, let’s see the claims. Improved:
Skin Health
Muscle Recovery
Mental Clarity
Athletic and Sexual Performance
Pain Management
Sleep
Hmm. Ok…so first let's just talk about being a little bit more skeptical, or cynical for a moment because you know that human existence is on a spectrum and skepticism is on one end of the spectrum, and on the other end of the spectrum we have total gullibility. A healthy dose of skepticism, especially in the face of marketing and influencing and social media is always a really good way to protect yourself from being caught out. I have talked in the past on this podcast about how to critically think about things and how to evaluate data so I would look back for those podcasts if you are one of the people that perhaps isn't really very good at doing that. Just to make it clear as well that being a skeptic doesn't mean that you ignore science you can't just follow your own biases. I could look at this and say, look red light therapy is all rubbish and then I could find out evidence to the contrary. Spoiler alert: I didn't, but I'm still open to the idea that I might so let's move on and talk about red light therapy, which is also known in more scientific circles as photo-biomodulation
Now, this was really discovered by accident. In 1965, doctors in Boston published the results of experiments in which they showed that lasers could be used to treat cancerous tumors. A Hungarian doctor took notice of this and attempted to reproduce the results. The problem was that his lasers were much less powerful than those used in the study, and the tumors on his lab rats were not affected at all. However, what did happen was that the skin surrounding the tumors, which had been shaved in order for the doctor to have a better observation of what was going on, began to heal in a much accelerated way. Just like how the microwave was discovered by a scientist, having a chocolate bar melt in his pocket, the Hungarian physician had stumbled upon a finding that would move his career forward dramatically. This laser wasn't the type that was going to shoot down incoming spacecraft and didn't burn tissue but this low level laser therapy showed promise, not for destroying unwanted tissue, but stimulating healing of tissue.
Now, we also know that there is nothing silly about the idea that light influences us as organisms. Our entire circadian rhythm, which is so important for health is influenced almost entirely by light. Our skin makes vitamin D from cholesterol when it's exposed to ultraviolet light, and our entire visual system is a complex arrangement dedicated to translating light into information that our brain can understand to allow us to interact with the world around us. The human body needs light in order to survive.
But what about these red light therapy claims that plugging a red covered lightbulb into your sitting room lamp, will increase longevity, improve your immunity and increase your mental clarity? Well scientific literature is actually full of studies which were looking at applications for red light therapy for the treatment of depression, the rehabilitation of strokes, Alzheimer's disease, the improvement of athletic performance, and believe it or not, it was even speculated it could be used to treat COVID-19.
However, these studies were all carried out on laboratory animals. They are not clinical evidence and it’s of course appealing to think that when we do something on a mouse in a laboratory then it's what will happen when we scale up and subject humans to the same treatment. Unfortunately, human beings are not large mice and nowhere is this more eye-opening by looking at the data that we have on what actually happens when pre clinical laboratory findings are tried to be brought to market eventually. A survey of clinical trials in 2014 specifically looked at how many laboratory trials on animals, eventually made it through to become pharmaceutical drugs. The answer is that only a tiny handful were even approved for human trials and those that were tested on humans only had a 1 in 10 rate at getting through to market.
So, while on a mouse it may look certain that red light therapy does something for you, the odds of this holding when it was tested on human beings in terms of the statistics doesn't look good at all. We have to come to terms with the fact that first of all, I don't even think that things should be tested on mice or any other animal, but that we need to adjust our expectations that animal studies do not translate to human beings.
Even the most positive review on red light therapy , a 2016 study noted most studies on the influences of red light radiation on wound healing have been performed in mice, rats or ex vivo models. This means cells that have been taken out of the animal to be experimented on externally. Even a clinical trial, which was done on human beings, using photobiomodulation to treat stroke in increasingly larger human trials, went from working for a subset of patients in the first trial, to failing entirely in the third trial, to the point where the experiment had to be terminated prematurely for futility of exercise.
One of the influencers that I've been seeing talking about red light therapy a lot recently talks about it working via the mitochondria. The mitochondria are powerhouses in the cells and all animals, plants and fungi contain mitochondria. These generate the energy that we need. Mitochondria have chains of proteins that juggle electrons around and one of them contains metals (heme iron and copper) which absorb light in the red and infrared part of the spectrum. So, when we shine a red light on living tissue, it is absorbed by the mitochondria, and then we claimed a biological domino effect that will apparently benefit every part of the organism. Your brain will get more blood flow, your cells will get more energy, your genes will be activated left right and center. A biological storm portrayed as a cure-all.
But this is where another biology lesson comes into play. Our cellular biology has a very impressive cast of characters that all work together. Our bodies contain around about 70,000 unique proteins, and some are even distinguished further within that set with modifications. So, even if it were true, that red light therapy created an enzymatic activation with our mitochondria that had a ripple effect on the rest of your body. It doesn't mean that that will be a clinical improvement on your body because your body is full of different redundancies that are in place to maintain equilibrium (homeostasis), so this doesn't mean that something that happens at the cellular level will make it through to level the impact the organism as a whole. Just because you shine some light on your eyeballs doesn't mean that there's a healing process in place.
The whole thing fails, what we call in Philosophy, the ‘teapot’ test. The Cambridge educated philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell, formulated this test to illustrate ‘burden of proof’. It goes like this: If I were to assert, without proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by any telescope, orbits the Sun somewhere between Earth and Mars, I cannot expect anyone to believe me solely based on the premise that I cannot be proven wrong.
The thing with all these ‘therapies’ is they fail Russell’s Teapot. I cannot prove that a type of therapy doesn’t work. But this doesn’t mean the claims are true. Burden of proof always lies on the claimant. So…where is the evidence to back all these claims up for the benefits of red light therapy, hexagonal water and so on? There is none.
So, I remain skeptical, especially of the outrageous claims of red light therapists that it will literally heal everything that you've got going and I don't understand how you couldn't get the same benefits from just being in sunlight morning and evening, which contains the exact same wavelength of light within it.
Take home message: Russell’s Teapot. Learn it. Apply it. Stop listening to influencers and Joe Rogan.
If you have a question or just want to say hi, then email me at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com and you too can be featured on the show. Don’t forget to share the podcast with your friends!
Get-Fit Guy is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team at Quick and Dirty Tips Morgan Christianson, Holly Hutchings, Davina Tomlin, Kamryn Lacey, and our new Director of Podcasts, Brennan Goetschius. I’m your host, Kevin Don. If you have a question for me, leave me a voicemail at 510-353-3104 or send me an email at
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