Reduce Inflammation With Red Light Therapy Dr. Anderson on Infrared, Sauna, an
00:00on 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 that's what we're going to do today so the first thing that we want to talk about really is how is it that the use of Redlight 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 wav light L and all of that but just to kind
01:00of 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 you know red is somewhere 6 700 nanometers and each chart you look at will have it a little bit lower a little higher 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 most commonly combined with red nir is 700 to, 1400 nanom 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
02:00time 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 may be 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 the red near infrared going to be even more the deep penetration it's going to help more so if you want all the background and 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 in thread gets a little bit deeper and
03:00we'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 arterials 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 ingent the stuff that holds us together they're that's 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 infared 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
04:00through 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 cuz 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 ingent or the direct muscle cell tissue and all of that it's going to affect it all through mitochondrial
05:00activity 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 sell 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 that people have 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 Redux 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
06:00cell so that's kind of how it's going to work and it's going to 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 going to 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 win longer on that but this one I want to talk about okay so why would that help me with inflammation and then how do we apply it where where we going to use these things right so the first thing is going to be it's going to help with inflammation because it's going to help with cellular respiration which just like our respiration where we breathe there in and breathe there 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 in flames cells tend to hold on to more trash so
07:00red near infrared light therapy is going to help to improve the movement into the cell of good stuff improve the oxidative capacity and the Redux status and improve the actual energy production but also then that is going to 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 do for yourself especially 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 physically move your body because that'll pump more blood through and 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 inflammation is metabolic junk take more junk out so the forms you might see and
08:00again there's a either slight or great difference between the forms that you would see you know that you might be able to 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 a small that might fit over you know your neck or the back of your head or your shoulder 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 bits 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 separ oparation between the
09:00device 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 in 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 lung 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 shirt or or no clothes that's going to 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 want to talk about far infrared separately but you may run into 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
10:00infrared all on its own if you're using an infrared SAA they're usually of the proper uh Power output to get whatever their band of infrared is into your muscle and heat your muscle up which is why your body would then heat up now of course they're going to heat up your lungs Etc 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 goose neck 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 of research
11:00on neuroinflammatory disease con postconcussive 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 might look like orthodontic headgear but it's got these light diodes on it it's got oscillation and of U wavelength and all of that stuff to be able to do it yeah I often get the question which one is best well it really depends what you're treating so if you have a postconcussive problem and we send you to the clinic that does photo dnamic 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 Co especially with earlier variants where people were having having a lot of
12:00respiratory 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 Co 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 long Co 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 can just take a plain old pad that you might use for your back and you you can wrap around your shoulder or
13:00your 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 wavelengths 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 Etc and then the way to cycle them is very broad now this is just what our experien 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 F postconcussion please talk to some healthc care 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 and like when people get home from the hospital we
14:00would do it two or three times a day on the chest or pelvic organs Etc after the first week we would try and get them to do it every day for a week or two and then we would start to spread the treatments out depending on how quickly they were getting better but usually one to two weeks of daily use and then they might go to every other day or 5 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 a 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
15:00always 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 we talked about today is red light decreasing inflamation 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