China-born Tao Li is using bright light therapy to boost her circadian rhythm so that her energy peaks as the same time as her races.
The light she is using is 3,600 lux in a single 15 minute burst. The therapy increases her mental alertness and physical ability.
This story has been all over the internet, but here’s a link to Reuters.
Ok. This therapy is SO new, that there is currently only 1 test subject, a Mr. Clem Fennell from Cincinatti, Ohio. The treatments he is receiving are in the UK.
After being diagnosed with dementia in 2006, and with a dearth of treatment options available, Mr. and Mrs. Fennell began looking for possible solutions. They came across a General Practitioner, Dr. Gordon Dougal, and his partner, eye surgeon Jim Laslam, who has been inventing light-therapy products, with a couple already on the market, already, Virulite and Restorelite. The new treatment is a helmet that shines 1072 nm infrared light into his eyes for 18 minutes, twice a day.
Apparently, initial reports are that Mr. Fennell is showing signs of improvement. Full clinical trials will be needed, however, before the true effectiveness of this type of treatment is known.
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/2393445.Clem_benefiting_from_pioneering_treatment/
While its we’ve seen hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) in our oral hygiene products before, such as baking soda and hydrogen peroxide toothpaste, new research adds a new twist to the proven oral debrider. Often, the bacteria that need to be reached live in structures called biofilms, which serve as a physical barrier to reach them. Apparently the combination of both blue light (typically used in dental offices to set fillings) and hydrogen peroxide can penetrate deep into the biofilms and kill bacteria that have been unreachable by traditional non-invasive means.
More information can be found at http://www.asm.org/Media/index.asp?bid=59500
Dr. Ken Walker, writing under the name Dr. W. Gilford Jones, recently posted several articles about his experience at the 2007 LILT Conference in Toronto, Canada. While attending, he saw presentations from a number of medical professionals advocating the effectiveness of Low Intensity Laser Treatment on a slew of conditions. These maladies include:
Finally, he tells us that a presentation was given showing preliminary research that LILT could help to stimulate nerve cell damage. Prior to this, it had been commonly believed that Nerve cells DO NOT regenerate, which is why spinal cord injuries seem so final.
While the exact mechanics of LILT are still under research and there is no definitive answer as to precisely how it works, there seems to be a general understanding of it. LILT uses light in the Red to Infrared wavelengths. LILT appears to kick-start the body’s natural healing process by delivering electro-magnetic energy to the affected cells, which is then transformed into biochemical energy. This provides increased blood flow and accelerates healing times.
LILT sessions are generally 30-60 minutes long, working from shorter to longer sessions. LILT is non-toxic, safe, and noninvasive. Dr. Walker recommends that you try LILT before resorting to drugs or surgery.
Two post-conference articles can be found here:
This is an interesting story about a research program being run here on earth. Research Scientists who work on the schedule of the Phoenix Martian Lander are also involved in a program to see whether a human body can be retrained to adjust to Mars’ 24.6 hour day.
The key components to this study? Light therapy to reset circadian rhythms, and an adjusted sleep cycle.
Studies like this are vital for potential colonization of the planet. It simply wouldn’t do to get there, and find out that everybody would fall victim to sleep deprivation and exhaustion.
More information and some interesting interviews can be found here: http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/local/90802.php
Understanding that the greatest “light therapy” solution we have is simply our own sun, though, I have to wonder if there wouldn’t be a vast difference in what these scientists are doing on earth by adjusting their sleep cycles while fighting ‘natural’ day and night, and living on Mars, where the sun would naturally set its own day and night.
Recently we’ve seen the CACI Ultra Non-Surgical Facelift treatment touted about the internet as a ‘Light Therapy’ alternative to facelift surgery. Does it work? Doesn’t it? Well, we haven’t tried it, but we did want to point out a couple of things.
CACI stands for Computer Aided Cosmetology Instrument, and the principles of CACI have been around for quite a while. Apparently CACI was originally developed by Thomas Wing, a doctor in California, USA, to help people with muscle pain, and well as the muscle-related injuries that caused the pain, such as sprains and whiplash.
First off, this treatment uses a combination of electricity, sound and light to do the full job. The bulk of the work is handled by the electrical currents used by the wands that are said to be able to ‘retrain’ the facial muscles, lengthing or shortening them based on where the muscles are and their function.
The Ultrasound works directly on the epidermis, exfoliating the skin to give it a brighter, fresher complexion.
The Microlaser (the Light Therapy) portion of the treatment is used to stimulate the body’s own cell regeneration.
So, we see in this case, that light is actually used to facilitate healing, not the actual face lift portion itself.
It would seem to us that like a ‘real’ workout, the electrically induced ‘workouts’ of the facial muscles would have to be repeated often to keep muscle tone, and at $200-300 per treatment, that sounds expensive over time. If anyone has had this treatment, we’d love it if you’d leave a comment giving us your experience.
There is another company with the name CACI International, which is a private military technology devloper and personnel contractor, and due to the state of the world, if you try a web search, you’re likely to find mostly links about this CACI in particular. Here is the link to theCACI International that creates the medical devices. http://www.caci-international.co.uk/
Despite earlier indications that persons with darker skin pigmentation might not respond as well to phototherapy as patients with lighter skin, new clinical research has suggests that this is simply not the case. Observation of over 100 patients undergoing the UT Southwestern Medical Center’s experimental phototherapy treatments for morphea, scleroderma, and other related skin conditions, has shown that these treatments are beneficial to the same percentage of patients regardless of skin color. The procedure currently in place uses light in the UVA1 wavelength.
More information can be found at Newswise.com.
New research conducted by Nathalie Hoang and a team of researchers has been published in the journal of the Public Library of Science. This study has shown that photoreceptors called cryptochromes in humans respond to blue light in much the same way that cryptochromes in plants do. While many of our cryptochromes are found in the retina of the eye, they can also be found in other tissues found near the surface of our bodies. The implication is that they must have a purpose in absorbing and responding to light, but exactly what their functions are is currently unknown. Preliminary findings suggest that these sensors may regulate our sleep cycle, also called our circadian rhythm.
The Author sums up the findings of her paper with these words:
Vision in animals is generally associated with light-sensitive rhodopsin pigments located in the eyes. However, animals ranging from flies to humans also possess ancient visual receptors known as cryptochromes in multiple cell types. In this work, we study the mechanism of light sensing in two representative animal cryptochromes: a light-sensitive Drosophila cryptochrome (Dmcry) and a presumed light-insensitive mammalian cryptochrome from humans (Hscry1). We expressed recombinant cryptochromes to high levels in living cells, irradiated the cells with blue light, and analyzed the proteins’ response to irradiation with electron paramagnetic resonance and fluorescence spectroscopic techniques. Photoreduction of protein-bound oxidized FAD cofactor to its radical form emerged as the primary cryptochrome photoreaction in living cells, and was correlated with a light-sensitive biological response in whole organisms. These results indicate that both Dmcry and Hscry1 are capable of undergoing similar light-driven reactions and suggest the possibility of an as-yet unknown photo-perception role for human cryptochromes in tissues exposed to light.
I don’t want to put words in the mouths of the researchers here, but basically it seems they are saying that our bodies react to light, or, as this particular study shows, blue light, though this particular research doesn’t show exactly how. Much of light and color therapy has long worked on this assumption, deriving its basis from a mixture of anecdotal observation and clinical testing and research. We are all very interested in seeing what this type of research will yet uncover about the way our bodies interact with light.
The report can be found on PLoS’s website here.
An article discussing the high points of the study can be found at ScienceDaily.com here.
In our household we’ve known about the economic, environmental and therapeutic benefits of LED lighting for a while. And while we’ll probably do our own write-up on the subject at some point in the future, we came across this article today and thought you might enjoy reading it for yourselves.
http://www.trendir.com/archives/000257.html
The article is written more for home decorating than for therapy of any kind, but it still outlines a lot of the basics of LED lighting and gives some links to other articles on the subject as well.
Now, please understand that our home is NOT lit up like the underside of an inner city street racing car. Its just not our decorating style, so I found amusement, and even some befuddlement at the fixtures portrayed here. However, I kind of dug the illuminated dining table, though it seems less like a formal dining experience and more like a game room table to me. SEEING the temperature of the water coming out of a faucet by its color could be very helpful, especially for families with small children or infirmed. Finally, I’m thinking that self-lit fixtures in the bathroom would certainly make 3 a.m. trips to the bathroom much more comfortable than having to either blind yourself by turning on the lights or else fumbling around in the dark. Hmm.
Honey, what do you think of this waterfall shower with mood-lighting?…
Mr. Patel, MCG School of Dentistry Junior, Dr. Jill Lewis, associate professor of oral biology, Dr. Regina Messer, associate professor of oral rehabilitation and oral biology, and Dr. John Wataha, adjunct professor of oral rehabilitation and oral biology, have recently concluded early studies pointing to the possible use of Blue Light to help treat cancer.
Apparently, the study used 10 mice with tumors. 5 of the mice went untreated while the other 5 received doses of the blue light for 90 seconds a day for 12 days. At the end of the 12 days, the tumors were removed for study. Of the 10, the 5 that had received treatments showed a 10% increase of apoptosis (cell suicide) in the tumor cells, but not in healthy cells.
Early hopes are that in time blue light therapy can lighten the amount of current treatment methods needed, such as chemotherapy, to reduce the discomfort and affect to the patient’s health.
The blue lights used are reported to be those common to dental procedures that use blue light to harden tooth fillings. While the wavelength was not disclosed in this article, standard wavelengths for this procedure run between 430 – 470 nanometers.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/mcog-blu062408.php
