670nm red light exposure improved aged mitochondrial function, colour vision
nature.com
nature.com
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=near+i...
What's the most convincing argument for it?
I've seen obvious lies on some product descriptions on internet listings, therefore I wouldn't trust a specification claim like "x nm" or "y lumen", and unless I had tools to measure them I would not rely on them meeting those specifications.
e.g. even when it's about visible light, well, do you trust this claim of 500,000 lumen?: https://www.amazon.de/Shadowhawk-Rechargeable-Extremely-Wate...
Having watched Torque Test Channel test[0] these[1] kinds[2] of claims, no, no I do not.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp8dumORMA0
The main science behind it is to hit the absorption peaks of a mitochondrial enzyme. You can make em bright, but be limited on how long you can use it, or dim and be forced to use it constantly for the same effect.
Pulse width modulation is very important in this for penetration. High intensity allows for deeper penetration, but heats up cells causing stress. The ideal scenario is a really strong light, run at a really low duty cycle, allowing for both intensity AND low average wattage, this lessening thermal issues
There might be other mechanisms of actions, as there are so many papers that say "light good", but until they can give a mechanism of action, I'm sticking with what I know
Without a controlled study, as an individual, how can I tell if my sprain got better in 6 days but would've taken 9 days otherwise???
People usually hear about this stuff peer to peer and they report back to their peers if it helped or not, so there is a before and after, and for those people there isn’t a selection criteria biased on success. If people don’t report back then others become very interested in why.
Insulin and Ozempic are both bioactive peptides, which is not to say BPC157 is anywhere as strong as either of them, but it's not easily dismissed either. Nowhere near the absurdities of ghosts and homeopathy.
We also know that, despite the vast quantities of anecdotal evidence readily available, taking 500% of your recommended daily value of Vitamin C will not actually effect the duration of your upper-respiratory tract infection. In fact, even ignoring the quality control issues in many commercial supplements, sometimes you can't even treat the deficiency of a specific nutrient with oral supplementation. And yet, again, many people will happily attest to the lifechanging benefits of supplementation to counteract a deficiency they likely never had.
Pain comes as you age. It isn’t unique to modern man, other than we typically live longer than ancient man.
If you do this plan you can still cheat. Drink, party, eat whatever. You invest effort so you can enjoy life when the moment arises.
Trying to decide which one to get.
I’ve got the AW Ultra and I’m quite fond of it, ability to use it without carrying my phone (even audible audiobooks) is the killer for me.
Hardware-wise they're largely similar, with some additional edge use cases (depending on who you are ofc) for fitness and outdoors with Garmin.
On the Garmin side for software, one thing I really appreciated on Garmin was the "body battery", or estimate of your energy, as well as health trends, etc. Apple has caught up with many of the features in the last year, and has a little ways to go. Apps like Athlytic do a good job filling the gap, but Apple really is making that gap quite small. Garmin locks your workout data down to its garden somewhat limiting your exports and has it more readily cloud accessible than I'd prefer; I felt the Apple privacy protections were better after reading the TOCs and looking at how the data is stored on each service.
What ultimately made me decide to go with Apple Watch is the above data consideration, the smooth functionality and integration with my iPhone, and the rapid pace of development Apple has had. Also, the cellular, texting (not saying it's the preferred method), Apple pay, etc. are all great to have on the Apple Watch and I can go for a run with only that.
After I paid more attention to my body metrics, I also changed my habits and started focusing on hydration more, when I drank alcohol and how much, and I was able to make good choices that help me feel much better to tackle the next day.
Aside from raw sensor metrics, as someone else said, their Body Battery is pretty decent. The biggest thing for me was seeing a long tail chart for things like sleep score, HRV, average resting heart rate etc and noticing sharp differences on days that I was either sick or drinking alcohol. The effects of a couple of beers on me was similar to COVID (except that they only lasted about 24 hours). But these are things you'll get with any device with long enough battery life that you'll wear it "all the time"
The overwhelming majority of people would benefit from doing resistance training 3x a week, cardio 3x a week, and shifting their diet towards more protein and less carbs and fat. People who fall outside of the large majority due to specific medical conditions need to understand their medical conditions and how they impact their daily life, because expecting everyone else to always take into account these issues is unreasonable and unproductive.
To be frank, this is a dumb point. The morbidly obese person probably can’t even run for 30 seconds. It won’t destroy their joints for the rest of their life. Suggesting activity over inactivity is good advice for basically every human alive.
Suggesting activity is good, yes, but suggesting someone should start with lifting specifically when they have issues with their joints without any further context is moronic.
(FWIW, to counter your personal experience with some of my own anecdotal evidence, I always sleep much better on firm mattresses.)
As for your question well you basically just have to trust the science. At some point a rat in a lab probably was intentionally injured next to another rat in the same position and one would get the treatment and the other not. They would then see who healed faster. Things like Acetaminophen and Ibuprofen have been around a long time and studied extensively so they have a good understanding of it's efficacy.
Lastly placebo effect seems to be a real effect so if you do something and you think it might help it might help.
Vitamin I is not, well, actually a vitamin.
Seems all that inflammation might actually be doing something.
I think your hesitance is valid
I got to try a prototype LED helmet that blasts 90 watts of lensed, circumspaced NIR beams through the skull for 4 minutes. I can say that an hour later it leaves me feeling mildly buzzed. The main effect I can identify is a mild and general sense of stamina/energy. I used it before/after an all-nighter and didn't feel as impacted as I should have; analogous to how you feel the next morning after drinking at age 20 vs. age 30. All anecdotal of course.
They took the helmet away to give to a kid with an recent brain injury, but swapped it with a hefty 2-foot, 1800W panel. It comes with tanning goggles and instructions saying to be nude and 12 inches away from it for 20 minutes per day--so a bit quacky. But it's apparently big in professional sports clinics for speeding tissue and joint healing.
How many well-designed double-blind studies in humans? That’s the question
Edit: found a wiki with more details:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode_therapy#P...
>as a natural metabolic regulation to control oxidative stress
That sounds like something I'd be very wary of manipulating without a good deal of clinical trials. Isn't oxidative stress one of like three primary hypothesized mechanisms of aging?
This is why humans have to actively overcome and sometimes subvert various mechanisms that presume the need to conserve the energy: they hit a gym which the body doesn't like, they limit sugars and fats which the body craves, they consume caffeine, nicotine, or even cocaine to trick the body into working harder and complaining less.
Compared to that, hitting the body with some NIR radiation seems very benign. You can get a lot of that just by walking in the sun, and there are no known adverse effects of that, unlike, say the use of the chemical substances. If anything, it's a promising field of research.
Other than sunburn and skin cancer?
For the panel, 1800W is a LOT of power to put through 2 feet. Is it actually 1800W? What wavelengths? PWM?
I've been using a NIR belt flipped inside out on my pillow the last few weeks. It's only 6W of 850nm, but I've been feeling less dumb recently. Not sure if it's correlated, but until I settle it for sure, I'm going to keep on using it.
I just dug out the spec sheet for the other device and you're right. It says "LED Power Class 1800W", but lists power consumption as 350W.
I really like it's potential to improve the right kind of symptoms when applied correctly and I'm also wary of people with bottom line incentives filling in any scientific uncertainty with miracle cures. But I agree, it's definitely worth using. It's a one time purchase with no side effects, so the worst case risk is just disappointment.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10103-024-04024-z
To achieve a neuroprotective effect, PBM must overcome several barriers, including bone tissue, a complex structure with variable optical properties
https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/neurophotonics/v...
Photobiomodulation (PBM) is a near-infrared (NIR) light-based therapy technique and has shown therapeutic effectiveness for various neuropsychiatric disorders, including MDD. The transcranial PBM (t-PBM) technique delivers NIR light through the scalp and skull.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/1...
Near-infrared spectroscopy in the brain is made possible by the relative transparency of biological tissues (including bone) to light for infrared wavelengths ranging from 650 to 925 nm.
Penetration of light from an 820 nm gallium-aluminum-arsenium laser diode through a sample of fresh human skin. Data extrapolated from data presented in Kolari (25) and shown in the blue columns. A line of regression is shown by the black dotted line. The regression line indicates that light from a low-power laser diode can penetrate less than 2.2 mm into human skin.
This says that a 820nm laser penetrate 2.2mm into human skin. That is 0.08 inches. That is about the width of a groove on the top of your finger. How does that square with saying that it could go through skull bone that is 3.5x as thick while being more dense than tissue?
We have demonstrated that our multi-watt NIR data delivers an estimated 1.65–3.7 J/cm2 to a depth of 30 mm. As shown above, this is within the biologically meaningful fluence range (1, 2, 4, 6, 47) and is more than 100-fold greater than the fluence delivered by an LED system or by a low-power infrared light system according to the findings of the authors cited above (7, 18, 21, 37, 38, 48).
and
Patients receiving 10–20 treatments of multi-watt infrared light, each lasting approximately 20–30 min, have experienced significant, and often, dramatic improvements (47, 48). The fluence of combined 810 and 980 nm light delivered during each of these treatments was, on average, 81 J/cm2/treatment. Correcting for forehead skin, skull, and 1 cm of brain tissue, this delivered a fluence of fluence of 0.41 J/cm2 to the neurons 1 cm below the cortical surface.
The authors paper listed as citation #4 (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.2147/NDT.S78182#medi...) has more detail on his methods, and the abstract sums it up pretty well:
NIR in the power range of 10–15 W at 810 and 980 nm can provide fluence within the range shown to be biologically beneficial at 3 cm depth. You can't ELI5 more than that.
Understanding does take work, and given your posting history of mostly low effort negative snark, I probably spent more time than I should have. But it was an interesting diversion into something I otherwise wouldn't have known.
Instead of light getting through bone you said
From your own link:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neurology/articles/10.3...
Now, the skin of the forehead overlying a portion of the frontal lobes is approximately 2 mm thick. It is possible that tiny amounts of infrared light from lower powered emitters could penetrate the forehead skin; however, only 9–11% of the light from a 10 W emitter penetrated that thickness of skin. Nevertheless, the remainder of the scalp, over which hoods, helmets, and posteriorly placed LED pads are emitting low-power light, is an average of 5.1–5.8 mm thick.
Simply put, it does not matter how long an LED is shone on a human head if the light energy from that LED cannot penetrate through human skin further than 3 mm. The energy of low-power devices simply will not penetrate the thickness of the scalp overlying much of the skull.
Some have suggested that NIR energy from low-power devices penetrates deeper if longer exposure times are used. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the roles that scatter, absorption, and refraction play in degrading NIR energy as it passes through tissue.
The energy delivered to the skin surface is different from the energy that penetrates to the depth of the target tissue – often several cm below the surface.
Longer exposure times will simply pump more energy into the epidermis and dermis of the skin/scalp.
Longer exposure times do not yield deeper penetration. These limitations on penetration only take into consideration the skin and scalp; however, the skull is a formidable barrier to light penetration, as well.
This is all moot however, as NIR is not light, because people can't see it (and possibly no animals can). If you drop the frequency enough something will get through (a tiny percent) and if you keep calling it light then you can make the false claim that light passes through bone, when we know that isn't true because we can see bones and they aren't transparent. We could say radio waves pass though people too and therefore light goes right though people.
The siren cry of ignorance everywhere.
however, only 9–11% of the light from a 10 W emitter penetrated that thickness of skin.
Yes. The study discusses this. Its why the researchers moved to more powerful sources. To provide the results you refuse to read. Which I explicitly pointed out in my reply so you didn't have to worry about struggling with reading comprehension yourself. Which you ignored because it doesn't fit your narrative.
it does not matter how long an LED is shone on a human head
Yes, that is what the researchers said. LEDs don't have enough power; they measured that. That's why they didn't use regular LEDs. And they measured that change. And gave you the parameters of their setup for you to check (well, not you...for people into facts and science and such). And cited the people who had similar results. And cited people who had different results. And other science things that people who actually read this stuff for comprehension appreciate. That you ignore.
The energy delivered to the skin surface is different from the energy that penetrates to the depth of the target tissue
Different...energy? Physics would like a word with you. But physics does expect you to have done your homework, so I'll let it know you won't be around any time soon. I told it to be nice, and remember not everyone has a high school level understanding of physics, and they might say silly things. Be excellent to each other and all that.
often several cm below the surface.
Yeah. How about 3cm? Like the researchers said. In their measurements. That they didn't guess at.
the skull is a formidable barrier to light penetration, as well
Yes. The researchers discuss skulls in detail. Not just people skulls...sheep skulls and mice skulls too. 3cm on people; all the way through in mice. Sheep somewhere between. And a lot about hands, but I don't figure you care about those. They wrote it down and it got published. After actually doing the science.
This is all moot however, as NIR is not light
There it is! Ding ding! The audience watching at home knew this was coming.
If it was 'moot', you would have said "Acksually, infrared ain't light so STFU. Duh!" a couple of exchanges back and moved on to easier targets with less annoying 'facts' and 'proof' and 'published works of science by experts' around for anyone who cared to check. I guess even the most seasoned troll gets to a point where their own contrived protests become too silly to keep up with a straight face, and the lazy out is to not just move the goalposts, it's to move them to a different stadium.
Go forth and declare your victory, brave internet warrior. You have outlasted my ability to whip between WTF and LOL and Kagi is telling me "dude, you can't out-research aggressive ignorance". Besides, there's a hockey game on and my wife made cocktails.
I did mention this in my first reply, I don't know why you feel the need for this manic response.
I guess even the most seasoned troll gets to a point where their own contrived protests become too silly to keep up with a straight face, and the lazy out is to not just move the goalposts, it's to move them to a different stadium. Go forth and declare your victory, brave internet warrior. You have outlasted my ability to whip between WTF and LOL and Kagi is telling me "dude, you can't out-research aggressive ignorance". Besides, there's a hockey game on and my wife made cocktails.
I don't understand where these insults are coming from. It doesn't seem like you're addressing that lower frequency EM that no animal can see isn't light. Saying "WTF and LOL" and trying to be patronizing doesn't confront what I posted.
You realize for most of your post you are replying to your own source right? I didn't write that, I took it from your link and put the most relevant stuff in italics. When you are quoting "Simply put" and replying: "The siren cry of ignorance everywhere." that's from your link, not me.
Though there’s a bit in the middle where it matches the resonant frequency of water molecules, yes.
Please do.
I have been exploring red light therapy using cheapo panels as well as fischer wallace devices (and have the OAK preordered via the IPO stock options), so I'm definitely trying out all the 'technologic approaches' since traditional medicine has been largely of no use (shout out to ondandestrone though, the best nausea suppresant I know of which can help fend off the migraince/vomiting episodes).
All that to say: Is your friend interested in any more TBI test subjects? Happy to pay for the device assuming I can afford it and provide detailed notes to help with any studies; this sounds like exactly the type of thing I need to try next.
No worries if not, but figured it couldn't hurt to ask.
I think the commercial model here is a tanning bed config with LED tubes. Goggles on, hop in the healing tube.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/3-minutes-of-deep-...
"Red (660 nm) or near-infrared (810 nm) photobiomodulation stimulates, while blue (415 nm), green (540 nm) light inhibits proliferation in human adipose-derived stem cells" (2017) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-07525-w
TIL it's called "red light optogenetics" even when the cells aren't modified for opto-activation.
And,
"Green light induces antinociception via visual-somatosensory circuits" (2023) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221112472...
"Infrared neural stimulation in human cerebral cortex" (2023) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1935861X2... :
> In a comparison of electrical, optogenetic, and infrared neural stimulation, Roe et al. [14] found that all three approaches could in principal achieve such specificity. However, because brain tissue is conductive, it can be challenging to confine neuronal activation by traditional electrical stimulation to a single cortical column. In contrast, optogenetic stimulation can be applied with high spatial specificity (e.g. by delivering light via a 200um fiber optic apposed to the cortex) and with cell-type specificity (e.g. excitatory or inhibitory cells); however, optogenetics requires viral vectors and gene transduction procedures, making it less easy for human applications [15]. Over the last decade, infrared neural stimulation (INS), which is a pulsed heat-mediated approach, has provided an alternative method of neural activation. Because brain tissue is 75% water, infrared light delivered near peak absorption wavelengths (e.g. 1875 nm [16]) permits effective delivery of heat to the brain tissue. In particular, experimental and modelling studies [[17], [18], [19]] have shown that 1875 nm light (brief 0.5sec trains of 0.25msec pulses forming a bolus of heat) effectively achieves focal (submillimeter to millimeter sized) activation of neural tissue
Does NIRS -based (neuro-) imaging induce neuronal growth?
Are there better photonic beam-forming apparatuses than TI DLP projectors with millions of tiny actuated mirrors; isn't that what a TV does?
Cold plasma also affects neuronal regrowth and could or should be used for wound closure. Are they cold plasma-ing Sam (Hedlund) in "Tron: Legacy" (2010) before the disc golf discus thing?
Does cold plasma reduce epithelial scarring?
A certain duration of cold plasma also appears to increase seed germination rate FWIW.
To find these studies, I used a search engine and search terms and then picked studies which seem to confirm our bias.
But given how simple their light setup is, they could easily have added a control group.
Has anyone gone down the rabbit hole here and have genuine product recommendations that roughly satisfy the conditions laid out in the paper? * Wavelength: 650–900 nm red light * Power output: 8 mW/cm² * Misc design choices: e.g. light diffusers * what other considerations???
So there may be a very different grade of led in the pricy stuff.
670nm Deep Red LED cluster
8mW / cm²
3 minute session timer with automatic switch off
Rechargeable battery with 2 weeks between charges
https://www.eye-power.co.uk/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43086073)
Some believe that the reason red light helps is that cytochrome C oxidase can use the red light to convert serotonin to melatonin and that melatonin is the most important anti-oxidant in the human body. (Under this model, melatonin cannot get into the mitochondria, but serotonin can.)
What little I remember it sure fits your description. I might try hooking up a red heat lamp to a timer as an alarm clock to see what happens.
[1] "Measuring and predicting eyelid spectral transmittance" Journal of Biomedical Optics, Vol. 16, Issue 6, 067011 (June 2011) https://doi.org/10.1117/1.3593151
Bright enough to warm the body, but not thermally stress the cells.
And yeah, closing your eyelids would block UV light from getting in and cross linking proteins and causing cataracts, while still allowing for NIR light to get in and speed up the mitochondria.
Analogous for sure
It has UV, which stresses out the cells You can't PWM the sun, it's hard to get full naked coverage in front of it. Doesn't perfectly target NIR or NIR-II biological windows.
But for a base/starter, it can't be beat.
Simply put, light is better than no light.
I suspect because the longer IR wavelengths just heat the body up, it's hard to get enough of the more "useful" wavelengths without overheating
have occasional pain in my left knee, but resolved it by one or two really hot
sessions at the chimney(I nearly burned myself lol so it has to be really hot in
order to get rid of chronical pain). Knee pain is gone now. I have read a theory
of the vagus nerve sending harmful substances produced by the microbiome in the
bowels to the knee to prevent it going to the brain. The useful compounds get
teleported to the brain(we got no clue how the vagus nerve does it, but if you
lack a functioning vagus nerve the transportation ceases).
One challenge is the irradiance drops off as a square a distance. So like 5 inch away vs 1 inch away is a difference of 25x irradiance.
Probably way too expensive for people to buy for this purpose(probably too expensive for skin care too, it's just a mask with red LED's, if I knew that's what she was buying I probably would've just made one. That's probably why she didn't tell me). Anyway, for anyone out there looking to buy a product, it's worth checking if your wife/gf already has something. Lots of products like this for anti aging as well as for hair growth
Danger Danger, make positive statement and redirect to how they feel about it!I have been telling myself for years I need to start building an selling these things.
Someone I know desperately bought a $8000 red light therapy gun pitched to her by a chiropractor to help her father who had catastrophic brain damage from a stroke. :/
The gun has a dial on the side that lets you cycle through "Cancer", "Chronic pain", "Acute pain", and other ailments.
Whatever legitimacy red light therapy has, it's set back by the legion of people trying to make money selling confusing products, and it's hard to tell what's legitimate or not.
Between some red-colored LEDs glued inside an eye mask and those fan-cooled NIR array panels on aliexpress, what is legitimate and how do you tell? I think it's that confusion that seeds the field for people to say "none of it unless you're spending good money [on my product]."
I imagine that this could serve as different enough input to matter. With the eyes being a very expensive and highly-strung instrument and all?
it sounds like getting up early and getting out like for a run can be beneficial in one more way.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Early-morning-6-am-relat... :
"Early morning (6 am) relative irradiance of the sun is higher in the visible and NIR spectrum compared to midday exposure (noon)"
"Metabolic rate and ageing are both regulated by mitochondria. Mitochondrial membrane potential, however, declines with age resulting in reduced adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production, which is a major source of cellular energy. Cellular decline is further accelerated with ageing by increased production of pro-inflammatory reactive oxygen species (ROS)1."
Forget everything else. Why does "Exposure to long wavelength light (650–900 nm) in animals improves mitochondrial function, increasing ATP production and reducing ROS"? That is what needs to be figured out, because red light will not always increase ATP production and reducing ROS because we are all different. Genetics, nutrition, it all plays a role.
It might be as well that red light helps in the short term but hurts in the long term.
On ATP, do you know what the real name for ATP is Mg-ATP, That is magnesium ATP. Not enough magnesium, not enough ATP. (I am in no way claiming that magnesium is a cure all, just making a point.) What reduces ROS? Selenium, magnesium, Catalase, etc...
* https://www.healthrising.org/blog/2024/12/10/red-light-thera...
Many independent studies, videos and panel buying comparisons on that page
Personally I'm still not completely convinced but cannot afford it anyway.
adding link to Red Light Therapy Shopping Tool:
https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/journal-of-biome...
Probably wouldn’t do it for more than 10 mins
- Your room must be cold. If you stand around in the room you should feel kind of chilly
- Your room should be quiet. If you have loud A/C which turns on and off that's a problem c.f. step 1 -- think hard about how to meet both requirements given your personal situation/constraints
- Your room must be dark. Not necessarily pitch black but dark. No blinking LEDs.
- A couple hours before bed, remind your brain that it is soon time to sleep
- Your phone must not be in the room with you. Your phone sleeps in the kitchen. I cannot emphasize this enough. It's OK you are going to have a nice book to read instead
- You need a real physical book. Books are cheap and make you more sexy and smarter. No Kindle
- Here's the book I'm reading: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/gormenghast/
- This is the headlamp I use: https://www.pelican.com/us/en/product/flashlights/headlamp/2...
- There's nothing special about that headtorch -- there are hundreds of head torches you can buy with a red ~630nm LED. it's the standard red color LED. It would be interesting to swap it out for the 670nm wavelength described in the article though!
- Actually that model is pretty heavy and just happens to be the one I bought for camping -- you could do a lot better/smaller/lighter e.g. Nitecore NU25, Black Diamond Spot 350
- You will feel like a clown when you put the headtorch on. That's okay -- you read books and sleep well, making you very attractive in the daytime. It's OK to look like a clown at nighttime
- You are going to sleep on your back. You can do this, I believe in you. You are going to sleep positioned like Tutankhamun and for nearly as long
- You need a reasonably firm pillow and you need to set it up right. It needs to support your neck and stop you rolling on your side. None of this foam bullshit it needs to have feathers in it. You are a human being not a cellphone. You don't sleep on plastic
- OK let's get this bread. You lie down you turn off all the lights and you turn on your cool little headtorch. You get your head very well positioned on the pillow. You are about to sleep like a boss, you're going to sleep like Genghis Khan. You better get those covers tight because it's fucking cold in your room. Then you start reading. Hell yeah this book is so good. It feels so natural and rewarding and you remember that people used to write in ways that are outside our grasp today, no LLM or modern author can touch it. Within a couple of pages your eyes are shut. You find yourself holding the book with your eyes closed, barely awake. At that moment boom you put down the book, ideally switch off the headtorch, and disappear
I found this: https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Red-670nm-Wavelength-Flashlight/...
Question: do you know how you know that the headlamp you own is 630nm? Thanks.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/led-indication-di...
Given that I'd be very surprised if my crappy little head torch is 670nm.
If you can use a soldering iron I think it would be relatively straightforward to modify an off-the-shelf headlamp and swap out the diode.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/led-indication-di...
While I like the sensation using it I don't feel any noticeable effect.
Anyone have any idea if it contributes a lot of i̶n̶f̶r̶a̶-̶r̶e̶d̶ red light that way?
My much less powerful home phototherapy light weighs about 20 lbs and I have to cover my eyes with multiple layers to use it.
I don't know why the people running red light studies hate control groups so much. If you do that many studies, varying wave length and intensity for some of them should be trivial. Yet somehow they almost never do that.
So: 90W mask or 1500W panel? Infrared, red light, or does yellow work just as well, maybe?
The people doing near-UV therapy for skin conditions managed to do all that. There's a know effective wave length (it's always 311nm), there's dosage plans. There's licenced medical devices doing the irradiation. IR people seem less interested in all that.
Entry (?) untested, $350: https://thunderoptics.fr/product/sma-e-spectrometer/
For anyone interested, here is a short vid on how to color your iphone screen red: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omuGVs7eP-A
The evidence seems stronger than for most supplements people take, for everything from hair loss to collagen production to soften tissue repair to brain function.
https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/images/sunlight_wavelength....
It's all definitely in there.
too bad the dark red bulb was thrown away together with all the other no-use-anymore equipment..