As you may or may not know, I studied both naturopathic and homeopathic medicine. Homeopathic training lasts 3 years, naturopathic training for 4. For two years I did both at the same time (because I started homeopathic training a year before naturopathic); naturopathy Monday-Friday and homeopathy on Saturday and Sunday. Mental breakdowns happened daily. But I learned a lot about different forms of “optimizing” health because I tried them all; I didn’t have the time to be anything other than “optimum”. There were a couple things that really got me through. One was heavy exercise – it helped counteract the heavy mental work I had to do. Diet of course was (and is) vital for mental, emotional and physical optimization. However, the most surprising and incredibly effective thing I found was red light or near infrared therapy.

Red light therapy has nothing to do with red light districts. Just FYI. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve googled various versions of red light therapy while doing research and got mostly red light district related hits. No. Red light therapy is what it sounds like: flashing red lights around. Usually on a part of the body with illness, injury, discomfort, etc or on the head for systemic effects via the blood and brain.

A year into my crazy double-program life, I started dating my now husband. He had these little devices (like the size of a pack of gum) with wires that go up your nose with red lights on the end. He did work for the company that had developed them (he’s a statistician) and was convinced that they were effective when he went through the data. This was pretty shocking, not only because my new sweetheart would look like Rudolf for a half hour every day, but because he notoriously hates using pharmaceuticals, supplements, medical devices, you name it. As a statistician, he sees raw data every day, and gets paid to turn the data into a story. Therefore, companies can almost never convince him that something does what they say it does. (FYI – he loves homeopathy). So if he was convinced that these things were helpful, then I definitely had to try them.

He used them for increased energy and to help fight infections. His parents also use them, and have almost never gotten a cold or flu in the past 5 years. I started using them while I studied in the evenings. And I have to say, it’s been years of using them and I almost never get sick anymore. I get a sniffle, plug them in, and generally things resolve quickly and with very few symptoms. But that wasn’t what was so surprising in my student years; when I used them almost daily as a student, my memory dramatically increased, as did my clarity of thought. I started using them daily before exams because I found I could go through twice as many flashcards as I used to and recall the facts days later. Needless to say, I became a total convert.

I continue to use them frequently, although more for energy and to help fight infections. There are many different ones on the market. The devices I am familiar with, and sell here on my website, are created by Vielight, a company in Toronto. The two devices I use differ in the wavelength that emits from the light. One wavelength is 633nm and the other is 810nm. The differences between the two don’t seem to be well known. The only concrete difference I have been able to find is that 810nm, which is near infrared and therefore not visible to the naked eyes, penetrates deeper into human tissue. Therefore, when used in the nose or in a helmet, the light gets further into the brain. However, there are some studies that I found that seem to suggest 633nm may be better at repairing neurons and decreasing blood lipids and blood viscosity. But I wouldn’t consider them conclusive. I think it’s likely that the 633nm device (and similar devices) and the 810nm device (and similar) have different effects on the body, so I continue to use both. But who knows.

If you look into the research, you will find red light and near infrared light seemingly could help anything. They’re supposed to be helpful for weight loss, cognition, acne, psoriasis and eczema, energy, mood, joint pain, digestive problems, cardiovascular health, to detox neurotoxins and more!!

How is this possible? I have two hypotheses. First, this is a new field. The perfect wavelengths, time of exposure, strength of exposure and location of exposure have not been fully tested and researched. This tends to lead to a lot of positive studies or claims by experts, but people aren’t sure what created the positive effect – was it the strength of the dose? The length of exposure? The population studied? Unclear. We see this with Cannabis right now. Suddenly CBD and other Cannabis derived products are everywhere and are supposed to help everything; I even saw CBD shampoo the other day that was supposed to help with frizz. I am willing to bet that in 10 or 20 years, we will better understand when and where CBD and Cannabis are most helpful, and the result will be highly effective but highly specific indications for CBD and Cannabis, not the vague and general indications we have right now. The same may be true for red light/near-infrared light – when more research is done, we will better know which specific diseases/conditions red light is helpful for and in which populations. ​

The other reason red/near infrared light may be seen as a cure-all is that it’s possible it is an essential substance for the human body. We need light, specifically the sun. We know this from a vitamin D perspective especially, but sunlight also plays an important role in our sleep/wake cycles. Sunlight does not only have UV radiation (which is what triggers vitamin D synthesis in our skin) but also red and near-infrared light in it. The red/near-infrared light creates antioxidants that protect our skin from the harmful effects of UV radiation and potentially has all the effects of these medical devices I talked about above. This is still a hypothesis; no one has proved that we die without exposure to red light for example. But I think it’s plausible. With all critical nutrients – vitamin D, vitamin C, magnesium, zinc, etc, there is an impossibly long list of things these nutrients supposedly help with. And really, the point is that if someone is deficient in vitamin D, giving them vitamin D will help practically everything because vitamin D is necessary to live. Same with vitamin C, zinc, magnesium, sufficient protein, etc. If red light is necessary to life, then giving people deficient in red light will help with practically everything. Again, this is not proven in the case of red light, it’s just a hypothesis, but I think it’s interesting to think about given the long list of supposed benefits.
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So, I encourage you to investigate red light devices and take a long walk in the sun – get your vitamin D and your red light in one free, deliciously warm device.