In this episode, I’m speaking with Tom Kerber, a fascinating entrepreneur with a great deal of knowledge and experience (particularly on the engineering side) in the field of photobiomodulation, (aka modifying biology with light).
Approximately 20 years ago, a series of professional and personal events led Tom to shift his career from electronic development to LED device development (like the small blue light device your dentist uses to cure fillings…yes, Tom invented that!).
In part 1 of this two-part series, Tom and I discuss some of the most pressing questions about red and near-infrared light therapy with a focus on how different devices penetrate the body and affect deeper tissues, along with light therapy applications and case studies.
Tom has been developing tools and equipment to do a lot of sophisticated experimentation on penetration depth of red and near-infrared light (which is a much-needed contribution to the field), so I invited him onto the show to discuss his work, which evolved into a 2-part conversation.
P.S. I want to give a big thank you to Tom and his company SunPowerLED for offering us 10% off all of their products through the end of the year! >> Click here and use code AriChristmas10 to take advantage of your discount.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Tom and I discuss:
- The possibility of red light as a therapy for cancer and viral infections (including COVID-19)
- How red light can work synergistically with other substances to create a more powerful result
- Tom’s breakthrough moment (aided by his wife’s lasagna dishes!) that led to the practical and life-changing use of red light for human health
- The key differences between far- versus near-infrared light
- The core benefits of photobiomodulation, including pain relief, injury healing, and even support for autoimmunity
- The unique adaptogenic nature of light therapy—it helps different people in different ways based on their specific needs!
- Clarification about controversies in light therapy, such as penetration depth, lasers versus LEDs, and whether devices should touch the skin or not
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Transcript
Ari: Tom, welcome to the show.
How Tom got into photobiomodulation
Tom: Hey, fantastic to be on the show with you, Ari.
Ari: I saw a presentation of yours recently. I saw a video of the presentation that you gave at the Photobiomodulation Conference that just happened in 2024 in London, just in September. You did a presentation on something that I have been– what’s the right word? I have been dying to get answers to for years and years at this point. That is penetration depth.
I’m going to try to briefly describe this for listeners so they understand the problem with it or the issue that’s at play here. Basically, the very short version of the story for people listening is there is lots and lots of controversy around the subject of penetration depth when it comes to red light therapy, near-infrared light therapy, this field of photobiomodulation. More broadly, photo is light, bio is biology, and modulation is what it sounds like. We’re modifying biology with light. That’s what this term photobiomodulation means.
Within this field, there’s been an enormous amount of controversy for years around questions like lasers versus LEDs. What’s better? Different wavelengths. Is 630 nanometers or 660 nanometers better? Is near-infrared at 810 or 830 or 850 or 880 nanometers better? What about 1,064 nanometers? How far does that penetrate? Does the beam need to be shaped like this? What happens if you use this device? What happens if it’s, and this is a big one, contact versus non-contact? What happens if the light source is pressed up against your skin versus far away from your skin?
There are lots and lots of issues here. The challenge that I’ve had for many years now, and particularly as I’m trying to put together the version two of my book, is that the body of research that exists just doesn’t have the answers that we need. It just doesn’t, these experiments haven’t been done in the way that we need to have clear answers to all of these questions. We are trying to piece together bits and pieces of evidence and speculate.
Then when I saw your presentation on– you did a presentation on testing in a very rigorously scientific way, the penetration depth of different kinds of light sources applied in different ways, and I went, “I need to talk to this guy to basically get some clear answers to these questions,” hopefully with some actual hard evidence to back things up, because I’ve done plenty of at-home experiments in my closet in a dark room where I can see certain things, but I don’t have the sophisticated devices needed to actually measure all of these things.
You’ve now done those experimentations, hence why you are now here on this podcast and we’re having this conversation. Hopefully, that makes sense to everybody listening. With that said, I know we’re going to focus a lot on those experiments, but Tom, let me have you start by taking people through a bit of your background of how you got into this field, why you started the company that you started, SunPowerLED, and just a bit of the backstory here.
Tom: Okay. If you would have asked me 16 years ago if I shine light on your body, whether it would have an effect, I would have told you, you’re crazy, you’re smoking something, because I couldn’t see that at all. Sure, you go outside and you stay out too long and you get a burn, sunburn. I could understand that. That’s an effect of light.
Yes, I’ve got 3 kids and now 10 grandchildren, so I know that the incubator used with the blue light affects the bilirubin, so if you’re a jaundiced kid, you have an effect. Light obviously grows trees and does all sorts of fantastic stuff. It’s critical to our whole life. If we didn’t have light, we’d be in trouble.
Take it back about 18 years ago, I’m in electronic development, so for 40 years now, I’ve developed electronic devices that are for all different purposes. About 18 years ago, one of the salespeople, we’re the Silicon Valley north where I’m located. Anyways, we have salespeople of all kinds that were coming to me with different products and new technology. They brought me these LEDs and they said, “Isn’t this fantastic?” It was. It was the first high-power LEDs. They would put out quite a bit of light power. Not like the little indicator that you have on your TV screen or whatever, but this was serious light power.
I thought, great, how much do they cost? They’re $70 a piece. Okay. How many would I need for a 100-watt light bulb? I need three of them. How many of these can you sell? In other words, it’d be $200 just in the LEDs before you create your first 100-watt light bulb. What market would you have? Zero, right?
I’m thinking, what can I do with this powerful blue? I’m going through all their brochures and they showed that this could be used for dentistry. A blue light can be used to harden your filling. I don’t know if you had that done where they packed the white filling material in and they used the blue light as a catalyst to harden the filling. No problem. If I took one of those $70 LEDs, I could make a $2,000 device and sell it on the market. That’s what I did.
I got FDA approval, got the lights. Rolled that ahead three more years. Not a good idea to compete against 3M, by the way. They’re no fun. Not good competition. They can make the product in China for $5 and millions of them, and you have to make it in North America. I made these products, had them on with the dentist. They loved them. This high-powered blue LED would cure the filling.
I could totally understand that light could photoactivate a compound. You might know that they use UV light for Bondo for cars, fiberglass in cars. That’s done. When it rolled ahead, my wife was ill with a bunch of problems, and we were trying to resolve some of those problems. She didn’t have cancer, but I ended up going to this one doctor.
Now, the other part of it was about 35 years ago, we live in Canada, and you used to use storm windows to put in the upper all of your house to insulate your house. Those are the old houses. I went up a ladder, second-floor height, pushed the window in, and the ladder took off. I fell right onto concrete. I didn’t bust anything. I have second-floor height down to concrete. I didn’t bust anything. Every year or two years, I could pick up a paper clip. All of a sudden, the muscle spasms that immediately would happen, and the pain that I would go through for several months, like three, four, five months. I do chiropractic. I do all the things you’re supposed to do. It always took me time, a lot of recovery time.
Now, I get this opportunity. I hear of this one doctor that worked with his clinic about half an hour from me, and I heard how fantastic he was. I thought, man, he’s a medical doctor. He’s got to be able to help my wife. I go in to see him, and he’s asked my wife a whole bunch of questions about her background, and he ended up helping her. This was the great part.
One of the questions he says is, “Is there any stress you can get rid of in your life?” She starts pointing at me because I’ve been self-employed, barely making it, getting sometimes good things happening, and then the bottom falling out, all this stuff in the business realm. He immediately turns to me and he says, “What do you do?” I said, “I make this powerful blue light for curing the white fillings.” He says, “Can you make it red?” I’m like, “Why red?”
Ari: How long ago was this?
Tom: This is 16 years ago. I said, “Why red?” He says, “Well, red is the right wavelength to photoactivate a drug that kills cancer.” I thought, fantastic. You and I both have heard the motto, the cure is just around the corner. It’ll never happen with the present medical probably going on. Anyways, I better not go there. Regardless, I thought, fantastic.
Now, I was very naive at that time. I believed that the medical system really would want to see cancer treatment go forward and new developments cure people and heal people and that. I said, “Yes.” That day, he’s going to go buy 10 red laser pointers and put them together with elastic bands. He had two patients, one with cancer on the throat, a guy with cancer on the throat, and a woman with cancer in her breast, and it was bad, both of them weren’t turning out well. I said, “Look, can you give me three weeks, I’ll build you the first high-power light, the red light,” and I knew the wavelength that needed to be 635 nanometer.
He told me that, he had done all the research, he bought the drug, the drug was expensive. In three weeks, I built the first high-power liquid-cooled, water-cooled LED system. This thing was about this big, and I was pumping about– there had been probably about 30 watts of optical out of this device, and it was about that big, and I delivered it in three weeks. The employees, everybody was on it.
We delivered it, and he started the treatment on the two patients, and one month, we shrunk both cancers. I thought, my gosh, this is a bad breast cancer and bad situation on the guy’s throat, and I thought, everybody’s going to want this. You know what, I tried everything to move this. We knocked on so many doors. I’ve been all over the US, I’ve been in different parts of Canada to try and present this and get it moved forward. That’s a separate company, so we’re going to move off the stage of PDT, but that was–
Ari: For people listening, this is something that if you’re interested in looking up the literature on, it’s called photodynamic therapy.
Tom: Correct.
Ari: There are various substances that are activated by wavelengths of light, oftentimes red light. Methylene blue is an example of this, is often used in photodynamic therapy, and several other compounds, including some natural compounds, have been used in this– sometimes it’s used to target the killing of certain kinds of cells.
Tom: Abnormal cells of different kinds can be dealt with. What’s cool about methylene blue, did you see the reaction curve on methylene blue?
Ari: Reaction curve in terms of what? Parts of the spectrum are activated?
Tom: Yes, it looks like this, like right in 660. I got it on my slide deck, lower it down, but it’s right in the middle of 660, is where you want to be. The bright red is the right wavelength to photoactivate that. They’ve been doing that in Brazil for– are you familiar with in Brazil? You know already, Brazil is really advanced in a lot of stuff with PBM and PDT, but they were using it for diabetic foot ulcers, and bacterial infections, and that, so really cool.
Ari: When I caught on to it was very shortly after COVID started, and I became aware of some research showing that light-activated methylene blue neutralizes viruses, and that they were using it in blood transfusions at the start of the pandemic, when they were taking blood out, to basically cleanse it, cleanse the actual blood, sanitize it, I should say, of the COVID-19 virus, of SARS-CoV-2. Methylene blue, basically activated with light, kills that virus. Given that I had a background in red light, and I had some methylene blue on hand, it was like, I wonder if it can do it in a bag, and I know red light penetrates beneath the skin into the human body, what’s to stop it from doing it in the human body, too? Other than issues of depth of penetration.
Tom: 660 nanometer, right there, will cover your whole body after a while. Circulation, that’s the right wavelength. Also, there was– Brazil was, during COVID, there was a research done on shining light in the back of the throat, did you see that? That was with idocyanine green, which is, there’s 20 photosensitive compounds out there that are reacted to different wavelengths, and that wavelength is 810 nanometer, and that shows great promise as well. Yes, that’s really cool.
Anyways, PDT is a separate company for me, I have that I started, and hopefully, someday, we’ll see it finally take off, but I don’t hold my hopes up too high. We can’t treat anybody with it, because it’s not been approved. Just to be sure, I’m not a medical doctor, I want to say that. I’m not a medical doctor.
Ari: Okay, and just, you don’t have to go in-depth, but as far as the reason why you perceive this to not be taking off, do you see it as financial interests that are essentially suppressing the technology?
Tom: That is the best way to describe that, and if you help people to heal faster, and they don’t need the other treatments, it’s not in the best financial interests of some people.
Ari: Right, and we won’t go further into that for risk of maybe this podcast being censored or something like that. Okay, so let’s go back to red and near-infrared photobiomodulation.
Tom: Yes. What happened was I didn’t believe red, at that point, would do anything on the body without a drug. Drug-activated, no problem. Light only, forget it, you’re smoking something. Anyways, two months after I built this light, I had to do a little adjustment to it. Something needed to be fixed on it, or whatever, I can’t remember now. I got it back, and I made it a little tweak, so I could bring it back to him, and wouldn’t that happen at that time?
Every two years, one to two years, I’d have these extreme muscle spasms. At that very moment, I was dealing with one of these muscle spasms, just when I got that other equipment back. I thought, what the heck, why not put the light in the back of my chair? I could barely get into my chair. The pain level that I was experiencing was probably about an 8 out of 10, where 8 was just screaming at me, but I had to keep working. I had to work on my computer, CAD work, or whatever I was doing at the time.
I put the light behind my back and then about 20 minutes later, I’m starting to move. I get up, and I stand up, and I’m like, almost can bend over, and my pain had dropped from maybe an 8 down to a 3 in 20 minutes. That was my aha moment for red light therapy, photobiomodulation, cold eyeball laser, whatever you want to call it. There’s a whole pile of names, but that was my aha moment. My gosh, this can do this on my back, and all these years I’ve been going to the chiropractor, physio, all these things, and, waiting it out for the two, three, four months of pain, and 20 minutes, I can get relief.
Then I started building lights. Now, at the time, LEDs were far too expensive. If I wanted to create a small light, it would have been just, nobody buy it, but I thought, in my own situation, I wanted to build a light big enough to do my whole back. As you know, when you get a muscle spasm, sometimes all the muscles contribute to the factor, so you want to do everything, right?
I built a halogen-based, or halogen, however you want to pronounce it, light source. If you take a 300-watt work light, okay, remember the 300-watt, and you’ve tried to put your hand in front of it, what would happen there, Ari? You’d burn your hand in seconds, right? I was trying to figure out a way to filter the far-infrared because that’s what’s heating up the surface of your skin. I thought, how can I filter that? There’s a theory, there’s actually a biblical theory, that there was two layers, there’s a layer of water, and a layer of water, so the sunlight was actually shining through the upper layer of water, okay?
Ari: Which is true.
Tom: I thought, hey, what if I put a layer of water in front of that light source? What would happen?
Ari: Very smart.
Tom: I don’t think I had the idea. It got dropped in my brain somehow. I have no idea, but all of a sudden, I had this idea of putting this layer of water in between. I stole my wife’s lasagna dishes, two glass lasagna dishes. I committed them to the cause of research.
[laughter]
Ari: It’s where all good scientific research starts, is lasagna dishes.
Tom: I put the two lasagna dishes back to back, and I put a silicone seal around, glued the two together, and waited for the glue to dry, the silicone, and then filled the middle with water. It was about a quarter of an inch of water. Then I thought I’d try it, so I put water in there, and you put it, I had half full, so you can imagine a pie plate. I had a half full, the water line was a halfway up, and I put one of those GU10 bulbs, the real focus jobs that used to be in the ceilings, and I put that above the– shining through the glass, no water, and it was burning hot. Dropped it below where it’s shining through the water, so only difference was just the height.
I was just moving it, so the light beam had to go through the water, and no heat. Above the waterline, heat, burning hot. Below the waterline, no heat. What it was is all the far-infrared is absorbed by the surface of the skin. People don’t understand that when they hear about far-infrared saunas. Another big challenge out there in understanding is far-infrared saunas just heat up the surface of the skin. There’s no direct penetration. Now, can it have an effect deeper in the body? You’re sweating out toxins. You’re doing this good stuff. There’s zero penetration for far-infrared.
Ari: It’s near zero. I would agree with you. I’ve spent a lot of time actually debunking this on podcasts because there is a widespread misconception, thanks to a lot of marketing efforts over, I think, 20-plus years now to promote the idea that far-infrared energy is actually penetrating very deeply into the body and “heating you from the inside out”. They actually paint a picture like traditional saunas, just you’re in a hot room. It only heats up at the surface. Infrared energy penetrates deeply into your body. There’s a whole web of–
Tom: You have to go to wavelengths that are shorter than 1,350 nanometer. Anywhere from 600 to 1,350 nanometer wavelengths that penetrate. What happens, so why my thing worked? Why did it take the heat away? Well, because it absorbed the far-infrared before my water and my skin did. It’s almost like having the perfect filter in front of the halogen bulb when you have that water in there that it takes out anything that would be absorbed in your hand.
How PBM has helped some of Tom’s clients
I had 15 years of seeing PBM help people. I saw a cop who drilled a guy in the face when he was resisting arrest, broke a bunch of bones in his hand. His hand was all swollen up. It was his gun hand, right? It was all swollen up. They said he couldn’t do anything because his bones were pointing in all directions. He used PBM for my Genesis. I’ve called it Genesis Health Light. We had this light on his hand of prototypes, ugly-looking prototypes in the beginning. We actually shrunk his hand in size.
Two weeks later, when he was supposed to get surgeries, to review the surgery, they said they didn’t need to do surgery because all the bones in his hand all lined up perfectly. No surgery was required. He continued to do that, and he had record healing. He was able to use his gun hand in incredible shortness of time. That’s what PBM can do.
Ari: Tom, I know you have a number of other stories like that, that you showed in your presentation that you gave at the event. Do you want to briefly show people that? Do you want to do it?
Tom: Sure, we can do that. I can share a screen here.
Ari: Let’s just be mindful of the time so that we have time to get into the penetration experiments as well and some of the other stuff.
Tom: I think this will work. There we go. Just so that everybody can see that I’m totally crazy, I just got to do something here. This is one of my light devices. You can see the light penetration so much for millimeters. I have a light probe that’s going in my mouth. It’s hitting the roof of my mouth. It’s lighting up. It’s going right through my palate, my upper palate, going through my sinuses. If one zooms right in, they can actually see the light coming through my eyes. Also, you can see the optic nerve with that light.
Ari: That’s inches at this point. That’s what, 3 to 4 inches?
Tom: I would say at least 2. I put it in the center. At least it’s 2 inches that you’re looking at here. This is, by the way, 660 nanometers. It’s not doing a favor as far as penetration depth. Okay, do you have anything on?
Ari: Meaning near-infrared 810, 830, 850 would penetrate even more. You wouldn’t be able to see it without night vision goggles.
Tom: Right. On the right, we’ve now started the Mile High, I screwed up on the spelling, Mile High PBM Club, where we’re treating people on the plane. They now have the 120-volt outlets, and because our units can run directly off the 120, there’s no problem. They don’t have lithium batteries, so nothing to burn up on the aircraft. Anyways, we ended up treating a number of people on the plane.
This is just quick. This is a kid, a 19-year-old guy, that swung a pickaxe around through some dirt. Unfortunately, the dirt was much softer than he thought. Swung around, cut his tendon right through. They put the tendon together, and in another day or two, it fell apart, so they had to do two surgeries. Lots of trauma. You can see in two weeks, the inflammation has come way down. You can’t see the inflammation pictures, but it was a really, really big swollen thing. In two weeks, you see post-treatment. Three weeks, you see that.
Now, he was told that he wouldn’t be able to walk for six to nine months. This is what PBM can do. This is three weeks. You can see how much he can move his foot. You can see, he doesn’t have the range of motion of up and down, but it’s starting to work. On the other slide, you can see him walking at four months. Now, his gait is not perfect, but his pace.
Ari: Four weeks.
Tom: Sorry, four weeks. Yes, correct, four weeks. This is a diabetic foot. Sorry about those that are a little squeamish. This person was supposed to lose their leg. In one week’s time, the surgery was scheduled. This foot is in really bad shape and gangrenous and ready to– that’s why they amputate. They rushed one of my smaller lights down to the– the palm light, down to the hospital, used it undercover for 20 minutes a day. Within one week, they canceled the surgery. Two months later, it was healed down to that. In another two months, it was totally healed. She was able to walk with her foot intact.
This is a woman that strokes. How does it affect the body with strokes? Not only did she use the helmet that we’ve developed, but also she used the large panels that we’ve made. We call that the canopy. Anyways, I’ll just play just a minute of this because we’ve got to be very careful on time here. Hi, Orlanda.
Orlanda: Hi.
Tom: You had a stroke.
Orlanda: I did, two months ago.
Tom: Two months ago. What’s happened since then?
Orlanda: I had a stroke, and the right side of my face had pins and needles all the time. My last function is the left side of my body. I can stand and barely walk. My arm, I could feel touch, but I don’t have any control over the movements. That’s where I am today.
Tom: Right, and coming in here today, we did a treatment with the helmet to see how that would work. Just a nice warmth feeling.
Orlanda: It is a nice warmth feeling.
Tom: Right, and then you did the light therapy treatment under the canopy.
Orlanda: Yes. Before, my husband had to position me because I can’t move. The left side is in a lot of pain. My arm, I can barely move it most times without a massage first and therapeutic oils and painkillers. I started the treatment off. My husband put me like this, lying on my stomach because it’s very painful in the shoulder and the arm. Then my lower back as well. We did, how long was it? 10 minutes. Then he was changing to the other light treatment. At that point, I was able to have my husband move my arm straight down. He got it to go straight down without any pain and no pain in the shoulder. Then I did the other light treatment.
Tom: Okay, I’m going to stop there because– sorry, I’ll just mention with that woman, she could not pull her arm down for– and this was for, I think it was four months of treatment. She’s been trying to get that arm to come down. In one treatment with PBM, she was able to straighten out her arm without pain. That’s the thing. She walked in with pain and the pain was gone. She was able to straighten out her hands and fingers. Anybody can look at the videos later on.
This is my granddaughter, just the big thing here. She pulled boiling water towards her for mixing Jell-O and it poured down her leg, the boiling water. She had second and third-degree burns. You can see day six, she’s already– all the skin has been scabbed over. By day eight, the scabs fell off. In about a few weeks’ time, you could see where the discoloration was. Then two years later, there was no visible scars.
This is when I plowed my head into concrete. I fell forward, on my face. Accidentally, I was on my phone trying to see where I was going to find a building. I didn’t see the little thing that was there that I fell onto the concrete, face forward without stopping myself, I busted out my tooth. Four days later, I really bounced my head, my face off the sidewalk. You can see four days later, I’m doing much better. Some doctors looked at this and they commented how I didn’t have severe bruising. I should have had severe bruising all over my face even four days later, and I didn’t. This is part of our light technology as far as the–
Ari: Hold on. Tom, before we go here, let me just add something to this. Just so people listening know and watching know that this is not only these case reports and anecdotes. It’s great for people to see this because this is impressive. I would say for most of us, seeing visuals of bad injuries and gangrenous feet and injuries like the kid with the pickaxe, it impacts us a lot to see that as opposed to looking at scientific research where we’re just seeing text and numbers and things like that and charts.
From a scientific perspective, I want people to also know, all of this is supported by a huge body of scientific literature in various kinds of injuries showing that red and near-infrared absolutely speeds up the rate of healing of everything from diabetic foot ulcers to ankle injuries in athletes and bone fractures and all kinds of different injuries. We have a very large body of evidence to show that it does actually greatly speed it up. Roughly painting with broad brush strokes here, something like a roughly doubling of the speed of healing compared to if you didn’t use photobiomodulation as a generalization.
Tom: Yes, and if people want to go to the sunpowerled.com website and hit the button under research, they can scroll down to research database. We’ve got the fellow from the Netherlands. I forgot his name right now, but we’ve got 7,500 research articles on PBM that you can search through to find like a lot of different things that have been studied.
Ari: Vladimir, I forget Vlad’s last name, but Hysikonin or something like that, something very Scandinavian.
Tom: Man, what a fantastic work he did to pull all those studies and the amount of detail. The only challenge I’d say with that PBM database is that it includes– just to take it a little bit with a grain of salt, because it does take in all types of light devices, which means that some of those light devices are inferior for what you’re trying to accomplish. You need to have the right amount of power behind it.
I usually compare it to if you go in San Diego or some of those places where you’ve got the big hills or mountain, and you are trying to go up that mountain with a 4-cylinder pickup truck fully loaded with the pickup bed, you probably won’t get to the top, or it’ll take you a very long time to get there. If you had an 8-cylinder or 12-cylinder pickup truck, you would fly up that hill with fully loaded. We really are working on the 12-cylinder, 8 and 12-cylinder end of the power spectrum.
The core benefits of red light therapy
Ari: Tom, let me ask you this. Just from a big picture perspective, how would you summarize the core benefits, let’s say, the top five or top eight or however many you want to list off of photobiomodulation? You can just list off sort of, “Here are the core benefits I’ve seen as being most impressive in the people I’ve worked with.”
Tom: Okay, so the core benefits is that you can use this light in conjunction with standard medical. You don’t have to. Really, outside of some antibiotics that are reacted to the blue light spectrum, which we’re not working in, you don’t have to worry about adverse effects with using the red light. Very safe.
Another thing with PBM is it generally is quite safe. People can go to my website. There’s a thing there called– or I’ll think of it in a minute. There’s a location that you can go to, to see the 100 million plus treatments that have gone on with PBM all over the US, and no written-up bad reports on PBM.
Ari: What do you see as the key benefits? You showed a lot of slides on injury healing. Injury healing being a big one. What are some of the others?
Tom: Oh, all right. Injury healing. That’s speeding up the healing. Increasing blood flow to the area. Increasing the lymphatic drainage, so that can be anywhere on the body, which lymphatic drainage is really, really key. People are learning about it that that helps get your toxins out of the area. If you have sprains and all those kinds of things, that’s what it does.
Let’s see. Light technology. If you have enough light, you can penetrate deeper. It’s a non-invasive way, as opposed to surgery, to get at things to help it. When it comes to autoimmune disorders, you can help the type of gland or whatever to start working in the right direction. That includes thyroids. You can help the hypothyroid start working better towards the normal state. You can get a hyperthyroid going the other way.
As you said, photobiomodulation, modulating. It’s actually modulating the effects of the cell or the mechanisms. Sometimes it’s upregulating the mechanisms, and sometimes it’s downregulating the mechanisms. The body knows what to do with that and be able to heal. When we’re talking internal injuries, you can speed up the healing. You can reduce the inflammation. You can start getting that body to work better.
A lot of times, let’s say knee pain, if you’re able to shrink the baker’s cysts or you’re able to reduce other swelling inside the knee, all of a sudden, you can start walking better. If you start walking better, you get more exercise. You start getting more exercise, you start losing weight. Guess what? You’re a whole lot better by using light therapy. You can use it. I’ve been telling people, you can use it even three times a day if you want to in certain situations. It’s not harmful. I’m trying to think. There’s so many other ideas going on.
Ari: Obviously, I’ve written a book on the subject that compiles 20-plus benefits. I just wanted to hear from you as far as what you perceive as some of the things that are really the most noticeable.
Tom: The things about being able to do things in the brain that drugs don’t seem to be able to help. When we’re talking jet lag, when you’re talking migraines, you’re talking all these seizures. To be able to help the body to be well enough that it can deal with whatever the trigger mechanism is and not have to do it. One guy, he had grand mal seizures. He got PBM treatment by Dr. Praveen Arany. I understand he’s a fantastic guy to know. I’ve worked with him for a long time. I guess you’re going to have him on the show coming up. That’s going to be great.
Ari: I’m interviewing him next week. That’s right.
Tom: He’s a fantastic, knowledgeable guy, a professor at University of Buffalo. He had treated somebody with seizures with the light. This is two years prior to COVID. He did it over a course of two months. He was seizure-free for two years. He wasn’t doing ongoing treatment, but two years, he was free. Then during COVID, he ended up having the seizures again. Now, with all the lockdowns we had up here, and in Buffalo, and New York, and everything, there was no way he could get the treatment. He got one of my lights. Now he’s two and a half years seizure-free.
When you can influence the brain from strokes, the other pain things people don’t think of is old injuries. You carry around that pain all the time. When you’re able to– sometimes it happens that somebody will– it’s crazy, they just do one treatment on the area. I think it’s something to do with adhesions on the nerves. All of a sudden, they don’t have that pain after one treatment. That’s it for for pain on that old injury. I know there’s probably others that can give you all the mechanisms, I can’t. You want me to build something for the next space launch, I could, but when it comes to knowing some of the biology, that’s not an area that I’m strong in, but I’ve been–
Ari: I actually, I want to tell you that I really appreciate that perspective because I happen to have spoken to a lot of people in this space, and oftentimes it’s owners of companies, who actually have a lot of wacky ideas about the mechanisms of how this work. They can be very detached from the actual body of scientific literature on this topic, where there’s so much research that has been done on the mechanisms, and yet somebody will sort of be very attached to this one particular theory that really isn’t very well supported of how it works. Anyway, I was going to ask you about the mechanisms, but since you said what you just said, I won’t, in the interest of time.
Tom: I guess for those who are just going through this podcast for the first time, I’ll just say, what happens is the mitochondria in the cell can absorb certain wavelengths, just like a tree can, and it’s like pouring high-octane fuel, that’s my best description, into the cell, and now the cell can go nuts and fix all sorts of things. It gets the immune system involved, it un-gums the cells, it does a whole host of different things. It releases nitric oxide, which increases vasodilation, and there’s a whole host of things that if somebody is a nerd and wants to know the biology of why does it work, they can do that.
I would say, well, 90% of people don’t know why they turn on the switch on their wall and it works, the light comes on. They don’t understand the mechanism, I do, but who cares? Most of them just switch the switch and turn it on and it works. That’s like PBM. It’s so beautiful that it can be used so safely anywhere on the body, including new stuff that we’ve learned about the eyes as well.
The difference between LED and lasers
Ari: That’s a wonderful little one-minute summary of a lot of the research on mechanisms. Here’s what you need to know, and broadly speaking, what you said is true. I think that’s great. Let’s go to some of these experiments on penetration depth, and I get the sense here we’re probably going to have to do a part two because–
Tom: Sorry, I talk too much.
Ari: We could probably do two or three more hours of discussion. Let’s see what we can get to on these experiments, and let’s see how many questions of mine that we can sort of get answers to.
Tom: Okay, I’ll use this first slide here very quickly. What happens is that LEDs versus lasers, and I’ll show something else with lasers, but this is still LEDs versus LEDs, is that if I just pick the bottom slide there and you see the area where there’s a single LED, you’ll get a certain amount of penetration with that. It’ll phase out because there’s a lot of diffusion in the treatment surface as soon as you start getting into the skin. You have the same thing occurring again at every time where the LED is reached, or if you have the LEDs right against the skin, the same thing happens.
What happens is that you don’t end up with a very deep penetration with this. Where you get more penetration is when you’re able to create a very even amount of light over the whole treatment surface area. You have a lot of optical power behind it, and you have overlap so that there’s a super even illumination. What that does is once the light goes into the skin, even light from the outside edges will diffuse and scatter through the tissues and add to the center zone of your trying to treat. That’s something there.
I’ll just show you lasers and LEDs. On the left, you’ll see an LED, and on the right, you’ll see a laser pointer. What I did is I toned down, I really reduced the power level of the LED on the left side, so it was the exact same power of 3 milliwatts on both things. If you see on the bottom on the left-hand corner, you’ll see my finger, when I’m about an inch away from the surface, that my whole bottom of my finger is illuminated. Whereas on the right-hand side, the laser is a culminated light, which then shoots directly at one little spot, and yes, you can shoot across the room and it’s still a spot.
The culminated light from a laser, or you have the diffused light from an LED, which diffused at a certain rate depending on the cone size and all sorts of technical stuff. On the top, what happens just going through your fingertip? When you compare the power level of an LED and the power level of a laser, and you’re looking at it, there was a dot on the backside. What do you see, Ari, on the right hand side? You see a fingernail fully illuminated, right? There’s no dot there. On the left side, you see the finger fully illuminated the same way. When you actually do some comparisons, you see, wow, it almost looks like the same amount of light power coming through, whether it’s a laser or LED. I did that.
Ari: Let me just briefly explain to people listening. Laser versus LED, and it was visible on the last slide, but the basic idea in general, this can differ depending on how devices are made. In general, laser is what’s called a culminated beam of light. It’s a laser beam. As Tom described it there, if you have a laser pointer in a classroom or something, you can shoot that light across the room, and it can travel a long distance and still be a beam.
There’ll still be a spot on the wall. That’s because it’s a very narrow beam, as opposed to LEDs, which generally spread the light out immediately as it exits the light source, rather than a single beam in a specific direction. It’s sort of diffusing the light more like what you would have in the room lighting in your home.
Tom: Correct. The thing that people don’t understand is they still have this thinking that, my gosh, they’ve seen enough James Bond movies that cut a person in half and all that kind of stuff. If you put that laser on the backside of your finger, and you could be a foot away, but there’s that spot. Immediately, when it goes through the first eighth of an inch, quarter of an inch, it’s bouncing in all directions, that light. It’s no longer a culminated beam. It’s now going all over the place. As you go through thicker and thicker tissue, you start noticing that there’s no difference between the two. That, I’ll get into in a minute.
Here’s just a quick picture showing you different wavelengths. I’m sorry. I’m going to bounce around a little bit. We’ll get through these real quickly. On the left, you see 660 nanometer. On the right, you see 810. What you do see with the 810 beam is it’s actually going through my gum. This was with a special camera, but you can see the light. Can you see that, Ari, on the right? I hope.
Ari: On the inside, back of the mouth, behind the molars?
Tom: Yes, exactly. Whereas on the right side, you barely see it. 810 penetrates much better. You’re looking at, depending on the type of tissue you’re going through, anywhere from 5 to 8 times, 10 times more.
Ari: Is it that much more?
Tom: Pardon?
Ari: Is it that much more?
Tom: Yes, it’s incredibly more. It is a lot.
Ari: That’s news to me. I didn’t realize it was that big of a difference.
Tom: Yes. I’m going to skip this slide because we’ve– I’ll just say with this slide, concussions, this kid, amazingly, we racked his head, or he racked his head onto concrete. One treatment, he was able to go from being in a dark room the next day to being able to read a book. Amazing things on light on the brain.
Ari: Let’s fast forward to some of the penetration experiments, just in the interest of time.
Tom: I’ve got a lot of things there. We’ll go forward. I’ll just say—
The common problem with performance tests of common RLT devices
Ari: Let me clarify quickly for listeners, Tom. There’s sort of three big areas of controversy here. One is the laser versus LED issue, and this is hotly contested among lots of people. There are our clinicians who have been using laser for a long time, who will swear that laser is different and unique in the effects and much superior than LED. There are other people who say there’s no difference. There’s a body of literature that has tested this, though the tests are often not perfect because it’s hard to compare sort of a spot treatment in a very specific area, which versus LED, which often covers a much larger area. Some of these experiments are not perfect. That’s one area that’s contested.
Another area is sort of distinctions between different wavelengths of light and how much the penetration differences, how differently they penetrate into different tissues. The biggest one I would say that is really emerging that I’m most interested in is contact versus non-contact. Where you are applying the device directly to the surface of the skin versus where it’s several inches or maybe a foot or two away from the skin and how that affects penetration depth of the light differently and what are the implications of that.
Tom: Exactly. What’s key here is we’re not using cheap light meters. Light meters have their place where you measure the light in a room but they’re not calibrated, like two different wavelengths, and so it’s really key we got the right equipment. I’ve got some really expensive–
Ari: Just to add to that, that’s the problem with a lot of the testing that’s been done by a lot of different people and a lot of companies out there is they are using lower quality equipment that is just not adequate to tell us everything we need to know.
Tom: With one of the devices I have you plug into the laptop, it’s a pretty expensive small little box that allows you to look at all the different wavelengths and you can calibrate things to be highly accurate so you can measure exactly what the power level coming off your device is. This is an example of me plotting a dual-wavelength device.
In this case, it’s a 590 nanometer coupled with an 810, which I don’t usually do, but in this case, it was a special device actually for the eye in this case. This is a presentation that we did and this is on the lasers versus LEDs and tissue penetration. Here’s one device that looks like it landed from Mars, and what was that recent movie that was out there?
Ari: I don’t know but that device to me looks like R2-D2 from Star Wars.
Tom: No, but the one guy who was involved in the atomic thing. Come on, I can’t remember.
Ari: I don’t know.
Tom: It’ll come back to me. Anyways, they labeled this ball when I brought it in. This is a very special device. It’s like an exercise ball that has some ports in it, and it’s a very expensive exercise ball. This thing’s about $10,000 just for this ball. What happens is there’s an opening in the top. I closed down the opening on the very top to an area where it was only 2 inches in diameter, and what we’re looking for is to see how much light could go through tissue, and this is the only way to measure accurately.
I had sensors inside the device, and those sensors allowed me to do very accurate measurements of what light goes into this ball. The big thing about this ball is anything that comes through that 2-inch opening will be measured regardless if it’s a laser or an LED. It’ll be a very accurate measurement, so it doesn’t matter the beam thread. What it does is it just– light goes inside and it’s like a white coating on the inside that just bounces the light everywhere.
You get a sampling. As soon as you put a sensor in there and once you calibrate it up, you can measure any wavelength and any power that you want in and shining through the opening that you have. What we did here is we wanted to compare an LED cluster comparing to a laser. We just put through different tissue. As I mentioned, I did this work at Dr. Praveen’s lab at University of Buffalo, and he’s got over 25 years of PBM research.
Here’s an example of us shining, so on the top of that ball, this is only the top, on the left-hand side, you see SunPowerLED device that’s shining through just right on top the surface in this case because we did the first measurements just what’s going in and getting a calibration on it. Then in the middle, you’re seeing a laser being used, 810-nanometer laser being used on a layer of chicken.
Another picture that I have an arc laser there that is 1,064 nanometer and it’s shining through pork. We decided to use chicken, pork, and steak. There we go. We decided to use those three because we could get it from the supermarket, and after all our testing, we could eat it. No, I’m just kidding. What you’re going to see here is we’re comparing basically a 5-watt laser and LED cluster of 5 watts.
Now, there’s a little anomaly in the front end of the very first reading, and unfortunately, we didn’t have the time to go back and double-check it, but the rest of it, look at how close this is. If you look at the graph at three-quarters of an inch thick of, in this case, chicken, you can see that there’s a drop of light output. It’s easiest to follow the blue line, which is the LED. The orange should have been the same, should have been there up there. The laser should have been up at the 10-watt– or sorry, right there on the blue.
As you see, three quarters of an inch, you see they’re almost matched. When you go to 1.5 inches it’s, again, almost the same, and when you go down to 2.25 inches, there seem to be a little bit of a benefit to laser at this point. Hey, I’m just showing the real data. That’s what we did with the chicken. One thing about it was that– then if that’s what’s going through all that tissue, and I wish we could have had live tissue on this, okay? Get a chicken to lay down on the side and go through the chicken while it’s live because you’re missing out on the blood flow and all the other things that interfere with the light readings.
How your skin tone will affect PBM therapy efficacy
Ari: There’s another big one that I think your experiments will not control for, and I don’t know to what extent you’re aware of this, but that is the skin itself and melanin in the skin.
Tom: There’s what’s called the Fitzpatrick meter that you can get, and that measures the color of the skin. We just did 21 patients, people that– sorry, they’re not patients. I don’t know why I used that term, not patients. 21 people are willing to work with us and we’re shining the light of 660 or 810 or 1,050, and also 635 nanometer, but through the cheek and doing a measurement inside the cheek to see how much light was getting through the cheek. Definitely, the melanin in the skin has some impact. In our case, we probably saw about a 20% reduction. We only had two very, very dark people– there were five on the Fitzpatrick scale.
Ari: Even apart from the melanin in the skin, the skin color, the skin itself, as in contrast to a piece of meat, without skin covering it, will have a big difference as well.
Tom: Yes, so there’s a lot of loss in skin for sure. Hey, this is just like, once you get past the skin, how much is going to get through?
Ari: Exactly.
Tom: What we did is we also did it with pork. You can see here that the– in this case, we did the laser and 660 nanometer, the laser versus the LED, 810 nanometer, and the 1,050. You see in the 660 and 810, we actually were getting, it seemed like– well, there was slightly better illumination, like energy coming through two and a quarter of an inches of tissue, in this case with the pork. We did this.
I’ve got all this on my website, so people can look it up, our study when we were at the PBM. If you go on the research tab, scroll down to PBM 2024, you can see where I was and the research, like other stuff that we encountered over there. We also did it with steak. Steak has got much higher absorption, but it was really cool, for the most part, that things followed. We had a couple little things that were giving us a little issue, but for the most part, it came out pretty good. Okay, I’m going to hold it there. Why don’t we go back to–
Ari: Tom, we got to go cut off right now because, unfortunately, I have a call that I can’t miss in three minutes. Let’s do another one because this is important and we need to cover it.
Tom: Yes, I want to show you the light through the hand and how we can measure it.
Ari: Tom, thank you so much. I’m excited to continue the conversation.
Tom: All right. Okay, bye for now.
Ari: All right. Bye.
Show Notes
00:00 – Intro
01:17 – Guest Intro
06:19 – How Tom got into photobiomodulation
28:04 – How PBM has helped some of Tom’s clients
40:08 – The core benefits of red light therapy
48:22 – The difference between LED and lasers
54:57 – The common problem with performance tests of common RLT devices
1:02:27- How your skin tone will affect PBM therapy efficacy
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