In this episode, I’m continuing my conversation with Tom Kerber, an engineer with a great deal of knowledge and experience in the field of photobiomodulation, aka modifying biology with light.
Be sure to listen to part 1 if you haven’t already!
Two decades ago, Tom shifted his career from electronic to LED device development, and since then, he’s been creating sophisticated tools and equipment to help us better understand the penetration depth of red and near-infrared light.
In our conversation today, Tom and I dig even deeper into the controversies and science surrounding red and near-infrared light therapy, particularly the nanometer range needed to truly penetrate our tissues and experience a therapeutic dose of light inside our bodies.
Don’t forget about Tom’s generous 10% discount on all products from his company SunPowerLED—good until the end of the year! >> Click here and use code AriChristmas10 to take 10% off any product on his website.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Tom and I also discuss:
- The nuances and controversies of light therapy generated by over 7,000 scientific studies, such as optimal dosing, device type, contact versus non-contact, and depth penetration
- Biphasic dose response and why you should be aware of this concept before beginning light therapy
- Why human versus animal or in vitro research is crucial for understanding more about the effects of photobiomodulation
- Finding the right balance between optimally penetrating and treating tissues within the body while protecting our outer tissues like skin and eyes
- Important distinctions between how people use light therapy devices and the effect they have on actual human bodies versus how device manufacturers market them
- Structured water and if there are validated ways to measure the amount of structured water created by light exposure
- The interesting and possibly healing combination of methylene blue with red light
- Why red or near-infrared light panels might not be the best solution for the issue you’re addressing
- The conditions that may benefit from photobiomodulation, such as arthritis, autism, depression, and even opiate addiction
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Transcript
Ari: Tom, welcome back for part two.
Tom Kerber: All right.
Ari: It was my original intention to cover everything we needed to cover in that first hour and 20 minutes or so, but there’s a lot of stuff to share.
Tom Kerber: Impossible.
The difference between lasers and LED light
Ari: I realized that we’re going to have to do a whole other hour to get to all the stuff that we need to get to. With no fluff, let’s just jump right into where we left off as far as getting into some of these penetration depth experiments. As you and I were talking about offline, this is a really critical piece of the puzzle of the story of red light therapy because– and for listeners, I’ll just maybe go into this a bit. I almost don’t know where to begin. There’s so much nuance and complexity here. Basically, we have this vast body of literature when it comes to red light therapy, near-infrared light, photobiomodulation. There’s literally 7,000 plus studies that have been done on this subject.
Part of the problem that we have is with dosing. Dosing of the devices has become enormously contentious and controversial. Really, just this landscape that is very difficult to make sense of because the problem with these 7,000 studies that we have is they all use– I don’t want to paint too broad a brushstroke here, but the vast majority of them use different kinds of devices.
We have lasers versus LEDs. A large portion of the studies that have been done over decades were actually done on lasers before LEDs even existed. There’s a big difference in terms of lasers versus LEDs in terms of, generally speaking, the amount of surface area that is covered by that light-emitting device. Sometimes lasers are just emitting a very fine beam over a very small area, let’s say one square centimeter. Whereas LEDs, we have giant panels that will light up a whole room that are human body size panels.
We’re talking about radically different doses that are orders of magnitude different, both in terms of each square centimeter of the body that the light is hitting, but also the total amount of joules of light. Joules is the measurement of the dose, essentially the light photons that’s being delivered, is radically different depending on what device you use. Not only is there a question of lasers versus LEDs, but there’s a question of the total dose that’s being applied across the whole body versus the dose to a particular target area. There’s a question over the wavelengths of the device. There’s a question over whether collimated light from lasers versus light that spreads out-
Tom Kerber: Diffuse.
Ari: non-collimated light, diffuse light. Thank you. Whether there’s differences in terms of the effects of those. Then the specific wavelengths within red and within near-infrared, and what are the most active or most efficacious wavelengths for certain particular goals, or which ones activate different mechanisms to different degrees. What are the penetration depth differences of these different wavelengths?
Then we have a whole other issue, which is a big and important emerging issue that is really going to have a big impact on the whole industry, which is contact versus non-contact. Are we using this device pressed up directly against our skin or is it back from our skin? Let’s say 6 inches, 12 inches, 24 inches, as a lot of the LED panels, virtually all of the LED panels, which I’d say are the most commonly used red light therapy device, how they’re being used.
We have generally assumed, and I have generally assumed, even in the book that I wrote on this subject in 2018, that that wasn’t a major factor. It’s looking more and more like that is a major factor. Your experiments that you’ve done on penetration depth where you’ve looked at all or most of these different issues I just outlined, are really going to help to clarify this issue. That’s the landscape. Hopefully, everybody listening followed all of these different nuances and complexities to the topic of how we get the dosing of light therapy right. The problem that’s created by so many different types of devices and ways of using devices creates an enormous amount of complexity in this. Tom, let me have you jump into this.
Tom Kerber: All right. I think you missed one. You missed the fact is that when you’re trying to penetrate the tissue, how much energy do you need to get to the target zone? If a person is obese, the fat content will scatter that light, and it’ll be much more difficult. More scattering will take place than normal muscle tissue. You’re not going to get as deep with the light. That’s one thing. What is accepted is the dosage level? You covered that indirectly. What is the dosage level is that you need at that level?
Ari: Even that’s pretty contentious.
Tom Kerber: Yes. I want to start there, because that’s a platform that everything else sits on top of. If you can’t get the right dosage to the point that you’re trying to reach, you’re not going to get there, you’re not going to make it happen. Unless you have very long treatment times, and even then it may not happen.
The biphasic dose response
Ari: Let me interject one quick thing for listeners. There’s something called a biphasic dose response. Basically, this is essentially– you can think of it as an upside-down U-curve of the dose needed to get an effect. In other words, a very, very small dose of light won’t have an effect. As the dose increases, it gets to a certain point where you get the maximal amount of effects.
As you do much larger of a dose from there, actually, you can get an inhibitory effect or essentially the benefits are canceled out. Now, that concept in and of itself is also somewhat controversial, because different experts in this field will make a big deal out of the biphasic dose response and will really warn against too large of a dose. Other experts, for example, Michael Hamblin, who I’ve spoken to extensively on this subject, really isn’t too worried about the biphasic dose response.
Michael Hamblin is an author of textbooks, author of over a thousand studies-
Tom Kerber: I’m in that camp.
Ari: -on this subject. As a former Harvard professor, who’s sort of widely regarded as the top expert or certainly one of the top experts in this field, he’s of the opinion, “Well, yes, there’s certain tissues in the body that are particularly light sensitive. In general, we shouldn’t be too worried about the biphasic dose response.” There are other people like James Carroll and many others who really are sort of much more concerned with overdoing the irradiance, overdoing the total dosage, resulting in either no effect or an outright negative effect by doing way too big of a dose. Just for listeners to understand that landscape.
Tom Kerber: I’d like to start there, Ari, because that’s so key. One of the things that, I would say, the earliest adopters of light technology, really, in a bigger way, is the dentists. They bought lasers to do the cutting of the different things too, you name it. Usually, it’s a higher-power laser that they’re working with. What they were looking at is how much dose do they apply inside the mouth, on the gum line. If you have a lip lesion, how much dose do you need for that?
The general statement I’ve got– I’m working with some dentists, and they have been taught since their infancy in laser is that 4 joules per square centimeter is the exact amount of power that you need to do the– that’s 4 joules of energy over one square centimeter. Obviously, if you got it more concentrated, a smaller spot size, a laser, you may very quickly have 4 joules per square centimeter in a very small area.
Now, that’s where, let’s say, something that’s very laser-driven. You could be very, very easily overdriving the tissue. Very easy because you’ve got such a small spot size. When you’re dealing with LEDs, you generally have a larger spot size that you’re dealing or larger area that you’re covering. The power is distributed over that area. This is key. What I have had people throw in my face lots is, “Oh, no, you’re overdosing the area. You need 4 joules per square centimeter.” That is totally dependent on what are you trying to treat. If you’re trying to treat something on your very skin, if you’re trying to treat a lip lesion, if you’re trying to treat, let’s say, something on your gum like the dentists do, or pre-work, even if they treat the gum, the gum is only a quarter of an inch thick, right? Maybe a little bit wider than that. Your light is, if you have it right against there, very little losses. You have some losses, okay, but very little losses.
The 4 joules per square centimeter really comes off of work done on slides. On a very thin slide with culture on a slide. The problem with that is if you did have a higher density, you’ll start drying out the slide. That biphasic dose where you’re starting to get improvement more and more and more as you go along more dose, you’re starting to fall off very quickly because there is no blood flow going through that slide. Unless you’re going to cut yourself with it, but there’s no blood flow there. You got no cooling mechanism to keep that temperature down. We know that you go up to 45 degrees C and you’re going to start having harmful effects on the cells if you start getting up into the higher temperature.
That energy concentration off a laser could easily bring the temperature up in a concentrated form where if you have the power density spread out a little bit larger area, you won’t. I bring that back to this whole thing with 4 joules. They say the top of the curve is 4 joules per square centimeter. Then by the time you get to 8 joules per square centimeter, you’re looking at inhibitor effects. In other words, you get very little benefit at some point after that curve.
I wish they redo this whole thing again on live tissue because it’s really not good. One thing is, hey, how many people have gone out on sunbathing? You lay out in the sun, you’re getting 100 milliwatts per square centimeter. If you took 100 milliwatts per square centimeter every second, you’re delivering a 0.1 joules. By the time you’re out in the sun for 10 seconds, you’ve already got 1 joule. You’re out in the sun for a minute and a half, you got already 10 joules. “Oh, no, you’ve just damaged your body because you’ve been out in the sun for a minute and a half.” Give me a break.
Okay. We do know that the 100 milliwatts per square centimeter over the sun is over the full bandwidth from UVB, UVC, blue, green, blue 465, green 535. As you go over to red 630, 660, near-infrared, starting to get in there, 780. The sun gives us a whole range.
Ari: Into far infrared.
Tom Kerber: Right. The amount of energy that you get in the near-infrared is still quite considerable. Depends where you start the starting point and where you say the endpoint is. Even after–
Ari: Roughly, 20% of it is in the red [crosstalk]
Tom Kerber: Exactly. If you said then, “We’re only going to pay attention to 20% of the beam that’s coming from the sun,” that still skews your results. That means if we just said 10 minutes, if you did 20% of that, five times more than that, 50 minutes, you’re way overdosing your skin and you should have everything falling apart after that. It’s not the case.
On top of that, you have part of the blue spectrum, and UV, which is hard on your skin. It’s beneficial, I believe you still need UVB for 297 nanometer for your vitamin D, but you still have UV in that spectrum. You can’t just selectively take out 20% and say that’s the number.
I’ve had this thrown back to me, Ari. Look, I’ve got a knee study that shows that 4 joules per square centimeter is the right dosage on a knee. Then you get into it, it’s a rat’s knee. How big a diameter is a rat’s knee? What? If you did 4 joules per square centimeter on the surface of the rat, you might get 1 joule per square centimeter in the center of the rat’s knee. Try that on a human knee that’s this big. How much energy do you get through that?
Ari: I just want to clarify for the listener who might not be following a lot of this conversation. Basically, when you shine even a very, let’s say, low intensity, not very powerful red or near-infrared light on the knee of a rat, you can get that light to penetrate all the way through that entire joint and get light coming out the other side. If you took the same light to a human knee, that light might travel half an inch or an inch deep and not even reach the interior of the knee joint, let alone– any ligaments or cartilage in there at all, let alone travel out the other side. Basically, there’s a big difference between doing these kinds of studies on a rat versus a human just by virtue of that factor alone.
The wavelength matters
Tom Kerber: Okay. Then it also depends on the wavelength. Very much so as to the penetration which we’ll get into. If I took a red 660 nanometer, and I can’t probably do it very well, but if we were to shine the camera, we would see the inside of my mouth with this red light coming through my cheek. Do you know what, we did 20 persons with measuring how much light went through the cheek. At 635 nanometer, it was around a half a percent. If we went to 660, it was now around the 1% mark that was getting through. When we got to 810 nanometer, it was more 5% was getting through. 1050, maybe another percent, a little bit more coming through.
That’s 20 people shining through their lip or their cheek. Look, what is that? That may be a centimeter, half an inch thick. Depends how much flubber you got up here. If you are trying to treat, let’s say, with a device, and you tried to do 4 joules per square centimeter, by the time I went through my cheek at 660 nanometer, I only have a tenth of that inside. I have 0.4 joules just going through the thickness of my cheek. What if we’re trying to treat into my shoulder? What’s left of the light that’s coming through into my shoulder by the time you’re trying to get to the joint? Sure, if you had a skin lesion on your shoulder, no problem, 4 joules per square centimeter is enough.
If you’re trying to treat into the cartilage, into the inner part of the bone area and that, you’re going to need 10 times, 100 times the level of the light level on there. Now, if you compare that to the amount of light that you would need, you would need a very, very powerful light to hit that 4 joules per square centimeter to fix your shoulder, to fix your–
Ari: To hit 4 joules per square centimeter delivered to the target tissue at the depth that you’re trying to reach.
Tom Kerber: Yes. Anywhere from 10 to 100 times is easily. You know what, people have gotten better even in five minutes, and you’re only talking 1 joule. That’s another whole area is how much energy do you really need at the target to influence the thing? You can have low levels of light and still have a positive effect. What I would say is that [unintelligible 00:18:11] curve is totally destroyed by the fact that you’re always working on the low part of the curve for all types of depths in the body.
Ari: Meaning, for treating any deep tissues of the body?
Tom Kerber: Exactly. Any deep–
Ari: Let me just make sure everybody got this. What you’re saying is that when we are trying to treat deep tissues, let’s say–
Tom Kerber: Not just skin. Not skin, wrinkles on the skin.
Ari: Really, anything below the skin. Whether it’s muscles, or whether it’s bone, or ligaments, or joints, cartilage, anything like that. Basically, what you’re saying is we shouldn’t be overly concerned with overdoing the dose because so much of the light, even with a relatively powerful device applied for a prolonged period of time, so much of that light is absorbed in the superficial tissues that very little of it is actually reaching to those deep tissues such that the concern of overdoing it and resulting in a negative effect is really not a concern at all at that level.
Essentially, because of that, really, the concern should be using a powerful enough light to actually deliver light to that depth of tissue such that we get a true beneficial effect at that depth of tissue.
Tom Kerber: Correct. The other thing would be needed is to try and treat a hip or even with a powerful source like I have, the issue is if I tried to crank up my light even more is that it starts heating up the tissue to an uncomfortable level. You don’t want to have that. It’s not bad to have it nice and warm. We do some things to try and keep the– there’s this what we call the knobby ring, to keep your skin away from it. There’s space in here. Your skin can breathe and move the heat away from, because otherwise, if we closed off that area, it would be too hot on the surface because we have that much energy on that area. That’s very, very key, I think, is that you need to have enough light there.
It doesn’t matter. If we compare this back to the sun, how many people lay out there for hours? If you did your numbers as to how many joules that you’re getting delivered to that area, it’s crazy. You’re up into the 200 joules per square centimeter very easily by laying out in the sun. Most people, unless they have a skin condition of some kind, don’t have a problem. That, I want to make sure.
The other thing that’s missing in a lot of the documentation out there is the spot size. What we were able to do is take– and I’ll demonstrate some stuff, and I wish I could pull up another graph. We might have to have a part C. Is right in the very beginning, we had to use 635 nanometer with our powerful– I just showed you that. This has got 1,000 high power LEDs. We got 600 optical watts that is possible coming off that thing. We needed that power to be able to use for what’s called PDT where you activate a drug inside the body. You need a lot of light to get in, okay?
Why the power matters in a PBM device
Ari: Just to quickly translate that, what he’s saying is that– what he just held up there is an extraordinarily powerful light that emits an incredible intensity and dose of light. That power of light facilitates an enormous depth of penetration of those light photons.
Tom Kerber: Yes. In this case, we actually have to pulse it or we’d melt down the skin. Very, very powerful. What I say, that was 635 nanometer. What we did in the early days is we had a lot of people that said, “Oh, 1 over E applies.” That’s another screwy thing. They say, “1 over E is as far as you can go.” That means what is– I’ll just translate it roughly as 1 over 2.7, it’s roughly 1/3. Call it 1/3 for easy math. That means where does the light approach 1/3 of the level of the surface? In the skin. It’s within the first millimeter of skin, 2 millimeters of skin, you’ve already lost two-thirds of your light in the first.
To say out there that you only have a penetration depth that’s effective as 1 over E is crazy. 1/3 of the light level. See, that’s where we got into. You start with a lot of optical power. Even if you have a third, another third, another third, another third, and you go through a certain depth, you can get that.
Here’s one finding that I did a long time ago because they said there was no way we’d have enough energy to go into a woman’s breast to activate this drug. We got pork breast tissue from a slaughterhouse from young pigs. What we did was we did slabs of this pork breast tissue to make a certain thickness. We did it as thick as 8 centimeters. 8 centimeters being 2.5 inches, almost 3 inches of thickness of– it’s three inches.
What we did is I took– we call it the wall of light where it’s a very uniform light array. Just as a quick demo, just for that so that people can see it, I’m just going to shine through a piece of paper. What you’re going to see is an extremely even amount of light across that whole surface. Okay? That’s what I’m using as a light source, let’s say. I use this very– a thousand high-power LEDs.
What we did is we started off with a 1 square centimeter by 1 square centimeter. 1 centimeter by 1 centimeter was the area. That’s where most lasers fit. Let’s say less than one square centimeter. They’re much, usually, much smaller beam size than that. Let’s say we just took that. If we went by 2 x 2, so it’s 2 centimeters by 2 centimeters, and we go through that stack of tissue, what ended up happening is we got almost four times the light coming through all that tissue. Amazingly enough, we had–
Ari: By doing what? Say again, what–
Tom Kerber: By increasing the area. We didn’t change the power density. All we did is, how much area is this power density covering.
Ari: The surface area of the light device that’s emitting the light.
Tom Kerber: We used aluminum foil. We only allowed the light to come through 1 centimeter by 1-centimeter opening, or 2 centimeter by 2, or 3 x 3, 4 x 4. Right out to amazingly, if you can imagine– I got to do this sideways. If you could imagine this is my aperture, and here’s the backside of the tissue, and I got my light sensor on the backside of the tissue, and I’m trying to see what happens when I go from 1 centimeter by 1, to 5 x 5, to 10 x 10. Even when we were at 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters, when we went to 12 x 12, we still had an increase in light at that target area of 8 centimeters in.
Ari: Okay. You tell me if my interpretation of this is correct. Is this because, essentially, when you have a larger surface area of the emitting light device, you get overlap of the photons?
Tom Kerber: Correct.
Ari: Okay.
Tom Kerber: Let’s say you had a ring this big, let’s say a dark board, and you put a ring of light around it, the light on the outside will scatter all different directions. As it’s going through the tissue, it ends up increasing the amount of power that optical power measured at that depth from the outer ring. Now, if you can imagine, don’t just do the outer ring, do the whole thing. Don’t do 20 points of light around the circuit, around the outside circle, do 1000 points of light over the whole area. That’s where you start getting the overlap of the light that happens increases the amount of energy that you have at a given depth.
Now, if you’re only going through this thin, or let’s say not this thin, but you can imagine. Even if I did a quarter of an inch. If I had all my power density here. If I added power density higher and lower, it wouldn’t contribute at all. It’d be very next to nothing on the other side because that one spot is right in line with the light on the other side. It’s only when the tissue starts getting thicker does the light from the outer edges start contributing to the light that’s going in the center. At least that’s when you see it, the biggest [crosstalk].
Ari: Is this the principle in physics called constructive interference? Basically, where multiple waves start to join together. Is it related to that?
Tom Kerber: I would say in a way. That’s a little challenging because when you’re talking lasers, you have interference patterns. Some of it is constructed and destructive. You have also dimpling effect. I’m trying to think. It’s not dimpling. It’s little hot spots of light. Then the next spot over it has nothing. The area of the light is critically important to the depth that you’re trying to get to.
If you start off with a very low power of light, even if you were this big, it wouldn’t make any difference because that low-power light from the outer edges is never going to travel that distance. You need some serious light power all the way around the outside to contribute to the depth. When you’re trying to treat a knee, a blanket of light doesn’t necessarily really help get a lot deeper unless there’s enough optical power on it.
Ari: Not to introduce too much complexity here because I’m sure some listeners are feeling overwhelmed by all of these details, and maybe hoping we just get to the practical stuff very quickly, but one of the other aspects here that’s a complicating factor is if we were to logically extrapolate based on everything that you’ve explained thus far, essentially, we would say the more powerful the device, the better. That’s generally speaking, broadly true.
Tom Kerber: Broadly.
Ari: That’s particularly when we only concern ourselves with delivering light to deep tissues. However–
Tom Kerber: I would say more LED-based too compared– You couldn’t do a high power– concentrate it without having to move it around because you’ll burn the–
Ari: A high-power laser.
Tom Kerber: You can’t stay in one spot for a long time.
Ari: You’re talking about a high-power laser?
Tom Kerber: Yes.
Ari: Okay. That’s related to what I was going to introduce because the same principle is also true with extraordinarily high power of LEDs, which also will excessively heat the superficial tissues. Yes, you can get an extraordinarily powerful device that might be delivering the perfect dose to those really deep tissues. In order to do that, you are delivering an extremely high dose to those very superficial tissues, which can also overheat them and actually cause damage by overheating the superficial tissues even if you were to simultaneously be delivering the perfect dose to the deep tissues.
Tom Kerber: Correct. Let’s say if you’re 43 degrees C, you’re going to be probably okay. You get to 44 and 45 C, you’re going to start causing cell damage. As long as you have ways of keeping the skin a little cooler. As a matter of fact, with that high-power dose, that other dosage light that I showed you, we actually had to dab the skin with water to help more perspiration come off so that we could keep it a little cooler and spray it down with a light mist so it could keep the tissues so they wouldn’t burn. Yes, you’re bang on. Lasers, you have to keep them moving if you have a high-power laser, for sure. Overall, you keep moving it. Yes, you’ve got a high-power area here, you don’t have a high-power– You’ve got to cover there.
Ari: There’s also some very high-power LED devices that also will definitely overheat those superficial tissues if they’re applied to one spot similarly to what you’re describing with the laser.
Tom Kerber: Right. Yes. They’ve got to be extremely concentrated. Yes, that can happen. That definitely can happen.
Ari: There’s some specifics that have been outlined though. Some people debate this. Some people try to claim that the optimal irradiance is approximating 50 milliwatts per square centimeter. I’ve spoken to Hamblin and also looked at Hamblin’s paper, and he’s convinced, I believe, and I’m pretty sure I’m quoting him, the number differs slightly between red and near-infrared. It’s somewhere around–
Tom Kerber: 180 to 100–
Ari: On the low end, I think it was around 200, but more upwards of 300 milliwatts per square centimeter. There are some devices, actually, that some companies are now making that are in that range.
Tom Kerber: Right. Then you might have to pull it away from the skin a little bit to reduce the power level, which won’t be bad because you’re going to give energy. The whole thing is how much photonic energy are you delivering to the surface over whatever area.
Ari: Then certain tissue seems to be uniquely sensitive. Hopefully, listeners are not getting overwhelmed by the complexity, but there’s a concern, for example, with facial skin in particular, and also tissues like, let’s say, the eyes and certain other tissues. There’s also deeper tissues that are very sensitive. I think the biggest concern is things like the skin and the eyes where you’re using too high of an irradiance, particularly with a panel-style device that’s a very powerful panel that you’re irradiating your face with an irradiance that is above the optimal intensity for the skin.
There’s an issue where many people believe that they’re doing something that’s positive for their skin, but actually, in effect, they might be potentially harming it by using too high of an irradiance there.
Tom Kerber: Yes. Ari, I’m thinking of one, but I haven’t seen anybody that’s running at the 200 milliwatts per square centimeter. I’ve been under these devices. This is one of the other ones that we developed. That’s almost a foot square, 12 inches by 12 inches. We’ve got anywhere from 100 to 150 milliwatts per square centimeter. We’re having an inch away from the skin. You could sit–
Ari: On the face or where?
Tom Kerber: Yes. Anywhere. I’ve had people actually do it on their face, down their neck, and no issues of people. As a matter of fact, the one– it depends, again, on treatment time, but I have fallen asleep under my own light that has those kinds of intensities from here right down to past my belly, and no burns, no issues.
Ari: To be clear, I don’t think it would necessarily burn. I don’t even think that you would necessarily notice anything. Just the same as you would– Let me put it this way, you wouldn’t notice an anti-aging effect, right? People don’t–
Tom Kerber: Yes. It’s so slow. Yes.
Ari: Right. It happens over a prolonged period of time such that, in a scientific experiment, over the course of 12 weeks of using these devices, we can detect measurable, let’s say, a 30% decrease in wrinkle depth. It’s not like somebody uses the light one time and then, “Oh, I look 20 years younger,” right? Similarly, in the opposite direction, if you were to be overdosing and delivering something that was slightly accelerating the aging effect on the face, it’s something that would also be accumulated very slowly over time in a way that wasn’t actually noticeable.
Tom Kerber: Yes, I believe you’re right on that. I come back to the sun. How much energy do we have coming from the sun that’s in the wavelengths that can heat up the surface of the skin? You have 100 milliwatts. Yes, there’s some far infrared there, but the main part of the beam from the sun is– let’s see, what would you– I haven’t looked at the numbers for a while. 60% is up– 60%, 70% is from the blue UV all the way down to about 1300 nanometer. The total power density of 100 milliwatts from the sun, it’s about 60% or 70% is in that range. Another 30% in the far infrared range of energy.
You’ve seen people who have been habitual sunbathers, and their skin starts looking bad, but we’re talking excessive hours. I’m never suggesting excessive hours. We’re not doing the blue spectrum which really heats up the skin, the blue, green UV in that. You’ve got the red which is much softer, which is penetrating deep, what penetrating deeper. You have your energy absorbed across the depth of the skin, not all on the surface. People get confused about the far infrared. Far infrared doesn’t penetrate at all. It heats up the water in the skin. That’s about as much as it does. It has some benefit in deeper. It’s only a skin level. Very, very shallow penetration.
Far infrared does heat up your skin as well. That’s why when you go in front of a hot stove, you feel it just like that because it’s very, very superficial. If it’s any deeper light, you have to be there for a while before you start building up that heat.
Tom’s experiments on penetration
Ari: Okay, Tom. Thank you for indulging me in the depth of complicated and nuanced discussion around, all this penetration stuff. I fear we’re probably overwhelming the listener here. Let’s jump into some of that penetration experiments.
Tom Kerber: All right. Here’s a penetration experiment to show lasers and LEDs, okay? Let me just do this quickly because everybody can see it, and they’ll know I’m not making anything up. These are one of the very expensive meters that few people buy, but those that really want to know what the light levels are, use something like– what the energy levels are. On this device, you actually set the wavelength that you’re going to be measuring.
For now, just to make it easy, I’m going to grab the sensor here. Okay. Sensor, sensor, sensor. Oh, there it is. Okay. This is no cheap sensor. This is the light sensor that goes along with device. I’ll just show you. It’s made by Thor. Thor Lab. It’s not to be confused with Thor Laser.
Ari: They’re not related companies?
Tom Kerber: No, they’re not related. My mirror here is a Thor as well. What I want to show here that is really cool is I’m going to turn off this other light here and put me in the dark a little bit. Makes it a little bit easier to see. You can see the numbers there a little bit better. What I’ve done is I’ve taken very special red filter material that only lets red through. It does let a little bit of orange through.
What I’m going to do is this light is– I’ll just take this cup and show you. One position, you see the– There we go. You see the laser. The other position is an LED. Very, very quickly, when you’re looking at this, and laser, look, I can keep going back further and further and my dot size doesn’t increase very much because that’s culminated light. An LED is going to have a beam spread of whatever the lens on the end of the LED is. If I take an LED, this is a white LED, and see as I go further away from it, the spot size keeps getting bigger. When I’m right up close, it’s that way. If I take the red filter material, right here, and I shine the light through it. Okay. Whether I take– you’re not going to be able to see that. If I do it this way, if I shine my red laser through it, it’s not going to make any difference. It’s not going to reduce the light level at all. Okay?
When I shine my white LED through it, all I’m going to see is my– now, you’ll be able to see it. If I go with my white LED, you can only see the red coming– red and a little bit of orange. If I put that on the sensor here, and I think this is going to show a lot of people some interesting things, is if I put that red filter material on top of this, and I put the– right now, there’s the red laser. I put the red laser on the middle, I get a reading of one point– If I’m right in the center there, about 1 milliwatt of light power. That’s what these lasers usually are. They’re 1 to 2 milliwatts. You see 1 milliwatt on the screen.
If I take my LED and I shine it on there, there’s 1.3 milliwatts of power. Between the white and the red, I’m getting the same energy once I pass it through this. Here’s what I want to show you. If I put that red filter on my finger here, and I shoot the red laser, and I put it on there, what’ll happen is– I got to go look at it here. That’s where I got to go do it. Do how even the illumination is over the whole area of my finger?
Ari: Yes.
Tom Kerber: All right? That’s a laser. That’s a laser point. This is the white LED now. If I put the white LED on there, do you see how it diffuses over my whole finger? I just demonstrated LED and laser of the same power, and it looks very similar coming through the finger, because as soon as it’s going through half my finger depth, it’s already scattering in all directions.
Ari: Even the collimated light of the laser scatters once it enters the tissue?
Tom Kerber: Right. After it gets the first eighth of an inch in. So many people are talking about, “Well, the laser is something that’s going to treat all the way to the hip joint because it’s got that culminated beam.” No it doesn’t. It’s a light that peters out or reduces intensity, just like the LED. It’s how many photons do you have on the surface compared to the other one.
Another thing that is a little demonstration that I’ve done, is when I take a red laser like this one here, and I put the sensor, because of time, we’re going to have to keep this real short, but if so many would say, “Okay, the laser is coming in at 90 degrees. It’s obviously going to be the preferred method of getting the deepest because you don’t have scattering off the surface.” You do have some scattering off the surface. You can see my leg coming back off my skin. It’s reflecting. There’s some coming off. Even at 90 degrees. What happens is, if I take my sensor here and I start going sideways at 45 degrees, I lose about 25% of the light power by coming in on an angle. That’s all. That’s starting with the laser.
An LED, depending on whose manufacturer you’re using, I generally use plus or minus 45 as the half beam profile, means that most of the power comes in at the plus or minus 20 degrees. Even on the outskirts of the angle, let’s say, if it’s coming off my LED, it’s coming off on an angle, the outer ring of power is still only– I’m only losing 20% of that power. Who cares?
Ari: Not to introduce too much complexity again, but that also– the way you’re framing this, talks about your devices which are relatively small, sort of handheld devices, am I correct in stating that?
Tom Kerber: No. Any time you have LEDs hitting the surface–
Ari: Okay. Here–
Tom Kerber: Yes, go ahead.
Ari: Here’s the distinction. When you’re using a large LED panel, it is hitting parts of your body that are not a flat surface that’s perfectly aligned with that LED device with the panel of it. If it was a flat surface emitting on a flat surface, then those principles would apply. Now, you’re hitting a round surface with curves, and it’s effectively that same principle that you’re describing where the light is still hitting the tissue at angles instead of head-on.
Tom Kerber: Yes. It’s getting it at angles, but you may, on a curved surface there, a little bit of curve. It’d take me too long to demonstrate, but I could do that, and have it on an angle, or have it on a curved surface and do this thing. You would see that you might lose 20%, 25% of the power going into the tissue. Just to keep that in mind when you were talking about treatment of depth. If you are coming on an angle, a fairly steep angle, you’re going to lose some of that energy.
Here’s what a lot of panels– this is another thing, let’s say, LED panels out there, that I won’t get into brands here, I just want to demonstrate something here. Okay. Oops, I didn’t do it right. There we go. They have these lights on here. You think, “Oh, my gosh, look at how powerful it is.” The problem is that, again, I come back to just taking a standard piece of paper against the surface and do you see how there’s a lot of area in between that doesn’t have the higher power amount of light, right?
Ari: Yes. The way people use those devices is typically that they would pull it off the skin by 6 or 12 inches.
Tom Kerber: Right. If we pull it away from– and that’s what I can do here for those that are watching. If I take my sensor and I– if I go right on top of them, some will say, “Here, look, we got 170 milliwatts.” This is part of the fake measurements that they’ll do. They’ll do one spot right over top, and they’ll say, “Look, we’ve got 100 milliwatts per square centimeter.”
Ari: Yes, this is an important point. Not to even mention the issue of the meters that a lot of these people are using are inaccurate meters. This was a mistake I made too back in 2018 before I realized that you needed a different meter to get accurate measurements.
Tom Kerber: Correct. If I move a little bit away from– I don’t know if I can do this. Let’s see. I got to go look at there. Yes. Okay. I put a diffuser in front of this just so that it’s a little easier to see. If I move my meter along there, you can see in between my light reaching the surface is very poor. To say that I have 100– let’s say, this thing, you put the meter right up to it, it’s 150 milliwatts per square centimeter. No, it isn’t, because if you want that even amount of light on the surface of the skin, I have to pull it back. I’ll do this here real quickly.
If I pull this back, it’s now uniform. It’s only when I get closer that it’s not uniform beam. By the time I go back where it’s a uniform beam, I’m down to 24 milliwatts per square centimeter, which is not– That’s hugely different. Let’s say if I tried to do that with my panel, I could keep pulling it back. Yes, it does spread out, but because it’s overlapping, you have a very continuous amount of light.
Even if I took this unit and I put a diffuser in front of it, the same diffuser, and I measure the light output in the center of this thing, I have– Now, this is with the losses of the diffuser. As I go out, I can move that thing almost anywhere across that whole surface, and I’m reading the same readings. Now, this diffuser is eating some energy up and reflecting energy. I’m down to 31 milliwatts at that point. If I look up closer without the diffuser, you can see that I’m up– here’s upwards of 80, 90 milliwatts of optical power coming in. You have the [crosstalk]
Tom Kerber: The diffuser was the red filter or something else?
Ari: Sorry, what’s that? The diffuser is just a piece of white plastic.
Tom Kerber: Okay. Got it.
Ari: Okay. When you take a laser on it like this one, you can see right away how much it diffuses the light. Normally, that’s just the spot. Look at how much it diffuses the light, much wider. It’s a much easier way to measure something that’s non-linear. The other thing is people are wondering, “Well, what about wavelengths and penetrations?”
Tom Kerber: That’s another one. [laughs] A big one. What I’m going to do here, and by the way, I’m not faking anything that I’m doing here this is real stuff, is I turned on the light because even now I’m into– Ah, okay. If I put my hand up here, I’m into the microwatt .06 microwatts of light or energy coming in. Just for the ease of saving time, I’m not going to switch it to calibrate it for every wavelength, but it’s close enough that it gives you the idea. If I go to the 660 nanometer right now through my whole hand, I get a relative measurement of 3.4– I can’t read the rest of it.
Ari: The light sensor is on the other side of your hand?
Tom Kerber: Yes, right there.
Ari: Oh, okay. That’s the amount of light, that’s 3.4 milliwatts, you’re making it all the way through the backside of your hand [crosstalk] through your palm into the sensor.
Tom Kerber: Sorry, that was microwatts at that point. That’s how much loss is there. There’s a lot of loss through the hand, but anyways, relatively speaking. This is the wavelength of 810 nanometer. Doesn’t look very impressive, but you can see it with this camera. It’s just the low glow. There you saw the red. I’m not going to move my hand at all, not move the sensor.
Ari: Just letting people know. 810 is in the near-infrared range and that is invisible to the human eye.
Tom Kerber: Pretty much invisible.
Ari: Almost invisible to the human eye. What he just showed there was the light on to our eye, it looks like almost nothing. If you were to wear night vision goggles, which see into the near-infrared range, you would be basically blinded by how intense that light is.
Tom Kerber: Yes, just blowing the doors of the other side of my hand. You’re reading five right, 5 microwatts. I’m going to switch it up to the 810 nanometer. I got– Sorry, that was 5.4. Now that’s 180 microwatts. We just went from 5 microwatts. It’s auto-arranging this thing.
Ari: It switches to the milliwatt range right there. It’s .17 .18.
Tom Kerber: 5 milliwatts. We got five there. 5 to a- [crosstalk]
Ari: 5 microwatts.
Tom Kerber: -to 170, 180 microwatts.
Ari: Got it.
Tom Kerber: Do the math on that, 180 divided by 5.
Ari: It’s a factor of almost 40 fold. 35 fold roughly.
Tom Kerber: I’m not doing anything too fancy here. I got going through my hand. What about distance? Take the red and I pull it away, guess what? It starts dropping down. Hey, but you can also see here, I can still be a fa– Like I dropped the half by being an inch away.
Ari: What if you put it six inches away?
Tom Kerber: Oh, yes. That’s not where I recommend my product to be.
Ari: Yes, I know. Just out of curiosity for my own edification
Tom Kerber: That’s why I would say that about six.
Ari: What if you put it 10 inches away?
Tom Kerber: Oh, now you’re really going to be– because of the angle that’s coming off of this device.
Ari: All right. Even just pulling it an inch or two away-
Tom Kerber: Inches half, let’s say, in this case, what we just did.
Ari: -you’re still getting a lot on the surface, but to a depth of tissue, it drops off dramatically.
Tom Kerber: Actually, at a depth of tissue, it’s half of the energy that you had, let’s say, by having it one inch away. We calculated this all, so we have it a high amount with this kind of distance away. That was 660, 810. People are wondering what about 1050 nanometer. [laughs] What’s going to happen there? Again, I have to let it go out of my hand, otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to move things around on the thing here.
Ari: Geez, I wish I had this device that you’re showing there. I’ve been looking for a device like that for years because I’ve been–
Tom Kerber: Unfortunately, this combo here, you’re looking at about $2,500.
Ari: I would’ve happily spent that to be able to do these experiments myself because I’ve been trying to get clear data on this stuff for years.
Tom Kerber: Remember I said earlier about trying to see how much light was going through the cheek? This is what we had in the person’s mouth. It’s not a small sensor. We have another new measurement device. It’s actually in the other room. Unfortunately, it would allow us to measure without having this big thing inside your mouth. We had that inside the mouth to be able to measure, but let’s do the 1050 now. Basically when I showed you that too, the power levels were somewhat similar, not a huge difference between the 660 and 810 on that device.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to do the same thing again. I’m going to put that sensor in the back of my hand here. It really does make a big difference. If I move it up here, I’ll get a lot more conduction through my knuckles than more in the center of the hand, because there’s more sinus, you’re talking different tissue here. A bone is easy to travel through, by the way. People don’t realize it because of the high mineral content. What I’m going to do now is I’m going to have that 660 and there we’re back to that same around four microwatts of power right there. Now I’m going to switch it to the 1050. We’re at the 186 mark.
Ari: It’s very similar to the near-infrared in the 800-nanometer range.
Tom Kerber: Right. Well, I’d have to go on the meter here and adjust it because the sensitivity of this sensor is less at 1050. To calibrate it properly, I have to set the settings here. It takes me a little bit to change the settings to 1050.
Ari: What would be the numbers if it was calibrated correctly? [crosstalk]
Tom Kerber: About double.
Ari: Double that?
Tom Kerber: Yes. It does show that it depends on the sensor that you’re using.
Ari: The bottom line from what you’re showing here is that there is an understanding, and this is basically what I wrote in my book in 2018, that near-infrared in the 800s in the nanometer range of 810, 830, 850, 880 is going to penetrate slightly deeper, let’s say maybe twice as deep as–
Tom Kerber: Correct It doesn’t relate. It doesn’t relate just because you have double the number, it’s not double the thickness through the hand because it works as a square function. You’re right. You go from 660 to 810. The number might read 10 times higher, but the distance might be half. You have another 50% [unintelligible 00:57:47].
Ari: Actually I was about to state it in the reverse direction, which is that, okay, well we can look at this from the frame of, “Oh, well, 810 penetrates,” let’s say, “half an inch deeper, an inch deeper correct,” or something like that-
Tom Kerber: Correct.
Ari: -than red light does. It seems like that way of framing it actually dramatically underestimates these differences when you’re talking about the amount of light delivered to deep tissues because-
Tom Kerber: Correct.
Ari: -it’s not just a difference of 30% or 50%. It’s a difference between a tiny minuscule amount of light versus potentially a very significant amount of light that’s enough to actually get in effect. If we’re talking about something that is thicker than the human hand penetrating to a depth of let’s say an inch and a half or two inches deep into the body, this is a major, major factor in whether you’re going to get an effect at those deep tissues or not.
Tom Kerber: Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you. [chuckles] We’re finally getting it out there. This has been something I’ve been battling with. Then you get into what I said earlier about the four joules per square centimeter. That’s all you need on the surface. Well, we got nothing by the time you go into depth for the target.
Ari: Right. The experiments that you just showed really make this– even for me, it’s like, “Wow.” I realize how much I’ve underestimated how big of a difference this is for treating deep tissues.
Tom Kerber: Right. Then you get into something that Michael Hamlin talks about, which was great to meet up with him in England. I went to see him in Boston quite a number of years ago. First thing he said, “Tom, there’s no way you can have that much power.” I said, “Yes, I can have that much power.”, “No. No. No. No.” [chuckles] Until he finally brought out some of his equipment and I saturated the equipment, which means it won’t read any higher.
Then he had to pull out one of his big guns for measurement, and he says, “You have that amount of energy. I didn’t believe that.” I just met him in England. He remembers the event. [laughs] It’s good to surprise somebody like that. Anyways, he was talking this time around too, and he’s mentioned it before, about 1050 nanometer can be absorbed by what’s called structured water. That’s another can of worms. Ari, if you hear of anybody knowing how to measure the content, the amount of content for structured water.
Ari: The person to talk to there would be Gerald Pollack and researchers affiliated with him.
Tom Kerber: Yes, he’s one of the– Is he still in the game? Is he still doing things?
Ari: I interviewed him on my podcast maybe a year, maybe more than that, maybe two years ago. I know that he was struggling for funding. One of his major investors that was funding a lot of the research, I think, if I remember correctly, stopped funding research or was no longer financially able to fund research. He was looking for new investors. I don’t know the status since then.
Tom Kerber: Right. What I’m thinking is, it’d be wonderful if we could use, let’s say with a clear glass, 1050 nanometer, and have 1050 nanometer hitting the glass and get in the water. If there was a way to measure how much structure water you’ve created in the glass, would be fantastic. If anybody out there listens to this thing, get in touch with me because I want to get–
Ari: Yes, I don’t know. You would need to maybe go into the methods of some of the experiments that they did to look at the equipment that they use to measure the exclusion zone water. Then there’s materials that they’re putting into the water that are obviously not in the exclusion zone water, hence the name exclusion zone. [crosstalk]
Tom Kerber: For people that don’t know, structured water is supposed to be in the cell, they’re figuring that structured water is what’s carrying some of the transfers of energy in the thing.
Ari: Yes, and this is another-
Tom Kerber: [laughs]
Ari: -contentious and controversial topic because you have lots of people who are very enamored with Gerald Pollack’s work. You have people in the evidence-based community who are essentially trying to debunk it and say, “Hey, this is a bunch of nonsense. “I’ve heard other arguments saying, “Oh, yes, we’ve known about this for decades. So-and-so talked about it decades ago, but it’s not an important or significant aspect of human physiology.” You get these different opinions. I’m personally of the opinion that there’s probably something to it, but it’s hard to know with so much. I think we need more research, basically.
Tom Kerber: Yes. Okay. One other angle, have you talked about on your podcast, I haven’t searched them out, but anything to do with methylene blue?
Ari: I have, yes.
Tom Kerber: Okay.
Ari: I’ve done multiple interviews on it. I’ve experimented with it long before it became popular because when I was young, I was very into aquariums, and we used to use it to treat certain diseases in fish.
Tom Kerber: Ah, okay. Methylene blue is used for– In Brazil, they did work with methylene blue on diabetic bacterial infections on the foot. What’s really cool, anybody can do this. If you take a very small concentration, you don’t load it right up, but you take a clear glass and just put a little tiny bit of methylene blue where it’s just starting to come blue.
If you use 660 nanometer light against the side of the clear glass, in three hours, this will turn clear so that you can actually see a reaction occurring. Now, I can’t tell you what the reaction is, but that’s cool stuff. Just trying to get people thinking about, they use the methylene blue with red light for some bacterial kill. It’s also used for toenail fungus. There’s great benefit to 660– It has to be 660 nanometer light.
Ari: Yes, and I mentioned last time, also used in blood transfusions to kill viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the COVID virus. Okay. Tom, is there any other experiment that you want to show people or any screenshot from your slides or anything that’s worth talking about, or pretty much we’ve covered what’s important here?
Tom Kerber: Yes, if I can share my screen.
Ari: Sure.
Tom Kerber: Can you see it?
Ari: Yes, got it.
Tom Kerber: Okay. I have some pretty other more expensive equipment. That’s the cheap stuff. You can look at, I can literally look at the wavelengths and although it’s cut off on the top of the screen here, it tells me the exact peak. It talks about the average on this waveform, tells me all those kinds of things. When I calibrate it up with the ball, I can tell exactly how much power is delivered on this peak by just putting the range in or looking at the wavelength on this.
This is actually, we talked about the eyes. There’s a company called Valida that’s using red, yellow and near-infrared in Europe. They’ve been approved over there for wet macular, sorry, dry macular degeneration. I just thought your listeners might want to see that. Yes, so it’s pretty cool that you can, with the right equipment, you can see exactly what’s coming out of the end of that.
Ari: Do you have any slides showing some of the penetration depth experiments?
Tom Kerber: Yes, let me just–
Ari: Into the meat tissue?
Tom Kerber: Yes, I got that one here. Here’s the thing is, here, I’m just showing you treatment surface. In our case, we stay relatively close to the– This is about one inch away to our light source. What happens is LEDs that overlap actually create a very, very nice even surface. There’s no hotspots on here. Unlike if you tried to work with a laser, you got to be very careful. You got to go keep it moving around, all that stuff. If you have a very even illumination, you’re just going to warm up the whole area.
Not too hot, that’s key. What happens then is that the light from out here, it’s not showing very well in here. The light from out here actually ends up more of creating a bubble like this, where you get more depth down the center line. When you start spacing out the LEDs, or you start, let’s say, having lenses on front of the LEDs, so you’re tighter angle. See, I’m using plus or minus 45 degrees, so pretty wide. Here’s narrower, 30 to 60 degrees. You get each one of these, but they don’t help each other out much.
This is, let’s say, at 100 centimeters in this case, which is, let’s say, 10 inches. You get an evenness on the surface, but it really doesn’t help you much, okay? That’s like, if you got rid of all these other LEDs, this is like what happens with a laser, except the laser would be a very sharp point of light hitting the surface, and then you’d end up with a bubble of light energy below it. That’s that, okay?
This was the demonstration I just showed that with the LED right on, coming from a laser pointer and the other thing, and you can see very even illumination coming through your fingertip, okay? Next, from beginning. This is using a probe up into the mouth, and what you can see is, even with this amount of power that we have here, how far the light is actually going. It’s actually enough light that it’s lighting up the back of the optic nerve, from current slide. You can see it’s lighting up my eye socket. This is 660 nanometer. 810 would be far better. Yes. We started the mile high PBM Club. We’re treating people on the way back from England on the plane, helping them.
Ari: Tom, I have to ask you, just to make sure, I noticed that on the slide there, you can go back to it for a second.
Tom Kerber: Okay, yes.
Ari: The one you just showed.
Tom Kerber: Yes. Okay. Here we go. I just noticed that probe that you have in your mouth says, “Testing the anal probe-
Tom Kerber: [laughs]
Ari: “-for light penetration.” I’m hoping that it wasn’t in the anal cavity prior to putting it in your mouth.
Tom Kerber: No, no, no.
Ari: [laughs]
Tom Kerber: Yes. This is once used, and it’s clean. [chuckles]
Ari: I couldn’t resist, Tom.
Tom Kerber: Yes. No, but the future of helping for prostate and other things with something like this that can get the high-intensity light, back in the area. We don’t have that available at this point, and thank you for clearing that, clarifying that. I hate people–
Ari: I just want to make sure that nobody screenshots that and misrepresents what’s happening there.
Tom Kerber: Yes. From current slide, here we go. What I wanted to show you is I took a– this is an Android camera, and it’s still not doing justice. If we did a near-infrared camera, we would see it just blowing through my mouth, but it does show you the 660 nanometer. You can see the light going through my cheek, and on this side, you can see that 810 nanometer not only is going through my cheek, but is actually going through below my molars, lighting up the molars and even coming through the jaw as well. That’s a quick way to show how longer wavelength of light can actually get better through there.
Ari: Tom, let me ask you this. We’ve gone into a lot of complexities here and this is really for light therapy geeks at this point, anybody who stuck with all of this.
Tom Kerber: [laughs]
The biggest misconceptions about red light therapy
Ari: On a purely practical level, I’m really curious, based on everything you know, all the experiments that you’ve done, what do you think are the biggest misconceptions out there with regards to how people are thinking about doing light therapy and in practice, how they are doing it with the type of devices on the market? Where are people going wrong in their thinking and their approach to doing red light therapy?
Tom Kerber: One would be, I did mention about laser versus LEDs. You really have to know what you’re doing if you’re trying to use a laser, and most of the lasers are pretty low power stuff until you get into the very expensive stuff and that starts having effects. Another area would be, I think there’s a wide range of light level from very, very low all the way to, let’s say medium, that you get some effect. At the very low, you’re still getting something, but at the very high, you’re getting effect much quicker.
You really have to know, too, how much time you need to spend to get a decent treatment in. You may have to be there, if you’re talking one of these pads and you’re trying to treat something deeper, you might have to be under the pad for an hour to help get enough light in energy, and even then, it might not be past the critical mass of light, let’s say, to try and get there. That would be a thing.
Area, you come up with a little tiny probe and they’re saying, “Well, there’s no cooling on it,” [chuckles] and they’re trying to say that this is going to start treating your hip joint. You’ve got to have something with serious cooling. I’ve got some patents on that, the only reason I don’t have the aluminum fins sticking off of this, like the old audio amplifiers, is because I’ve got a patent pending on how I came up with a new technique of cooling. Using airflow, but it cools it so that I can get a lot of power coming out of those LEDs.
Ari: What about panels? I think that I had some misconceptions around panels and the usefulness of panels when I wrote my book in 2018, and I’ve since started to change my opinion of panels in many ways. I’m curious if you’ve come to similar conclusions based on your experiments?
Tom Kerber: Yes. One of the things and also measurements, I’ve had people bring their panels in and, unfortunately, they’ve been a little saddened by thinking, they’ve got a 500-watt label on their power supply going in, and then you end up putting it through a power measurement device, and it’s burning up 100 milliwatts or 100 watts over this big area. LEDs are 25%, 35% efficient, so the actual power density is pretty low.
What I did is, I did do on the research page, I have a thing for comparison guide, I’d like to see the industry start using how many high-power LEDs, irregardless of how high they drive them. Okay, that’s another thing, how hard they’re driving them, how cool they’re keeping them, all those kinds of things, but how many LEDs per four inches by four inches are we talking about? Because otherwise, even the best of us, it’s really, really hard to– anything in the literature is garbage to try and read and try and understand.
The other thing is, they’ll say, you’ll see these LEDs on here, on the different devices and some are lit, some are not lit. Well, the reason they’re not is they might have near-infrared, so they’re mixing the wavelengths together because then they can say I’ve got 6 different wavelengths in my light, the other guys only have 5. It’s like one LED of this and one LED of– Overall, you’re dropping the amount of optical power that you’d have for 660.
Ari: That’s especially a concern where you have one LED here of a-
Tom Kerber: Exactly.
Ari: -specific wavelength, and another one an inch away of a different wavelength.
Tom Kerber: Yes, exactly. What I decided to do, it requires that I’m using double the LEDs, is I put 100% of the LEDs to the maximum power on the wavelength you’re going to use, whether it’s 660, 810, or 1050, and then 100% of the wavelengths for the other– I do two dual wavelengths, so if you switch it to one, you’re getting that. Then a person can start thinking, “Okay. I got more shallower treatment, I’m trying to treat my fingers.”
If I’m going to try and treat my fingers, maybe one minute of the 660 and one minute of the near-infrared, because the near-infrared is plowing through, I don’t need to spend five minutes on near-infrared going through my fingers, because it’s happening. Try and treat your hip, now you need, I might say, 3-4 minutes of red, and maybe 15 minutes of near-infrared. You can choose, devices, I think, should be choosing what wavelength they’re going to do, and put all their energy they can on that wavelength or the other wavelength, whatever you’re selecting, for the thing you’re going to try and accomplish.
Ari: Okay. Any other thoughts on panels or misconceptions that you want to mention? What are your thoughts on the contact versus non-contact issues since panels are often being used from 6, or 12, or 24 inches away?
Tom Kerber: Right. Well, it doesn’t matter, like you’re not losing energy, you’re just spreading it over a bigger area when you start pulling it away, depending on the type of lenses they use, as you pull it away, the light is going to be, obviously, less dense, a little less dense. On these kinds of things with the lenses on there, you’ve got to stay this far back if you want an even light illumination. If you start getting back– I see these exercise videos, and they got the thing three feet away, forget it, you’re not doing anything. You might be helping your melatonin levels slightly, because you’ve got an effect of red, on the area.
No, you need to have it at least so that the focus light is even over the surface that you have. Some panels, depending on if they have a really tight, beam profile, well then you can have it two feet away, and it’ll still do something. You constantly are losing, and then if you did end up having where you have down the body, if you have two big panels, and you have them a foot away, well, you’ve lost 70% of your energy to spraying out the sides of your body. You’re not hitting anything. That’s where you want to be closer in so that you’re not–
Ari: Explain that in depth. What do you mean by that?
Tom Kerber: As you start pulling away because of the beam spread, even if there’s lenses on it, you’re starting to miss your body. Your body is the core here, let’s say, and your light is–
Ari: The contours.
Tom Kerber: Yes. Not just the contours, but as you start moving further and further away, the angle that the light is hitting, angle that’s leaving the light, is going to miss half your body.
Ari: Half the total amount of light emitted is not even hitting the body.
Tom Kerber: Yes.
Ari: It’s also the case that more of it is going to reflect off the surface as opposed to penetrate below the skin.
Tom Kerber: The other thing is, if you take some of these devices that have the powerful lenses on them, then you have very concentrated hotspots. If you start putting them one inch away from your skin, wonderful, you have 10 hot points of light on your body. Not as good as a nice even. That’s why you have to see when you pull it away with any of these panel devices, you need to pull it away the right amount so that it’s a nice even illumination. That’s going to get you the effect that you want.
Ari: Would you agree that with panels, we are essentially getting, if you’re using them from 6 or 12 inches away, you may be getting still a lot of light hitting the surface of your skin and you may be getting an effective dose at the superficial tissues at the skin, but very, very little of that light, not enough to be effective, is reaching the deep tissues.
Tom Kerber: For arthritis or things like that. Exactly.
Ari: For treating muscles and joints and things like that.
Tom Kerber: Yes.
Ari: From a distance, you are basically doing a skin treatment or getting a systemic benefit, but you’re not really treating the deep tissues. Would you agree with that?
Tom Kerber: Yes, that’s correct. It’s great for skin at that point, but if you want to do more than skin deep, you need to have some– Make sure you got the panel the right distance away, and then you still are going to be fairly low in your light levels going into the skin.
Ari: This is why you prioritize the smaller handheld devices for things like joint and deeper tissues, right? I know you also have a helmet as well. Do you want to tell people briefly about the products that you offer?
Tom Kerber: It’s not here. Sorry. I have a helmet. It’s on my website. It’s 10 of the palm lights, all equally distributed over the course of the head. Just one second.
[off-mic conversation]
Tom Kerber: Anyways, the helmet gives you 10 points of light, 10 points, 10 clusters of LEDs, which end up providing a very high even illumination over the whole brain.
Ari: Is it all near-infrared?
Tom Kerber: We have 660 and 810 because 660 is highly absorbed by the blood. Being highly absorbed by the blood is very beneficial because the blood takes it further than you’re going, right? That’s helping the blood, and then the near-infrared is penetrating deeper, whether it’s the 810 or 1050. That’s where we want to have– We have both those wavelengths, so either the 660, 810, or the 660, 1050 nanometer.
Ari: Do you think 660 can penetrate through the skull into the brain?
Tom Kerber: Absolutely. I think you’re looking at, though, more on it’s going through the skull and the inside layer of the– That’s very important because you have lots of blood flow around the outside of the brain and between the brain and the skull. To be able to have impact that blood, and then we also did– Yes, I better not go there. Anyways, we know it does go– You saw the light.
Ari: Did you do experiments with using a skull?
Tom Kerber: As a matter of fact, there was somebody– 635 nanometer, that the other technology helped somebody with abnormal cells in their brain. How’s that?
Ari: Okay.
Tom Kerber: [chuckles]
Ari: Nice language.
Tom Kerber: 635 nanometer, even though it’s a poorer wavelength, with more power, we were able to go through the skull, no problem, and get into the area, and so helpful.
Ari: All right. To let people know a little bit more about the devices you offer, and I believe you wanted to offer a discount as well to my audience?
Tom Kerber: Yes. There’s a 5% discount if you go to SunPowerLED and just do ENERGY5. It doesn’t matter if you capitalize on–
Ari: That’s the discount code people can use when they’re checking out?
Tom Kerber: Yes, 5% discount on that. Then we have a range of the palm lights. We have the 660-810 nanometer, and we have the 660-1050 nanometer lights. There’s three of them on the list.
Ari: What do you recommend? I’d actually like to get a light from you after this, and I’ll have my parents with some arthritic joints try them out to see what they say. What would you recommend for that purpose?
Tom Kerber: Okay. Either the Ultimate, which is the $1,300 one, which is the 660-810, or the Super Palm, which is the 660-1050. I still lean towards the 1050, that there’s a little more getting through, and so, hey, how much extra does it help? That’s still a gray area as far as, it’s a longer wavelength, so it should penetrate a little bit better, deeper. We’ve been able to see some of this stuff. How much extra effect is it? Could you use the lower cost, double the time, and get the same performance? Probably.
I’d recommend either one of those devices. I do have what’s called the Professional, 975. It’s about 25% less power than the middle of the road, and then we have the helmet. The helmet is $6,500, and 660, and 810, people want to customize it. They want 1050, we can do that. We have the Mini Canopy, which is the other device here that I just showed you, the one-foot square device. That’s this one. The helmet and the other one come with the stand.
They come with the stand, and that does a very large area, and that has basically the same power density as 15 of these units. You’re covering 15 times the area, and again, that helps to get you even more penetration by having the larger area. Yes, just one split second, Ari. Unfortunately, this was just taken off into another room for somebody getting a treatment. Great information now coming out about helping with autism as well with photobiomodulation.
Ari: Okay. Have they done it on the brain directly? Have they done photobiomodulation on the brain directly of autistic children?
Tom Kerber: We supply the stands with them, so you can put the stand anywhere you want in a home environment or in a clinic. I’ll just put that on there. Oh, yes. Thank you. There we go. Okay, there we go. There’s the 660 nanometer right here. We do one minute of that, and three minutes of the– I guess somebody tilted a little bit on me, but anyways, there’s the 810, and you can see it in the back, or 1050 nanometer. Yes, so that just goes like that. They do three minutes.
There’s a study published on our website for opiate addiction and depression. Pretty exciting stuff as to 25 people got treated with transcranial PBM, 25 didn’t, and the 25 that did after two months, and that was only two treatments a week at three minutes. They only decided to use the 810 nanometer, they had significant improvement over the group that didn’t have the light therapy.
Ari: That’s using your helmet?
Tom Kerber: Yes, that’s using my helmet, so pretty excited about that.
Ari: Great, congratulations.
Tom Kerber: Thank you, Ari. This has been fantastic. I finally was able to vent on all this stuff that’s out there that just has been mislabeled, misinformation, and bad specifications, and to be able to say what’s going on here. This has been great. Thank you, Ari.
Ari: Yes, my pleasure, Tom. Thank you very much, and thank you for the work that you’re doing. I think really, as I mentioned, these are all experiments that I’ve been looking to do and trying to do without the right equipment in my own home, but not with the data that I could put out to the world and say, “Hey, this is really scientific data. I just didn’t have the proper equipment.” I’ve been trying to do these same experiments that you’ve actually done successfully for years now.
I’m very grateful for the work that you’ve done here and the work that you continue to do, and just the honesty, transparency, and integrity that you’re doing all of this with. Obviously, you have your own brand, you have your own products that you’re trying to sell, but I can tell your heart is also in the place of really wanting to educate the world and help the world more broadly. It goes beyond just trying to market and sell your devices, and I see that about you, and I really appreciate that.
Tom Kerber: Thank you. Yes, PBMs should be for the healing of the nations, not just North America even.
Ari: Awesome.
Tom Kerber: Thank you, Ari.
Ari: Tom, thank you so much, and I look forward to continuing the conversation with you. I’m sure we’re going to have-
Tom Kerber: Great.
Ari: -more conversations.
Tom Kerber: [laughs] Part C.
Ari: Yes. [chuckles] All right. Talk to you soon.
Tom Kerber: All right. Okay. Bye for now.
Show Notes
00:00 – Intro
00:13 – Guest Intro – Tom Kerber
05:13 – The difference between lasers and LED light
11:23 – The biphasic dose response
20:41 – The wavelength matters
26:52 – Why the power matters in a PBM device
42:56 – Tom’s experiments on penetration
1:15:22 – The biggest misconceptions about red light therapy
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