The Irradiance Threshold: Why Your Red Light Therapy Might Be Failing

0:00 Introduction and ATP Supply

Lee Weinstein: When you are way above the threshold, you are increasing your ATP supply, scaling up with the brightness of the light. When you are below the threshold, you are not increasing your ATP supply at all. I wouldn't want somebody who is sitting at home to just assume that I can just take this thing and I can treat anything and it is going to automatically make it better. It might, but it might not.

Dr. Yi Song: Welcome to the Regeneration Effect Podcast. We are talking about everything from ancient Chinese medicine practices for health and longevity to modern technology. We are pleased to have Lee Weinstein here again for a second episode talking about red light. Now we are going to talk about what device is good for you for your particular body and purpose.

1:10 Portable and Affordable Devices

Dr. Yi Song: Let's talk about this first because this is portable, easy to use, and affordable for most people.

Lee Weinstein: Yes. Because if you look into the market, there are people selling something like this portable for $1,000 or even north of $1,000. If you compare them, yours actually has way more strength than their product usually. Some of them cost $2,000 to $5,000. It comes in a really jeweled case and gold.

2:09 Light Intensity and Power

Dr. Yi Song: The importance for people to know is when you get red light therapy, you need to have a certain strength of light, certain power wattage of light to shine on your skin to make it effective.

Lee Weinstein: You do need a certain amount of power per unit area. People get very wrapped up in seeing different things. For instance, a red light panel might say 300 equivalent watts. What is an equivalent watt? The thing that is relevant is milliwatts per square centimeter. That term is irradiance.

3:31 Sunlight vs. Red Light Irradiance

Lee Weinstein: The sun is about 100 milliwatts per square centimeter at noon. This device is a little more than 100 milliwatts per square centimeter, but it is all in the red. The sun is spread over the whole spectrum from ultraviolet down to deep infrared.

4:18 Mitochondrial Mechanisms and Thresholds

Dr. Yi Song: In the last episode, we talked about the mitochondrial chain. Red light is providing energy to kick nitric oxide molecules off of binding sites where they are getting in the way.

Lee Weinstein: There is a threshold. When you are way above the threshold, you are increasing your ATP supply at a rate that scales with the brightness of light. When you are below the threshold, you are not increasing your ATP supply at all.

5:36 Optimizing Treatment Time

Lee Weinstein: When you are above the threshold, it is useful to get brighter and brighter up to a point. That point is either where you are creating so much heat that you are causing damage, or where you have built up as big a reserve of ATP in the cells as is useful to have. The normal treatments most medical protocols use is one sun worth of brightness for 10 minutes. This device is more like 240 milliwatts per square centimeter. In less than five minutes you would get to the peak. Three or four minutes is as long as you need to go in one treatment.

7:26 Measuring Light Power

Dr. Yi Song: Do you use a specific device to measure the power?

Lee Weinstein: I use a military laser power measuring device. It reads out total milliwatts and then you divide into the area. When consumers buy stuff online, they are shown power at a 6-inch distance, but most of the time they are lying.

8:37 Red Light Panel Quality

Lee Weinstein: Almost all the red light panels, even the ones branded under US names like Joovv, Mito Red Light, or Biomax, are all Chinese manufactured. They are repurposed horticultural lights originally designed to grow vegetables indoors. Those panels usually have a lot of little circular lenses and power supplies with fans. All of them made like that are about 300 milliwatts per lens output and are decent devices regardless of the brand. The ones not worth getting are those with tiny LEDs in a frame that doesn't have fans. If it doesn't need to be cooled, it doesn't put out much power.

11:55 Handheld Device Specifications

Dr. Yi Song: How many LEDs are in the device you made?

Lee Weinstein: It's about 49 or 50. The LEDs are small but mounted on a heat sink with a fan because it dissipates quite a bit of power. This puts out a higher intensity than the panels, but it is meant to treat a specific area where you have an injury rather than the whole body.

12:47 Body Sculpting and Ketones

Lee Weinstein: If you do red light treatment just after exercise, the amount of ketones your fat cells release depends on the amount of red light they get. If you shine red light on a certain spot, those fat cells release more ketones than others. You can tune body sculpting and weight loss from a specific spot, like the belly, by shining red light there after exercise.

14:42 Ketosis and Cryotherapy

Dr. Yi Song: If people are on a ketogenic diet and use red light on the abdomen, would that help?

Lee Weinstein: Probably. This doesn't push you into ketosis; you have to be in ketosis already for this to help you.

18:05 Professional Grade Measurement

Dr. Yi Song: You mentioned using a military laser device to measure intensity. Is that available for consumers?

Lee Weinstein: You can get them for a couple thousand dollars. The best devices for measuring optical power are made for measuring weapons systems. This device is brighter because it's designed for spot injuries, like carpal tunnel or rheumatoid arthritis in the joints, where you need to reach a certain depth.

20:41 Collagen and Skin Aging

Lee Weinstein: If someone wants to look younger, red light increases collagen production in the first few millimeters of the skin. All panels with fans are bright enough to do that. You can hang it on a door and treat your face with your eyes closed.

23:13 Wavelengths: 660nm vs 850nm

Lee Weinstein: This device has 50% 660 nanometer and 50% 850 nanometer light. 850 nanometer penetrates a little better. 660nm LEDs are more efficient at converting energy into photons, while 850nm goes a little deeper but is less efficient. 850nm is infrared and invisible. You should never have a high-power light that is purely 850nm because you can't see it, and it could cause thermal damage to your retina without your body reacting to it.

25:52 Consumer Advice on Power

Lee Weinstein: A consumer can tell if a device has a reasonable amount of power by checking if it has a fan. If the manufacturer didn't need to put a fan into it, it doesn't put out much power.

28:12 Aperture and Penetration Depth

Lee Weinstein: The treatment threshold depth for this device is probably 1.5 to 2 centimeters. To go deeper, you need a larger source. A way to think about it is that the light is designed to go about as deep as the source is wide.

34:40 Red Light for Brain Health

Lee Weinstein: There is nothing in your brain much further than this device's reach from the surface. Whether red light is always good for the brain is not fully settled. Some experiments on mice found it made them less healthy in certain ways. However, for stroke recovery, research shows it does help healing.

36:32 Stem Cells and Biological Processes

Dr. Yi Song: Red light should help stem cell treatments by accelerating the process where vesicles called exosomes transfer mitochondria to your own body's stem cells.

Lee Weinstein: As long as there's not a competing biological process you don't want to accelerate, like an infection or cancer, you will win. You have to be careful when accelerating endocrine processes to ensure you don't throw things out of balance.

39:13 Immune System and Viral Infections

Lee Weinstein: Red light often makes the immune system work the way it is supposed to. In rheumatoid arthritis, immune cells stop misbehaving when they get enough red light. It also helps with viral outbreaks. Viruses don't have mitochondria, so they can't get energy from this, but your immune system can. It's a win-win for viral infections, but you should not use it on bacterial infections because bacteria have mitochondria and will also be energized.

42:44 First Aid and Healing

Lee Weinstein: I use the handheld device for first aid. If you hit your head and know you're going to get a bruise, shine this for three minutes and you won't get it because the capillaries will re-knit themselves. For burns, the light seemed to speed up the healing so fast that it put a lot of signals on the nerves.

47:38 Wound Care and Closing

Lee Weinstein: For a paper cut, if you tape it closed and treat it for three minutes a few times, it will be healed by the next morning. It would likely help surgical cuts if you have clear bandages that let the light through.

Dr. Yi Song: It has been a great pleasure learning from Lee. We will have more episodes coming talking about many other things he knows. Very nice having you here.

Lee Weinstein: Thanks for having me.