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Low level light/laser therapy
Are there any affordable low level light/laser apparatuses for brain stimulation? Would those caps used for hair loss do anything?
Comments
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What's the mechanism of action that you're interested in? Do you have any papers that show that light therapy stimulates brain function? I presume you mean NIR, but it would help to know the specific wavelengths and which parts of the brain you want to get the light to?
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> @Satur9 said:
> What's the mechanism of action that you're interested in? Do you have any papers that show that light therapy stimulates brain function? I presume you mean NIR, but it would help to know the specific wavelengths and which parts of the brain you want to get the light to?Yeah I was talking about NIR. Here's a paper on it:(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5180077/). I was wanting to use it to improve memory and I'm not sure exactly where to stimulate for that, but I know the frequency of the lights on those hair growth devices is 660 nm. I doubt they can be used for this purpose but I was curious.
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So first off the paper talks about some dubious claims that LLLT affects mitochondrial activity and reduces inflammation, which can apparently have a whole host of health benefits (a suspicious amount if you ask me). The "proof" Hamblin provides by sacrificing mice is somewhat subjective and the objective parts are below the margin of error threshold so it can't be that huge of a benefit.
Secondly if you go on YouTube you'll see that Hamblin does talks with alternative health channels all the time peddling these supposed benefits which can coincidentally be received with commercial grade products that he is likely receiving a kickback for sales of. This paper is made to look great because the language is flashy and there's numerous "tests", but the data itself is sparse. I mean what even is this graphic (attached)? 72 sources may seem like more is better, but they're mostly abstracts behind paywalls with little to no relevance to the topics he cites them for.
I'm sorry, but all the evidence I've ever seen (and I've been examining it for a few years) indicates that red light therapy is a scam to sell cheap lighting devices at a high markup.
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Well good to know. Thank you for saving me time and money.
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Sorry if that came off as hostile. It's a common thing on r/biohackers and they usually don't react very well to criticism of it so I was a bit on the defensive.
I just reached out to the Professor Dave Explains YouTube channel to see if he would consider doing a debunk on it describing the biochemistry and he agreed if I can get together some research for him with papers and a list of specific proponents like Michael R. Hamblin. If anyone wants to help with that could you drop some links here for me?
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I didn't think it sounded too hostile. Anyone that saves me time and money is good in my book. I'll see if I can find some more links for your project. Junk science pisses me off.
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Thanks mate. I appreciate that, I'll check those out.
