Health Longevity Secrets

Lasers vs Painkillers: Deep-dive into Photobiomodulation

• Robert Lufkin MD • Episode 222

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Guest: Forrest Smith — serial founder bringing clinic-grade photobiomodulation to a safe, wearable form factor.
Theme: Why dose and delivery matter more than raw wattage for red light therapy.

Key takeaways

  • Wavelengths that work: Deep red 660 nm (blood flow, NO release, shallow penetration) + 808 nm near-IR (deeper tissues/joints).
  • Mechanisms: Hemoglobin photodissociates NO → vasodilation + better O₂ delivery; mitochondria’s cytochrome c oxidase bottleneck relieved → higher ATP output; downstream: resilience to oxidative stress.
  • Performance & recovery: Overnight reductions in CK and CRP let athletes train sooner; UFC PI and USA Weightlifting use cases mentioned.
  • Brains & microvessels: Near-IR protocols tied to BDNF and microvascular improvements—an emerging Alzheimer’s angle.
  • Dosing > device hype: Class-1 lasers allow precise, reproducible dosing to deeper targets; panels/LEDs spread light too broadly and shift dose by distance (inverse-square).
  • Safety & contraindications: Class-1 lasers are eye-safe in normal use; titanium implants OK (osseointegration may improve). Pregnancy and active cancer: regulatory contraindications despite encouraging early data.
  • Personal protocol (example): 15 min over carotids + 15 min lower abdomen (gut) upon waking; higher-melanin skin generally needs longer time at same power.

Resources & links (from interview)

  • Kineon: kineon.io 

Chapter markers (approx.)

00:00 Why red light now?
 00:34 Mission: measurable QoL at scale
 03:02 Risks of NSAIDs vs alternatives
 03:34 660 nm + 808 nm explained
 05:34 Newer NIR bands (905–1064 nm)
 07:39 Penetration depth: red vs NIR
 08:34 Photoacceptors & evolution (melanin)
 10:28 Hemoglobin, NO, and O₂ delivery
 12:02 Mitochondria & ATP bottleneck
 14:06 Brain protection & TBI athletes
 14:34 CK/CRP drops & faster training
 15:55 Dosing by melanin level
 17:49 Implants, pregnancy, cancer notes
 21:22 Biphasic dose curve; laser classes
 25:26 LEDs vs lasers; panels’ dose drift
 27:50 Strongest evidence areas (wound, knee OA)
 29:33 Gut–brain, BDNF, microvasc/Alzheimer’s
 31:46 Forrest’s daily protocol (neck + gut)
 34:00 Systemic effects; fertil

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Speaker 1:

Hey Forrest. Welcome to the program.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited about the discussion today.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I can't wait. I think this is the first time on our program that we've talked about red light therapy, so I can't wait to dive into the details. You've obviously had a lot of experience with this and looking forward to sharing your knowledge about it. But before we do, I want to invite you just to tell the audience a little bit about your background and how you came to be interested in this space.

Speaker 2:

It's a great question. Essentially, I've been starting startups since I was about 20 years old and then building them and then exiting them, and it's a great thing to do. I'm really happy with it as a career. But one of the things that we wanted to do with Kenyon as we started it was, instead of just build the company for exit, let's measure ourselves to something that's a little bit more impactful systemically, and what we came down to, after my partner and I spent a couple of months talking about this before we had chosen a technology to go into or anything was increasing the quality of life for the largest number of people we can in the most measurable way we can. And that led us to a deep dive into the technologies that exist that really can change outcomes for people, can change outcomes for people, and red light and laser therapy or, as it is in the clinical research, photobiomodulation, is a really powerful tool that was available only in clinics from a well-dosed there's panels and we can dive into why.

Speaker 2:

We don't feel like those are necessarily the best dosing method for it.

Speaker 2:

But the good dosing, the well-dosed devices that were existing at the time when we started the company were laser devices that were desktop plug into the wall $30,000 to $50,000 in a clinic, and it's really useful to have those because you can actually see the outcomes that it's providing people.

Speaker 2:

But the downside for that is that you'd really like to have this on someone daily to get the best outcomes, and so that was our kind of aha moment of we can. We can make this smaller, wearable and cheap enough for people to be able to use at home, but still keep the clinical level, dosing, and so that's the kind of mission we've been on for the last five years now, and it's been really empowering to see what it's been able to do for people for getting away from pharmaceutical solutions and I think we've all heard about the opioid crisis and are aware of the dangers there, but what we're seeing more is that people are less educated on things like insides and uh, it's um, and then the negative impacts they can have from a a physiological standpoint as well. So, uh, giving in, educating and trying to provide people with different tools that are going to help move the needle for their their quality of life and get them back into movement as quickly as possible so.

Speaker 1:

So let's, let's, let's go back to the basics, like for red light therapy. So it's some kind of light and light is this electromagnetic spectrum, the spectrum of its radio waves and visible light in the middle of it and different things in there. So where exactly we're talking about red light, literally light at the red end of the visible light spectrum. Is that right? Or does it include infrared and non-visible light as well?

Speaker 2:

It also includes non-visible light infrared. So we use in our flagship product the two most well-researched wavelengths that if you look at kind of these forest plots which show how much they're impacting the outcomes for people, these are things where you go back and look and see all right, these wavelengths kind of move a little bit. But the two wavelengths we're using 660 nanometer is deep red and 808 nanometer is near infrared, and deep red is visible. It doesn't penetrate as much. It goes in kind of a couple of centimeters. You see a few different effects from this. One of the reasons why we even though it doesn't penetrate quite as much, that we still use the red is it increases the blood flow to the area. So one of the things that you see is that it dumps nitric oxide into the blood and that's a dilating factor for your blood vessels and you start seeing more blood being able to be delivered the way that it does. That also allows more oxygen to be delivered to the area. So even though we're really trying to, in most cases trying to target deeper tissue and that's why we include the lasers and the infrared the red actually does bring more blood and kind of oxygen to the area which can increase the mitochondrial efficiencies and energy production, and then the infrared penetrates more, like, potentially three to four inches, depending on if it's into your head and there's a very, very thick skull, like I've got maybe not quite as far, uh, but for for your joints, um, into your synovial tissue. Uh, synovial capsules is the is the big thing, because, uh, that's that's where you see a lot of the inflammation, uh, particularly chronic inflammation that people can have, that that really, uh, degrades the tissue and causes long-term pain and inflammation, issues like osteoarthritis and and um, and different tissue degradation, um, uh impact. So, uh, that's the two wavelengths that we use now.

Speaker 2:

Uh, we, we do see that there's a lot of research, um, that's you know, since we've started designing our first product, that's helped flesh out more around the near infrared uh side of the spectrum. So, um, as you move further with these longer and longer wavelengths. So 660 is red, 808 is near-infrared, 905 to 940 is another range of near-infrared that's been very impactful for gut health and brain health, as is 1064. So the way that works, though, is that they're really just triggering these different photoacceptors. They have to donate electrons into these different signaling pathways in the body to be able to trigger systemic adaptations and those, those go down some biochemical pathways that are relatively complex.

Speaker 2:

But a lot of times it's nice just to know that this isn't smoke and mirrors. There's over 7,000 research papers on the subject. Our team actually contribute to an international group that collates and then parses key data from these 7,000 different research papers on the subject. It gives us a really good visibility to what's working, what's coming, what are we able to treat with this and what kind of needle moving can we do for people's outcomes if we can actually adopt quickly what the research community is finding.

Speaker 1:

Back up then. So we have the electromagnetic spectrum. We have these two peak wavelengths, or frequency, which is the unit of measure along the electromagnetic spectrum, if I remember my physics right. So we have 660 nanometers, which is the deep red wavelength, and then 808 nanometers, which is a different wavelength a little further out, which is near infrared, and the near infrared. These wavelengths will penetrate different distances based on things. So the near infrared is three to four inches below the skin surface. How much does the deep red penetrate? Is that less?

Speaker 2:

Two to three centimeters, so like an inch, basically maximum, and it's yeah. Oddly though, it does contribute meaningfully to the outcomes and and even though it's not penetrating in there, it is they work synergistically together, which is why we've kept including these, these red over, really, the thousands of tests that we've done, uh to date to, to see what those impacts uh do from an outcome standpoint okay, so, so we're gonna, we're gonna apply these to the, to the skin or to the body through the skin, and then these, these photons at these wavelength, then somehow interact with our tissue.

Speaker 1:

What is the? What is the understanding? I mean, why? I guess the question why do we have, why do our cells have photo receptors that even respond to these things? Or what's going on like biochemically or photo chemically with these? Do we, does anybody know?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think it's a great question and essentially an evolutionary function. Sunlight triggers a number of things that we are aware of kind of intuitively. So melanin is a photo acceptor and we see that either increase or decrease the amount of light that's kind of penetrating through to our tissue. We also see that, you know, part of that evolutionary change is that as Europeans move to Europe, they develop less melanin because there's a trigger point downstream that you actually impact with a photo acceptor that helps generate more vitamin D. Too much melanin, you don't get that. Too little melanin and too much sun, then you get cancer.

Speaker 2:

So there's balances in our system that have been developed in over a very long time and we typically give a couple of examples of these photoacceptors. There's eight really that we're triggering, that are making a meaningful change in the body, and we spend tens of thousands of hours mapping where those eight are and then how many of them exist there. But one very good example that's very ubiquitous around the human body is hemoglobin, and what happens with hemoglobin is it's a carrier molecule in our blood that helps us carry. What we're taught in school and I think this is something that's a bit of a paradigm shift around now is that we have kind of this two gas system, so we have oxygen coming in and carbon dioxide going out. What's what's been changing over the research around this for the last, really 10 years? Uh, quite a lot is that we're not looking at it as a three gas system, uh, with nitric oxide uh being the third gas. Um, and that's the one that we're actually triggering or or interacting with, particularly with the 808 nanometer infrared light.

Speaker 2:

So when we trigger hemoglobin, there are four binding sites that are competitive for oxygen and nitric oxide on a hemoglobin cell.

Speaker 2:

When you are triggering these hemoglobin, you are reducing the affinity of the nitric oxide to bind to these sites, and so what that does is that drops nitric oxide directly into the blood.

Speaker 2:

It also opens up a binding site for oxygen to be able to both take the nitric oxide, dilate the blood vessels, but also, when you are delivering, you have less nitric oxide bound to these hemoglobin and more oxygen, so you're delivering oxygen back to your cells more effectively as well. And again, that's one of eight that we interact with. There are more, but those are the primary eight that we interact with that drive changes and adaptations that we'd like to see in the body, and hemoglobin is just one of the most widespread and high volume ones of these, and so we see different protocols with our users for example, treating the large blood vessels that you have very close to the skin, access to in their neck, and being able to see powerful cardiovascular changes around that relative to the plasticity of that cardiovascular tissue, which is a good measure for how kind of healthy your heart and your cardiovascular system are.

Speaker 1:

And I hear people when they talk about red light therapy. Sometimes they talk about effects on mitochondria. What's going on there?

Speaker 2:

So it's a great point and actually we're going to be leaning into that this summer with some more goodies and I'll just kind of enumerate on that shortly. But with the photoexceptor in mitochondria. Your mitochondria are the powerhouses of your cells and you have this what's called the electron transport chain. That's kind of embedded in the walls of these mitochondria. This is how you generate energy and your cell's currency for energy is called ATP. Essentially, what we see with particularly both infrared and red, but particularly with the infrared, is an enzyme in that energy creation chain is a bottleneck, and when you can donate electrons to it from this photon delivery systems, you remove that bottleneck and you increase the level of energy that your body can produce by around 70 to 80%, which has a really powerful effect on things like wound healing. But some of the downstream effects are not necessarily measured by the energy, because everything in your body has a couple of different functions. You don't just generate energy with your mitochondria, they're also signaling back and forth with the rest of your cell. And so what we see with the mitochondrial triggers is this cytochrome C oxidase, which is that enzyme in the electron transport chain receives these electrons, removes itself as a bottleneck for energy production and we see the downstream impacts of that are that your cell is much more robust in how it deals with oxidative stress. So if you have external environmental stress on your cells, this is a great way to reduce that, and a couple of ways that we've seen that used relative to kind of patient outcomes is protective impacts on brain tissue.

Speaker 2:

So people who are in combat sports we work with the UFC Performance Institute.

Speaker 2:

We want to have athletes as healthy as possible uh, you know, 10, 20, 30 years from now and being able to protect your brain tissue by increasing the energy production and reducing the oxidative stress that things like traumatic brain injury can cause, uh, are very well documented, and so we're just we're seeing more and more athletes take this on.

Speaker 2:

Another example of that is in the ergogenic or protective effects on muscle, and so if you're training, we work with the US Olympic weightlifting team and they have really good understanding of how intense they can go and then how fast they can get back into training in a way that's going to help them promote more muscle and strength improvements. And when you can reduce things like muscle inflammatory markers and the two that we track for this are creatine, kinase and C-reactive proteins. We reduce those overnight, so if you're super sore the next day, you can't go back into training. Your body's just not going to be able to work at the same level. What we can do is reduce between 60, 60 and 80% these muscle inflammatory markers that keep you from being able to get back into training and strength improvements, and so that's the benefit. Of light is really triggering the cellular level impacts, both in the cell from the mitochondria, and then extracellular with things like hemoglobin and, and you mentioned before that the there, the photons are modulated by the melanin in our skin.

Speaker 1:

Does that mean that people with different amounts of melanin or different different you know skin darkness, will need to, uh, vary the dose accordingly? Is there an algorithm for that, or or is that necessary?

Speaker 2:

yes, and we we tried to offer uh kind of a a uh an editability of the, the level of dosing with our devices. But it's what we found is. Our goal is to have as many people seeing positive impacts as possible, and that means maintaining the most effective uh protocols. They can long term, which is essentially around 15 minutes a day, depending on the level of melanin in your skin. We have adapted our protocols for different levels of melanin and different pathologies, and so we have data that we provide our users for this. And higher levels of melanin mean you do have to dose longer, but we don't change the dosing on the actual devices, we just increase the time for that. So higher melanin users will be able to use this for up to 25 minutes, where the lower melanin users will be more in the 10 to 15-minute range.

Speaker 2:

And again, that's a little hand-wavy. That's what we're advising as an example for knees With things like hands. Hands are unfortunately one of the things where we see the slowest results because there's just less tissue for us to interact with there and it's a, you know, as an example from an expectation level. We try to be as open and transparent as possible. It takes six to seven weeks if you have kind of more severe osteoarthritis in the hands to be able to see a powerful reduction in pain and inflammation Because again, the tissue level that we have to interact with there is much smaller, where for knees and hips and shoulders you've got a lot more tissue and you see a lot faster two to three week powerful impacts and needle moving from a pain and inflammation standpoint.

Speaker 1:

Now for someone using this for patients are there any contraindications for it? Are there any? Certain types of patients shouldn't use this, like pregnancy or, you know, metallic implants in their body, anything like that with this type of therapy.

Speaker 2:

You've got the best questions. This is awesome. So with metallic implants, one of the things that we see is a really powerful increase, and this started in teeth implants. There's a metric around how titanium bonds surface to surface with bone and you see an actual improvement in the bone growth and the adhesion with the titanium implant. So that's completely on the table and has actually benefited by using the devices and the photobiomodulation or light therapy.

Speaker 2:

With pregnancy, we contraindicate this because of an FDA requirement, but there's nothing in the literature that actually supports that. It's really more just better safe than sorry, because no one's done massive long-term studies on the application for pregnancy. What we have seen relative to pregnancy is usage that, using particularly the infrared, makes scar tissue, so post-surgical scar tissue develop more similarly to the original tissue, and so there's a bunch of histology slides and I can send this through, but essentially pictures of the cells. You can see night and day differences by being able to treat this, and so what we see with C-section users is their scar becomes thinner, more pliable, less stiff and less noticeable, and so we do promote the use for post-surgical treatment as well, just to promote the healthier scar tissue.

Speaker 2:

The one other thing that's worth considering and again it's contraindicated, more based on the regulatory than it is on the research is cancer. There was a concern from the FDA that this is increasing levels of energy production. What if we're increasing levels of energy production in cancer cells? What we've seen from the literature is that if you are not using high doses, that this actually helps to cause more necrosis with cancer cells. So it's actually and this is really over the last three years the jury is still out. These are still small trials, um, but and we haven't seen kind of the anything that's, that's a larger trial that's really kind of allowed us to plant a flag and say we're, we're a hundred percent safe to use around cancer.

Speaker 2:

Um, with that said, with cancer there are a couple of cleared areas to be able to use. Um, your mucosal lining uh, both in your gut and in your mouth, really can be damaged badly by treatment of cancer, and so repairing and helping the mucosal lining heal and grow back faster and be less painful and less inflamed in both those areas in the gut and in the mouth has been tested broadly and is very safe and is very safe and is very effective With cancer. Again, what we're seeing right now is that it's been. This is actually effective in the correct dosing, which is kind of where we spend a lot of our time on designing the right product is when you're dosing correctly, this actually impacts cancer positively, meaning that this is going to be something that kind of causes cell death in cancerous cells. But again, we promote cancer as a contraindication right now, based on the regulatory input.

Speaker 1:

And how do we know what for dosing? How do we know what a high dose is, what a low dose is? Is there toxicity If I turn it on for 30 minutes instead of 15 minutes? What's the toxicity? What do we need to watch out for?

Speaker 2:

It's a great question and this kind of comes back to the dosing where we've spent so much time and really tried to carry the science and the mathematics forward on this, and so I'll describe how the general literature goes about quantifying the dosing and then how we've taken a little bit more unique and proprietary way to quantify that, Adopting from technology that is sensor supporting technology. So plethysmography has been an old sensor technology. Then we've adopted some of the mathematics that they use for how light moves and distributes through tissue. But generally how this is thought of is in what's called the biphasic dose curve and so essentially photobiomodulation or light therapy. You see, as you increase the power of the lasers you see an outcome, a beneficial outcome, increase with that until you hit the peak of that and then past that peak, you see a decrease. It never really goes until you get way, way down the line from a dosing standpoint.

Speaker 2:

With high-powered lasers you can actually ablate or burn tissue, and even before you get to burning tissue there's negative impact from half of it.

Speaker 2:

But that's really 10, probably more like 100 to 200 times the dosing that we're looking at with the class one lasers that we built.

Speaker 2:

So the reason we're using lasers essentially is to have a very tight beam that penetrates very effectively and gives us a very reproducible and reliable outcome for the photons that we're delivering at the depth of tissue that we need to to be able to reduce the inflammation and again trying to get people out of chronic inflammation, particularly with their joints and their soft tissue, because it gets them back into movement from a pain management standpoint. So all of that to say there is a risk if you're looking at really high power lasers, there's safety regulations around lasers. Class 1 is completely safe With these lasers. You can actually still even use it without eye covers, directly on your eyes in some cases of macular degeneration and things like this. Class 2 is there is some danger. Cover your eyes, You're probably not going to have any major issues with it. Class 3 and 4 are clinically distributed and are much more dangerous and really need to be operated by a professional.

Speaker 1:

And yours are class 1 lasers correct yes, that's right uh, so we're class one.

Speaker 2:

Uh, very oddly though, we we were planning on building a class two device based on our early research on power density, and this is something that led us down the the path of using the, the sensor technology, to be able to understand and get a better idea of what the dosing is, because the dosing is Because the dosing guidelines, when we were starting to design the product, were really around power density, and so if we deliver this power density, we get that outcome, and we did a very early test with our modules, one of them being a class two laser and delivering the same power density as one with the class one lasers and which should have given us, based on the literature we had at the time, very similar outcomes.

Speaker 2:

One with the class one lasers and which should have given us, based on the literature we had at the time, very similar outcomes, but the class one lasers were actually wildly more effective, and so that took us down kind of the rabbit trail of how do we build out our own proprietary Monte Carlo models that map most effectively to what's actually happening when the photons are going through the tissue and how we're triggering these different photo acceptors, and and you know it wasn't perfect out of the gate. We, we, uh, we've done about 37 or 38 different cycles of here's our model. And then what can we test for this? And so we use uh, serum nitric oxide, or nitric oxide in the blood, as a, as a kind of um real time test of here's what we expect from our model. And then here's what we're seeing in the physiology. And over the different cycles we've gotten closer and closer and really have kind of a world-class dosing methodology that we've built for this, and it just means our users get better outcomes, more reliably.

Speaker 1:

Now I see some red light therapy devices use LEDs. What's the difference between using LEDs and lasers or other sources of light? What are the tradeoffs?

Speaker 2:

Oh, what an awesome set of questions. This is amazing. So LEDs emit light. Leds are a dye-based technology and these dye, when you apply electricity to them, emit light in like 360 degrees. When you put them into an electronic part, that pulls them back down to about 120 degrees, but it still emits in a way that is not what they call collimated. So if you think of a column, just kind of straight, these actually continue to expand out and because of that it's really hard, um, and because of that it's really hard to dose internal tissue. Uh, because you're just emitting light at too broad an angle.

Speaker 2:

And when you do dose internal tissue, uh, often people will say, oh, we're using LEDs, we've turned them up this much so they can, they can reach to the internal tissue. It means that you're overdosing the more superficial tissue. So what we're trying to do is find a balance to where we're. We're dosing both the superficial and the deeper tissue and the photoacceptors that are in both of those in a very controlled and optimal way, and LEDs just don't support that.

Speaker 2:

And I think, to take it one step further, we see a lot of light panels. It's great. We don't like to knock other people's products, but it's great to see light panels with LEDs on it, getting exposure for red light therapy out to people and then letting them see what this can do. The downside for these panels is the dosing is basically inverse root square. So if you think about like two inches closer and two inches further away, massively different dose, and so it's. You know, if you're looking at red light therapy, make sure that you're getting a device that emits from the skin level, that you're not seeing something where you're going to see a space between your skin and the actual device, and ideally look for something with the lasers, because it's going to help you dose that internal tissue more effectively.

Speaker 1:

Now someone's a skeptic about red light therapy. What is if you could point them to one study, one controlled study that has strong evidence for its effectiveness? What would you suggest?

Speaker 2:

it's a even better question. So that's a hard one to pick because there's 7 000 studies and so it depends on what you'd like to be treating with it. And and uh, I think the ones that have been researched the longest uh kind of linear, time wise um, are things like wound healing. So if you use this on uh, you know you have a cut and my kids fall down and scrape their knees. You almost go into Wolverine mode not to get too dramatic about it, but you heal like so fast these superficial tissues and the wound healing. Again, I mentioned the same kind of thing around post-surgical applications. I would say that knee pain and knee osteoarthritis also has hundreds of papers around it. I can send you through our database if anybody wants to look through, and they can search this directly in the database of. Hey, I want to check on how it's used for brain tissue or healing, anything like this. This is a great database to come in and say there's and not to to also set expectations.

Speaker 2:

Not every single one of these uh, uh papers and and research, uh kind of trials, has been super successful. A lot of times they're testing to see from a power output, from a wavelength output, um, that that you know what's working. What we found, though, is that that's why the dosing model is so crucial to the outcomes, and when we apply the dosing model that we've built to all of these, it fits very well. So you see why some of these using the wrong wavelengths or using the wrong power levels are seeing suboptimal outcomes, and then why the ones that are seeing the outcomes are doing a good job with it. So all that to say.

Speaker 2:

Um, if I had to pick my my most interesting ones, uh, I think gut and brain treatment are are extremely exciting. Uh, your, your gut generates a ton of neurotransmitters, and your brain, actually. Even though those neurotransmitters don't necessarily not all of them cross the blood brain barrierin barrier, you still see, reflected in the brain chemistry, a change in those same neurotransmitters. So dopamine, serotonin. Um, you also see a big uh, bdnf, so brain-derived neurotrophic factor.

Speaker 2:

Uh, improvement in the brain from treating it directly, and one of the more exciting ones that's come up from the recent literature is the improvement in the brain from treating it directly, and one of the more exciting ones that's come up from the recent literature is the improvement in microvascular performance in the brain, which is really based on this, the newer kind of microvascular hypothesis for Alzheimer's, really gives us some good trajectory for what we can test around this and we're seeing very good impacts both from a dementia and from an Alzheimer's outcome standpoint, particularly when they're flagged early enough to be able to impact this.

Speaker 2:

But that's one that we're filing grants with the US government on being able to apply this more effectively and test this around things like Alzheimer's because it's just it's a really terrible pathology, not only for the patient but also for really everyone around them. It's just a just an awful pathology and having this kind of impact on the microvascular piece is is just unheard of relative to the the outcomes that we've seen from a pharmaceutical standpoint, which have really been focused more on protein and plaque-based approaches to date. So that's super exciting for me again, just kind of seeing people with that pathology and the very slippery slope and the very negative impact it has. I would say that's one of the most exciting that we've seen in the last three to five years is the positive impacts for Alzheimer's.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I can see the inflammation effects and all and the gut. How would you apply it to the gut if it only goes three centimeters deep? Is it just over your abdomen, your abdominal wall and your stomach?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and actually we work with the. We work with a really ahead-of-the-curve Japanese lab that does a lot of protocol testing for this and we started one protocol with them. And I'll show you what I do essentially every morning now because I had such good results for it myself. In the body that have the most access around the neck, with two vertical modules aligned over these large blood vessels, I run this for 15 minutes every morning and then I run it over, I pull them a little bit closer together and I run it over my lower abdomen about an inch to two inches below my navel and I and again this is N of one completely grain of salted. But except that it also lines up with what we're seeing from the research literature is haven't been sick in a year and I got the two kids and they usually drag things in and it goes through the whole family, then it goes back out. It doesn't go through the whole family now. And also you feel and this also lines up with the medical literature and research in the space you feel a mood lift. What is called in the medical trials is affect, and it took about two weeks for that to really kick in. But if I travel with it everywhere now, essentially because I feel better, I feel more energetic and I feel more aware and alert on a daily basis, and that's again very in line with the affect impacts that we see in the medical trials as well. So you know, again, it's, it's I. We tend to think of ourselves as as kind of product inventors, but also know experimenters as as an end of one, that we should test these types of things around, um and try to inform ourselves really on what's happened in the literature that would support this. And again, this is this has been a great one.

Speaker 2:

I and I could also send over some of the uh, the impacts that are, uh, what the, the, the lab referred to as abscopal or remote impacts for different types of pathologies.

Speaker 2:

One of the most exciting ones is that when you do this, you reduce systemic inflammation when you're treating the gut and the neck like this and there's different.

Speaker 2:

They're still kind of debating about the actual mechanisms for this, but they've run a 220-woman study and then a 400-woman study that in the second actually had better dosing from a laser therapy standpoint relative to fertility with women who had been infertile for, I think, three to five years minimum, and the first study came out with 27% uh who had been infertile completely uh became pregnant and uh 21 plus percent of those delivered a healthy baby at the end of it. And the second test was even even higher. I think it was in the forties. Uh, I'd have to dig those up and again, I'm happy to send through all of this. We spend quite a lot of time, uh, digging through this and it's just exciting to see that because there's there's, um, there's obviously a powerful impact and link between that systemic inflammation, which we can now reduce and modulate with these type of protocols, and really impactful pathologies that that women are seeing that are causing infertility.

Speaker 1:

So the company is called Kinion and this is available anywhere. We'll have links in the show notes. Is this covered by insurance at all for anything as a medical device? Can people use their insurance for this?

Speaker 2:

They can use HSA. Fsa we're underway. It's a very complex. The US has a very complex insurance coding process and it's a little bit opaque relative to the amount of time and resource that goes into it. But we are working on getting this covered by insurance and we do work with. We actually found some of our best customers were physicians and you know that's that's. You know people in clinics from you know post-surgical, so orthopedic surgeons to pts and chiropractors that were seeing good results from this and so we now have a group up that that's over 500 uh medical professionals and health care professionals that are are uh helping to get this, have been educated themselves on it and helping to get their patients more educated on on what they can expect and how to use these type of products well, forrest, is there anything we haven't covered today that you wanted to uh touch on for our audience?

Speaker 2:

I have to say no, this is really like on the on the ball amazing questions, what a, what a great discussion and I, I, I hope I haven't gone down too many rabbit holes with it, but I, I, you know your, your questions were world-class and really enjoyed the discussion.

Speaker 1:

Great, Well, great, and and how we'll put the? We'll put the company link and the show notes. Maybe you could just say it also for people who are listening to audio, how people can follow you and find out more.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. Kenyon K-I-N-E-O-N dot I-O. Kenyon is from the Greek for movement, and we like to see people getting back into movement, out of pain and back into movement. And you can also find us on Instagram, kenyon underscore labs, and we have a very good and vibrant community on Facebook. So if you search for Kenyon on Facebook, you can join the group and if you have any questions, we see a lot of our medical professionals and users in there answering questions around. You know how am I going to use this? Does this work for me? Will this work Like what's the best way to get the most juice out of this type of red light therapy product? And I spend time in there trying to answer as much as I can as well, but it's a really vibrant and cool group, so if you have a chance, jump in and say hello.

Speaker 1:

Well, thanks so much, Forrest, for spending time with us today. Really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for all the great work you're doing.

Speaker 2:

Likewise. Thank you so much, really appreciate it.