Journey to Well
We are not created to do this healing journey or life alone. In fact, it was Bessle Van Der Kolk who expertly shared “healing happens in the presence of an empathic witness”. That is the heart of this podcast & my business : to witness. You can expect a plethora of conversations on nervous system regulation, breathwork, human design & astrology, cycle alignment, energy & spirituality work and so much more. We are all on a journey back home to ourselves, rediscovering our innate power within & I am thrilled to take this journey to well with you. be well xx
Journey to Well
Shedding Light on Red Light Therapy: Science, Benefits & More | Bjørn Ekeberg | Recharge Health
Step into the world of red light therapy in this enlightening episode featuring Bjørn Ekeberg, co-founder of Recharge Health and FlexBeam Red Light Belt.
As awareness grows around the benefits of red light, it’s essential to understand the science that supports its effectiveness, especially with near-infrared light, which penetrates deeper than conventional wavelengths. Bjørn shares his journey from philosophy to health technology and explains how this healing light can aid muscle recovery, reduce inflammation, and offer a wealth of benefits for overall health.
We delve into how red light therapy initially stemmed from NASA’s research, highlighting its historical significance and modern-day application. You’ll learn why the correct dosage and positioning are critical for maximizing benefits and the intriguing experiences of users who have incorporated this therapy into their routines, particularly women seeking hormonal balance and relief from menstrual discomfort.
By sharing insights, experiences, and scientific knowledge, this episode aims to highlight the emerging field of light therapy as a promising avenue for holistic health. Join us to discover how integrating light into your health regimen can be a game-changer.
Interested in exploring this transformative tool for yourself? Visit Recharge Health’s website to learn more and unlock your potential with light! Use code: journeytowell for a special discount!
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be well, my friend
xx Hannah
Hello, welcome back to the podcast Journey to Well. So today's going to be a really fun one, because I haven't talked too much about red light therapy before. I talk a lot about it on my Instagram. If you don't already follow me on Instagram, I have a red light panel and I talk about some of the benefits. But we're going to go really deep with Bjorn Eckeberg panel. And I talk about some of the benefits, but we're going to go really deep with Bjorn Eckeberg.
Speaker 1:He is the CEO and co-founder of Recharge Health, also a philosopher of science, so he has so many fun kind of aligned pieces of history and background that we were chatting about before we started recording. So, bjorn, you know that if you've listened to my podcast, you know that I like to kind of hand over the reins and allow my guests to introduce themselves. So I would love a little bit about who you are and maybe even we can kind of get into what even got you interested in red light therapy. Coming from philosopher of science to red light therapy is a super interesting switchover, so I would love to hear a little bit about that.
Speaker 2:Thanks, hannah, and it's a pleasure to be on. I'm very excited to have this conversation with you and I was given a serendipitous kind of opportunity about six years ago. I was on track to. I've written a book about the basics of physics and cosmology from a philosophical perspective and I had that as a kind of background. I've been dabbling with filmmaking and other things. I had a career path going very strongly in a certain direction when I came across.
Speaker 2:Well, I am now two of my co-founders that I knew from before, who had discovered a lot of research from NASA and PubMed studies that showed remarkable physiological effects when the human body is exposed to certain wavelengths of light in specific parts of the spectrum. This is near infrared and red light, which we can talk more about. But I was blown away because we haven't heard about this before and that research is actually decades old. This is not something that was discovered yesterday. Nasa developed, actually in the early 2000s, prototypes for this for astronauts to heal faster in space, and I think so. This is not new at all, but people don't know about it and I realized when I dug into it that the reason we don't know about it and I realized when I dug into it that the reason we don't know about it is because it hasn't been made really accessible to people.
Speaker 2:You kind of have to, as we'll get into, like sign up for a big panel and like there's, there's.
Speaker 2:You have to be really, really into it and know your thing, and we wanted to create a device that is so easy to use that it can be embedded in everybody's home, and so I shared with my co-founders that we met six years ago, kind of on a fluke, and one of them, a medical doctor who's worked on this technology for decades and wanting to get it in the hands of people so they don't have to come to a clinic like hers, is let's make something that can be in everybody's homes.
Speaker 2:Let's make this that can be in everybody's homes. Uh, let's make this technology widely available. And I saw firsthand some of the effects and stuff and I interviewed people and uh, yeah, I joined a train early on. I took a chance on this because I thought it's the most exciting opportunity to get to spread something that can benefit so many people, and I didn't know what I signed up for six years ago. But here we are and, yeah, we're now one of the purveyors of the more advanced light therapy solution and working on ways to make this even more accessible for people and people to use, so everyone can have one. That's my way of short introduction.
Speaker 1:No, I love it. I love it. I do think that red light therapy is becoming more talked about, although obviously one of the most exciting parts of having you on this podcast is even I don't know a lot of the science behind it. It's more just oh, red light therapy is good for you, it's good for your skin, right, and we'll get there, like the differences. But at least I would assume that a lot of my listeners because this is kind of where I started is just knowing there's benefits to your skin. It can help with anti-aging, which is very important to women.
Speaker 1:And then I kind of stopped there for a long time until more recently, I've gotten into the NIR, the different wavelength frequencies for penetrating deeper into your muscles and not just helping you know surface level skin issues. So I would love to dive into maybe this is just diving right in, but I'm like such a science person. I really love the data behind it. So I would love to dive into. What are the differences between red light and NIR? What the heck is NIR? And are there even more different frequencies than those for when we're talking red light? Obviously there's different frequencies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean certainly, let's dive in. I can say from the outset that the research on this is there's quite a lot. There's, you know, thousands of studies already. When we started and there were about six years ago when we had our idea for how to make this it was a very niche kind of thing. Like we saw, there were sort of like biohackers that adopted it and started using it and word was spreading that this was something, but it was still far from where it is today.
Speaker 2:So in the time spent that, we got our product first to market through development and then started selling it and finding our audience base. There's also been an explosion in awareness around red light therapy, the cosmetic aspects especially, and there's also been an explosion of health tracking devices that people are wearing like increasingly wearables to have data on themselves. This is part of a broader trend, like we saw this early and we kind of bet on this becoming more of a mainstream thing that people are looking to improve their health, take health into their own hands, and they're looking for alternate ways and are not really trusting that their regular doctor will give them the best health advice. Right, are not really trusting that their regular doctor will give them the best health advice. So there's a huge need and huge demand for thinking outside of the traditional medical health care system.
Speaker 1:And what?
Speaker 2:we felt we were sitting on was a potential solution that doesn't replace all of that, but it's like highly complementary and that people ought to know about. At the same time as awareness has just exploded and now every person I talk to, especially in the US, they've all heard of it but almost nobody really knows what it is unless they're using it. And it's a potential pitfall, or point of confusion at least, is that there's so many overlapping claims and benefits and different applications and red light therapy is increasingly associated with skin and cosmetics. Yeah, that you touched on. So part of the confusion is that the term red light therapy that we commonly use and that covers things like our device and panels so on, is two types of wavelengths. So there's red light, and red light is very well demonstrated is great for skin. It improves collagen production, elastin in the skin, so it can be very beneficial to be exposed to relatively low dose, but a consistent dose of red light. This comes from sunlight, the redness in sunlight. It's the same kind of wavelength as in the visible spectrum. So you'll see tons of masks and things on the market right now that are like, basically, red light devices.
Speaker 2:However, the most powerful in the research and in the actual application of what we call red light therapy is in NIR, as you called it, near infrared light. So this is light that is just off the visible spectrum. It's in the infrared range, which is a whole sort of long bandwidth of the whole electromagnetic spectrum. If you're thinking about energy as a total field coming from the sun, infrared covers a large part of the spectrum. We can't see it, but we can feel it. It's associated with heat. So actually over 50% of the energy we get from the sun is in the infrared range. So it's invisible to us but we certainly feel it. On a warm day If you use a thermal camera, thermal imaging camera, you can scan across around you and you see when the sun is up there is enormous reflection of infrared in nature and in like leaves and and rivers and so on. If you look at an urban landscape with asphalt, it's fully absorbed. There's nothing it's absorbed into the heat. So infrared is around us all the time and it's part of the natural spectrum of the sun. So near infrared is a specific part of that broader infrared range in which all the research is showing that between 800 to 880 nanometers, which is a part of the spectrum, something happens physiologically in the body that, in a simplified sense, is the healing response in the body.
Speaker 2:The biological explanation is the mitochondria, which are the organelles in your cells that are responsible for energy production. So your mitochondria, which make up a large part of your body. They're, like, really crucial to your cells and to your overall health. They respond when they are exposed to this light by producing more energy, and what the cells do, and what they're trained to do, is to repair and recover, etc. So when you are able to expose them to the right dosage of that kind of light, they basically become much more effective at what they do. So they produce more energy at the cellular level and then that kickstarts your body's natural healing process, but kind of turbocharged right.
Speaker 2:So you can get results like 30, 40% faster recovery times from a muscle injury, for example, like not just marginal benefits but like a significant improvement. So this is really what sort of blew us away the red light we kind of knew about, and that's fine and we have that built into our device. But having a strong near infrared component means that you're able to treat a whole range of things muscular skeletal of things, muscular skeletal types of conditions. And the trick here about near infrared, what makes it specifically so powerful, is that it's a long wavelength that is able to penetrate the skin. So we can't see it because it's too long for our eyes, but it's just long enough to be able to sneak past the skin. And if you have a device that goes straight on your skin, you can get two, three inches type penetration with the right dose.
Speaker 2:So, if you think about that for a second, how deep you can go beneath the surface of the skin, just skin level. You're able to target, like all your muscles, even some organs or your gut or anywhere You're able to actually stimulate them with this kind of light. And so that, of course, has a lot of promise for, like anyone with health concerns, ranging from athletes and biohackers but to more general people who just want an energy boost or a health boost.
Speaker 1:So it goes beyond skin deep. Does this do anything to your bones?
Speaker 2:uh, it also can. Yeah, if you can reach the bones with the penetration, there are studies showing effects on bone healing yeah, very clear research showing.
Speaker 2:Also, stem cell production is another aspect, um, that is also stimulated from this. But it's all, then, about having the right dosage at the right place so you're able to penetrate deeply. That's the power of near infrared, and that's why we set our sights on developing a device that had a very powerful near infrared setting, because that way you're able to treat things in the body that go well beyond the skin able to treat things on the body that go well beyond the skin.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so one of the things that I very briefly researched and I'm sure that you can more eloquently speak on it is with the dosage as well, as I'm curious because I know that we were just talking about your red light panel goes directly on your skin, but some research that I came across was kind of talking about the distance that you should have your near infrared light panel, because it's almost like I mean, if you're not watching the video, it's almost like a prism, is that what the shape is? It kind of comes out in a v and so if you have it a little bit further away, it's able to cover a little bit more surface area, although what you're saying, I assume it's just not penetrating as deep. But why did you create something or why is this? Why is it better to have something that goes on your skin? Is it just because it can penetrate a little bit deeper?
Speaker 2:it can be much more effective and go deeper. So for those who are watching the video, I'll just show, show you. This is FlexBeam. This is a belt-like shape Like it's really a belt more than it's a panel, with light pods. That beeping sound is me turning it off. I just want to show you what the lights look like. They look purple For a second or two, but it's got three light pods connected to a controller. This gives you basically the same it's the same power as in a large panel, but packed into a belt like shape that you can wear. Okay.
Speaker 2:The reason you want to consider this kind of design, or like why you want it on the skin, is because when it's on the skin you don't lose any of the energy and it all goes into the body. If you're standing five, 10 inches away from a panel, you are losing 80% of its power, like the light diffuses. So it's just it's actually very basic physics, right that the further you are away, the less effect you can get from the actual device. Now the reason with your panel why you have to stand at a certain distance to it, is twofold. One is that your panel is likely to get very hot. If you were to stick your skin very close to it, it would have almost a burning kind of feeling. It would be too hot for you to be close to it.
Speaker 2:Panels also have very high electromagnetic frequency radiation, so-called EMFs, because they're plugged into the wall and they're not encased or anything. They're just open lights. So when you do an EMF reading around something like a panel, it really is like it's quite a lot. It's almost like level of a cell phone, yeah, right. So you want to have a distance to be more safe, but you need to keep the same distance in order to be consistent in your treatment. So if you like, for like one day you're just leaning further back from the panel, you can get like half the dose of what you got yesterday. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right. All of this is like it's when you really think about it. You get your head into it and you think about how the physics of it works.
Speaker 2:It is quite obvious, but it's not so easy to understand when you start out yeah right and panels are produced uh, we know, like all the different panels, and some of them are great quality in terms of lights and so on, so I'm not going to talk them down and say that they are bullshit. They're just. It's a, it's a way of delivering light that is factory and production driven. They are basically. They come out of the grow up industry. They are actually light for plants, and when they discovered that you could, that certain wavelengths were something that the human body responded to, they just basically replaced the light, used the same design and pumped out panels. So it's designed for plants and it's not really designed for humans, and we wanted to reverse that and actually design it from scratch, something that you can wear on the skin. So ours has a fan that cools it down, it has battery encasing so that there's no emfs, and so we wanted to create something that is something you can wear and feel intimate with. You can even take to bed.
Speaker 2:You know, that is not just like a radiating lamp. That was the design principle we started with, but it's all really about effectiveness at the end of the day how effective your treatment is going to be.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about dosage, because you keep saying that, what does that mean?
Speaker 2:so dosage would be a measurement of how much output you have within a certain time window. It can be measured in various ways. There's measures called irradiance, which is expressed in milliwatts per square centimeter. These are like very um, like physics calculations but that have to um, that speak to the density of the light and the power output of the light. That can be calculated into how deep it goes and how much dose you get, like how many joules you get per area of coverage. Okay, that's all like very technical. There is a dosing window that's established in the literature, which is quite wide. The overall sort of takeaway from all the overlapping research into different wavelengths and dosages is there is an optimal sweet spot window. If you have too little, you're not getting any effect, and if you have too much, your not getting any effect. And if you have too much, your body over adapts quickly and you're also not getting an effect. So you want to make sure you have. You know you have to have a powerful enough setting. That's step one, and most of the cheap lamps out there or simple belt stuff simply do not have enough output power.
Speaker 2:I see the vast majority of products I see coming out on the market and making claims. From a physics perspective, it's not possible. They can penetrate. They have. They're just small diodes. They have no fans built in, so it's not hot enough, like. That's often a good sign. If your panel or your device has fans, it means at least the lights are powerful, right? So that's one thing you can look at. I would not buy anything that doesn't have a fan or a cooling solution, because then it's more of a cosmetic effect. In order for the light to penetrate which is what you want it has to be strong enough, right. But on the other side, you also don't want to overdo it, and this is a common uh, it's a common reaction we have. For people to try our device or a panel. It often takes a few sessions to click in. I don't know how it was for you, when you first first experienced it, to really feel like how it's working and if it's working.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like to get an effect. I don't know how was it for you to. When did you start feeling you had effect from it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so my panel actually is battery operated, so it's not, it's not plugged in and I've used it on my face. Honestly, when I just do the red light I don't really think that I notice any difference. But when I do the NIR, I've been doing it on my back because I hurt my back and I do feel sensations. I don't know how really to explain it, but I feel sensations and I do feel that my back is improving. But mine has a timer on it so I can't do it longer than 12 minutes because it turns off and then it won't turn back on because it's cooling down. So obviously after a couple of minutes I could do another session. But I assume I trust the 12 minute mark. That that's all I'm supposed to do per day and I think actually my directions were don't do it more than a couple of times a week or maybe every other day. So I probably do it, you know, maybe two, three times a week. I try not to do too much, but I'll do it on different parts of my body.
Speaker 2:Right, and these are good signs of the device itself as well. It's a short. It's a short treatment window Like ours is 10 minutes. You can do 20 if you want, that's fine. But it's like we don't recommend an hour or like more than an hour, because what happens is the body adapts so much that you don't get the response you're after. So some of the difficulty for a lot of people have assessing whether it works for them or not. Is this trial error phase, like do I really feel it? And of course the inner skeptic is like I'm not sure is it placebo effect?
Speaker 2:yeah, it's the placebo effect and so you know, obviously it will help even more if you believe in it. You can get effects. But you also want to, like, remain skeptical. So anyway, we see how all users go through this, and I did the same thing when I first had the prototype. I had bought in science level, but I needed a few sessions to really feel like can I feel it, can I not? Yeah, this is what's sometimes referred to as the benefit gap of red light therapy, and it's just a sort of a user challenge because sometimes you need a little bit more time to feel really confident that you can see the effects.
Speaker 2:And it depends on what you're treating. What we often see is when because that aha moment comes and it comes almost for everybody sometimes after two days, sometimes after two weeks, but at some point you click in that you know you can really feel the difference over time. Then usually people get excited and then you think more is better, right, that's just like okay, now it really worked. I did, you did 12 minutes on your back and like now your back feels better. What if you just also do your legs and your arms and your shoulder one night and you just like you know intuitively.
Speaker 2:This is where, like it's a default setting we have in our our mind you know that more is better and once it's working, more of it would be good. However, this is not the case. This is part of the education around how to use it appropriately. There is a sweet spot and when you find that sweet spot, it is wide, it's not super narrow, it's like you have room to maneuver. But the point is overdoing it will not help you and having too little or, as in, just not a powerful enough device will be just placebo device will be just placebo.
Speaker 1:Yeah Is this a trial and error kind of figuring out how much is too much and how little is. I mean, how little kind of makes sense to me. I think, once you do research on the actual device you have and making sure that it's an ethical, ethical device, and you know that makes sense to me, but the too much, especially since we are that way like why not just take more? Why, why, why not just do more? It's been helping me, that's yeah, Is that like trial and error thing, or is there? Don't do it more than.
Speaker 2:That we set certain guidelines in the research. It's like you you get averages and statistical ranges that are pretty consistent, right. So you can say overall, it is within this dosing window of so and so many joules and so on.
Speaker 2:over time. However, everybody's different, everybody's health state is different. So if you are a very active younger person who has a lot of energy already, your tolerance is higher. If you are, let's say, in like closing into retirement and you battle a lot of diseases in your life, you probably don't need as much, right? So there's a little bit of individual variation. We are working on, like our future innovation concerns this actually making it more personalized. For now we are offering guidelines for users just on general timing and protocols to follow. We have a medical doctor as part of the co-founding team who's developed protocols for everything from arthritis and fibromyalgia type things and endometriosis type of complex medical conditions to a tennis elbow and like basic inflammation responses, so you can find good guidelines for placements, how often to use and the intervals that you should take breaks and so on to follow. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it is a little bit trial and error, but within a certain range, and we try to help people as much as possible to find their own dose and then you can gradually also increase from there once you see response okay, right, okay so I want to hear some stories, so they can be personal of you, family members, personal clients or, if you prefer to keep it, research.
Speaker 1:I would love to hear some stories of this. Helped this? This panel helped this situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean there's so many like it's hard to know where to start. I mean we're closing in now on. We're approaching 30,000 users so far of this of our, our device, and we see, of course, the red light therapy so far of this of our, our device and we see, of course, the red light therapy like it's it's booming. Lots of people are trying it. Uh, originally we uh I mean we designed the whole device thinking about people with, um, targeted injuries or muscular skeletal conditions. Right, because you can wrap it around a shoulder or an elbow or something like this and you can get light from all angles, so it's ideal for targeted spots.
Speaker 2:So we have a lot of you know soccer players and tennis players and these kinds of things that it. It works very well for all muscular skeletal things. I um, and we saw that very early and designed the device for that. However, when we put put it out, people started using it for different things than we had thought. So one of the more arresting early stories I uh I found that we started looking more into is around gut health, for example.
Speaker 2:So we hadn't really thought of this, but, um, I like personally, intuitively, when I, when I got it, it's a nice warming kind of effect, but you can keep it close. So while while I was meditating, I just put it on my stomach and just held it in place for 10 minutes, et cetera. That just felt good for the nervous system, and we have more and more user cases now that suggest this is a popular use. However, then I started finding out that it had an effect on my gut. I could, without going into detail, you can kind of feel the day after though ooh, something happened here. When you go to the bathroom and then a couple of more days of using it, it's like something is changing in the whole gut, and mostly in a positive way.
Speaker 2:And then we found more research also and user stories to suggest that it helps really balance the gut bacteria, so the good bacteria kind of can fight off the bad ones, bring more regularity. And then of course, the gut is linked to the brain through the neural system, so people also responding with more cognitive clarity from using it on their gut. So this has become like it's one kind of use case that we didn't think of initially. We gathered more and more user stories that were compelling and we now did a recent survey. We found over 30% of FlexPM users actually use it for their gut health, which also tells us something about general awareness of this. Actually, like when we started five or 10 years ago, like talking about your gut was like very marginal and now it seems to be something that a lot of people are aware of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And I guess for me it's an example of something that you can do with a device you can wear straight on your skin, for example, because you are able to penetrate more deeply so that you can reach.
Speaker 2:You have a lot of light receptors in your stomach and where you have the most mitochondria in your body are in all the organs. They are packed with mitochondria. So our doctor on the team, who is very holistic and trained in like both TCM or traditional Chinese medicine alongside with being a Western medical doctor which is a really rare crossover she uses it a lot for like she has ways of trying to assess uh organ imbalances and system imbalances and then can use the light in this to shine directly on a liver, for example, or the kidneys, and because of the penetration depth you're able to stimulate the mitochondria in those organs right. So she even issued like a detox you can use. You can't use just any red light device for that, but ours with packed with near infrared light you can use to target inner organs. So this is one one application area that I personally like a lot and I have a lot of stories about people or use cases where people report sort of great improvements in a way that we didn't think about.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah that's super interesting. I didn't think about that until you mentioned it to me last time we chatted and I was like, oh, I guess you could use it on your gut health. So, along the same lines, then let's talk a little bit about women's health, because that was something else that you mentioned. That's very interesting to me. You know that I do a lot of cycle alignment work with my clients, so it's it's not so much the, it's not so much the cycle, thinking of this is what you should be eating, this is how you should be exercising, because I feel like that's pretty easily, uh, approachable and we can gain a lot of information just via Google search of what should I be eating.
Speaker 1:So I do a little bit of that work with my clients. It's more aligning your energy and and aligning um your energies to where you are in your cycle, and and you know, your energy as a woman is different in the ovulation phase versus the luteal phase. However, or in addition, a lot of my work is optimizing your cycle and harnessing the energy that you are in in each phase as a female, and so this, I think, would be fascinating for anyone to listen to. Again, I never really considered red light as a tool in cycle alignment. So what is your experience with that? And if you have experience in that research, what are the benefits of? What can red light therapy help with?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this again is another example of where red light, as in yeah, so this again is another example of where red light, as in a mask, won't help you, but where near infrared light actually can then penetrate and treat something. And it's another sort of discovery through our users and user feedback led by our doctor, Dr Zulia Frost. If you could have a whole show with her just explaining everything that you're interested in around hormonal alignment, red lights impact on both the melatonin cycle for circadian rhythm, but other hormonal balances in the body. She can speak this much better than she's trained in it.
Speaker 2:I'm just learning as I go yeah but it's really what I can tell you is when we, when we first got started and we launched the device and we were like three guys and a female doctor, uh like, originally found the company and we had a, our initial launch was sort of crowdfunding just to get it started and get a first audience that was very male dominated.
Speaker 2:It was very gadget, new gadgets, right, like the guys sort of picked that up and then over time, what we've seen is that now it's more women are buying it and more women are driving word of mouth and we started seeing a little sort of percolating up use cases of various women's health issues, like endometriosis was an early one, which is a quite severe condition, even the lighter versions of period pains and helping with period cramps. Yeah, dr Zulia started getting stories from people who had used it for fertility and to improve fertility, uh, which we're also gathering and trying to like. The challenge is to get it up at scale so you can do the large, large studies, um, but getting more and more studies like this and reports back of use cases. And again it goes down to having a device that you can wear in your intimate area and that can just be on like you can literally penetrate and target that whole region. So, whether it's ovaries or lower gut, or I, have a girlfriend that's been struggling with PCOS like cysts, for example.
Speaker 1:That's going to be my question.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that has found it very, very helpful. Again, it becomes anecdotal and we're looking for ways to actually get this into um, into broader research. Uh, but this hasn't been studied so much in the in the background literature. It's been mostly about inflammation and muscular conditions, performance. These kinds of very male-driven things are the ones that are the most substantiated in the literature, right?
Speaker 2:So what we are discovering through our interaction with the user base is this whole host of other sort of other applications and, yeah, we have increasingly also female ambassadors that tell their story right and share it with others. We have protocols for it too in our membership programs. Dr Zulia is always producing more guidelines for how to use it for these variety of types of conditions. So I think, if your listeners are interested in exploring it for this, we have some tools to get started. It is a bit experimental, of course. You have to find your own way, but there is no doubt from the feedback we have that this really helps a lot of women yeah, one of the things that you asked me earlier was like how did it feel when you first started doing the red light?
Speaker 1:and and that would be that's my biggest invitation like even you know, whatever, if you're wanting to explore red light therapy, notice, notice how you feel, notice any changes that are coming up. I personally haven't done it enough. It was literally you that kind of introduced me to that idea, because I've been doing it so much on my back and a little bit on my face. Just the red light, yeah, to use it.
Speaker 1:uh, and I'm not someone that struggles like thank god I don't have pcos or an endo, I can't say that word endometriosis yes um, but just period pain too, and just like overall womb health is what I would say without noting a lot or having a lot of experience in this. Um, if we're talking in terms of that's a huge thing, that can happen down in our lower gut too. I mean our regular gut and the lower gut and, like you know, your whole, like pelvic bowl region. So I would just assume, knowing what I know about red light, that it's going to be, you're going to notice some differences.
Speaker 2:Yeah and I could say I mean we almost skipped over that part from the intro is the most documented effects of red light therapy, or photobiomodulation as it's called in the academic literature for these wavelengths is inflammation reduction was established very early, like back to the 90s, in studies that even compared was using lasers, but compared the effect of lasers at the same wavelength with pharmaceutical anti-inflammatory and found consistently that red, like the laser, was much more effective at treating inflammation.
Speaker 2:Pain relief is another for pain relief. For any muscular skeletal type of pain relief, it is dramatically effective and it's like the FDA has classified this kind of device in as like it's okay to talk about pain relief with it Because it's noted in the literature. That's a common benefit. That's actually why most people buy it initially is because they have something painful they want to treat and then most users at least of our device they discover there are other things that it can help with also, but pain and inflammation 100% like what you can expect from a good near infrared light to give you. So already there, of course it it plays into the kinds of conditions you were talking about which I think everyone deals with pain and inflammation.
Speaker 2:These days there's so much pain and suffering out there. I mean this is part of my own motivation for, like, jumping off a career that was going like really well doing something else and finding it's this is something that people need. Yeah, we need to have in our kind of toolbox or in the family medicine chest or however you want to frame it. So that's why our original idea was like one day this will be, this is a no-brainer to have at home. But we haven't quite reached there yet where the device is quite smart enough yeah to experiment with lamps, as you're doing now, or panels.
Speaker 2:So our first device, flex beam, is an iteration to show that like to demonstrate that you can have a wearable and you can make it easy to use. Um, and our future innovation is going to try to help people connect their own data points they have on themselves to help validate it even more, like they can actually see the effects in real time. We're able to start measuring it now in ways that uh, I think it's still an early phase that we are in and with your panel, for example, you can feel that it's working and doing something, but we're getting increasingly better at measuring exactly what it is doing, and that's a part of an exciting, exciting part of the journey as well this isn't something that we talked about and I feel like we should have even mentioned it in the in the the beginning, but I want to hear your response to this.
Speaker 1:What we're talking about and you kind of made me think about this when you were saying this study with the inflammation, pills or medicine versus this why is using red light therapy more beneficial? Besides that, you see more benefits that you just shared. But why is using NIR more beneficial than a pill or a medication? Or you know why go, why try doing NIR versus going to a doctor for your PCOS?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean hopefully we get to the point that also doctors will eventually prescribe red light therapy for something like PCOS.
Speaker 2:For now it's just a tool they haven't learned and they're understandably skeptical. I think it's coming in, it's going in that direction that they're seeing that. It's obvious that you should as a patient or as a user or client of healthcare services. I'm not going to compare it to any specific kind of anti-inflammatory drug Like you can read about that in particular studies that have been tested. But, generally speaking, why would you take a pharmaceutical that has a range of different side effects that you know and you accept willingly, when you can use light, which is just the sun's own energy, just concentrated? It's the same spectrum, it's the same source of energy as is in nature. It's just tailored and tweaked specifically for humans and it has no side effects, like there are no known side effects of this treatment at all in the literature. So most people we work with when they tried and they come across this alternative, it's like it's a no-brainer to use this instead. That said, there are, of course, conditions that you know.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to say ditch all your pills because it's a complex thing and talk to your doctor and all of that, but we see an enormous like overprescription of pills and overreliance on pharmaceuticals and frankly, I think most people also know that this is problematic. Yeah Right, and there are also there is a hunger for other kinds of solutions. Unfortunately, there's also there's a lot of noise and there's a lot of you call it snake oil out there and people are making kind of medical and health claims with various dubious products. So it's a bit of a jungle to navigate what's really working and what is just hype. But I think people are smarter and have more tools now to also do their research. So I think over time, like devices like it sounds like you have a good one, like panel that you're using and I know our devices in this sort of premium category and that these things that are really working will stand the test of time and they will get broader acceptance.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, one of my favorite things that my mom, my mom is very I grew up very holistic. I mean I always make the joke that, like I grew up like in a holistic household before holistic was a term and she will always say, you know, using like homeopathy or using an herbal remedy, or you know, in this example, using red light therapy, she would always say, try it and it's either going to work for you or it's not. But you're not going to have the negative side effects and you're not. You're not putting these chemicals or unforeign things. I mean I love the example, the illustration that you reminded that it's just sun and in a different, you know, concentration. It's either going to work for you or it's not, but you're not going to lose anything is what she always says and I'm like I I agree with that. I really do. It's either going to work or it's, or it's not.
Speaker 1:And there's a lot of research which I like that that we highlighted in this conversation. Just that's how my brain works. Hopefully everyone else got some benefit from getting the science behind it. I have one last question. But before we go to the last question, where can people find you? Where do you hang out? Where can they learn more from you and learn about the panel that you have the belt?
Speaker 2:Yeah, our device is called FlexBeam, like a flexible beam of light, and the company is called Recharge Health, so our URL is rechargehealth and we have all the information you would want there about the device and also linking to the actual scientific studies and group them according to categories for anyone keen to learn more. We try to make this as impartial and objective as possible, and read about our ambassadors that we have many of, both in the health practitioner space and sports people who wouldn't endorse this if they hadn't actually felt the effect. So at rechargehealth is probably the best stopping point for people who want to learn a bit more about this.
Speaker 1:Perfect, and I'll link it all below in the show notes, of course. Last question If you're standing on a stage and you had the microphone for the next minute 30 seconds and you had one message to share with the world, what would you share?
Speaker 2:Oh my God, is this a short TED talk?
Speaker 1:It is a short TED talk 30 second TED talk Go ahead 30 second. Ted talk.
Speaker 2:I am a big believer in the sun and the health of sunlight, and I think we live in a culture that we've grown up custom to being very scared of the sun.
Speaker 2:There are some negative side effects and things, but they can all be accounted for and you can handle them and within reason, like if you're smart about it. I think one of the worst things in our culture is around light and lighting. Like we are surrounded by just very bad indoor artificial lighting that has never even been tested on humans. They've been designed for other purposes, to be energy efficient and for all these different reasons, and they have negative side effects on us, generally speaking, to be overexposed with them, and sunlight is the ultimate healer, the ultimate source of energy. So I encourage people typically to if it's any sort of health advice, it's like get outside, like you can use something like a flex beam is great help for healing, but don't forget about it doesn't replace sunlight. So, especially in the mornings, it's very, very helpful to set your whole circadian rhythm and everything. We wouldn't live if it wasn't for sunlight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I go out. It was four degrees Fahrenheit this morning and I bundle up and I got my little hand warmers and I go out every morning and take a walk. Honestly, it's invigorating. I used to hate it, but now I'm like I'm really awake because I just got plowed with freezing wind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you may think it's the wind. That's part of it, and the cold and just the temperature. That's probably an aspect of it. However, when you walk outside and if you're in a green neighborhood or something, you're walking through infrared and near infrared and you're basking in all of that and that's part of the energy your body uses to actually be a healing machine or a or really efficient at healing. So with sunlight it's like, of course, don't stay out so much you get burnt. But it's just that energy is what we before we got pharmaceuticals about 100 years ago they were invented. If you were sick and you're feeling down and out or low in energy, the usual prescription is go to a sanatorium. That's what they call it.
Speaker 2:It's a place where you just sit and bathe in sunshine, in some salt water, maybe in some mud, and back into the sunshine, because sun is the ultimate healer. And that's the crux of what we uh, what we started out with and why we think it's important this technology also finds its way into every person's home not to be afraid of the sun yeah, I think that's an important message.
Speaker 1:Thank you, this was such a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on and it was so great chatting with you thank you so much for having me, anna.