The Truth About IV Laser Therapy | Ep. 12 with Dr. Michael Ellenburg

In this episode, Robert sits down with Dr. Michael Ellenburg, a naturopathic doctor from Anchorage, Alaska with nearly nine years of IV laser and photobiomodulation experience in clinical practice. 

Dr. Ellenburg is one of the most experienced PBM practitioners in the United States, treating chronic infections, cancer patients, joint conditions, and complex cases where conventional options have plateaued. He brings a rare combination of deep clinical experience and mechanistic understanding to the conversation, and shares protocols, combinations, and real patient outcomes that practitioners can take directly into their own clinics.

In this episode, we cover:
How IV Laser Works at a Cellular Level: A deep dive into the mechanisms behind intravenous photobiomodulation, how different wavelengths affect red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets, why blood viscosity changes, and how mitochondrial water channels play a role in ATP production.

Wavelength Selection in Practice: How Dr. Ellenburg designs protocols for specific conditions, why he uses blue and UV for acute infections, skips red for certain inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, and why green is gaining clinical relevance for stem cell release from bone marrow.

Laser and Cancer Care: How IV laser is being used as an adjunct to chemotherapy and immunotherapy, reducing the need for growth factor injections, decreasing transfusion requirements, and improving patient tolerance of standard oncological treatment.

PRP and Light Activation: Why Dr. Ellenburg has never done PRP without laser, and the clinical outcomes in knee and shoulder cases that, in his words, sometimes astonish him. How priming patients with IV laser in the week before a PRP procedure amplifies results.

Combining Laser with Ozone, Stem Cells, and Exosomes: A practical look at how IV laser integrates with other advanced therapies, and what Dr. Ellenburg learned from Dr. Herskowitz's lecture on exosomes and laser at the ISLA San Diego conference.

Chronic Kidney Disease: A real patient case where creatinine was brought from 2.5 back under 1 using IV laser and methylene blue alone — and the ongoing protocol for a family member facing dialysis.

Transcranial PBM and Cognitive Function: Clinical experience with the Weber infrared helmet, the surprising data on IV laser improving cognitive outcomes without transcranial application, and why the combination of both is the most promising approach.

The Herxheimer Difference: Why switching from ultraviolet blood irradiation to IV laser dramatically reduced die-off reactions in infection patients, and what that means for patient compliance and outcomes.

About the Guest: Dr. Michael Ellenburg is a naturopathic doctor and owner of the Ellenburg Center for Natural Medicine in Anchorage, Alaska. A graduate of Bastyr University, he has been practicing integrative medicine since 2002 and has used IV laser therapy in clinical practice since 2017. He is a regular speaker at ISLA conferences and one of the leading voices on IV photobiomodulation mechanisms in the United States. He also hosts a live health radio show on 1080 AM and 95.1 FM KOAN in Alaska.

Connect with Dr. Ellenburg:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-michael-ellenburg-87ab6ba/
Website: www.1080koan.com

Connect with Weber Medical:
Website: https://www.webermedical.com
LinkedIn: / webermedical

Disclaimer: The content of this podcast is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult with a healthcare professional before starting any new treatment.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Been very, very shocked at times when reading an MRI report on a patient, being like, Okay, well, let's bring the big guns out, let's do PRP, and we're gonna do laser interparticular on these patients, and have them, you know, come back, you know, maybe three or four months later because they need it need some more, but getting them like some significant relief, not only in pain, but in mobility. Um, like often, like it's when it doesn't work in a patient, I'm kind of like, well, what do we do wrong that we didn't get the best result in this patient?

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Hello everybody, and welcome to a new episode of our live medicine podcast. Today we are talking again about laser therapy of photobower modulation in a clinical practice or a clinical practice again, and therefore I'm very happy um to have my dear friend, um, Dr. Michael Ellenberg from Anchorage, Alaska, as my guest today. He's a very experienced practitioner using lasers already for many years, um, also often presenting at our conferences. So, thank you, Michael, for being with us today. Um, yeah, let's start as usual by um you telling us a little bit about your background, um, your clinical focus, and also how your interest in laser therapy started.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Yeah, I um I graduated from an epitophic medical school back in 2002, and my dad for a gift gave me a um uh low-level laser therapy for topical use, and that's how I got introduced to it. I had been working with a provider up in Alaska who was using it to treat joint disorders in patients topically. And so uh for the first two years of my practice when I was still in Seattle living there, then I treated a lot of joint problems in patients from shoulders and necks and back, and you name it, um, with this little tiny probe that you know the end of it was like probably like a you know a half a half a centimeter. Uh so it took a lot of time to treat patients, but we saw a lot of good results with that. And when I came up to Alaska and moved back home, I joined a clinic um that had been doing um ultraviolet uh blood irradiation. And so that was really my first uh experience to be to be exposed to um how light can affect the blood. And of course, with this particular instance, there was outside the body, so the blood would come out and go through the machine. And I earned on started combining that uh with ozone therapy, and it was still doing a topical laser, and even in trying to find some topical treatments, even paths, and back then those things were so expensive, and and there were very few companies on the planet making anything like that. And in 2017, I got very lucky to um go to a clinic um in um Mexico that had a Weber um laser system, and I was walking in this clinic, and then someone was getting I mean, I was like, what is that? I mean, I'd heard about it like not that system, but I'd heard about the therapy in 2008 from somebody from Russia, and that's all I knew about it. And so they had and of course they had the book on the couple applications of uh of the therapy that are available at the um practice, and I bought one, and then I read about half of it on the way home, and after that I got a whole to you and I didn't know it yet, but I was like, I want to get one of these machines because I was clear I was I've already given a lot of good results ultimately like, so I knew that light could affect the body in a variety of ways, and who knew what it could do uh intravenously, and so that's how it began, and so that was what August of 2017, and now we're in 2026, so almost almost nine years now. I've used an IV laser or photobomodulation or PBM for short, one call that, of course, um, in our practice, and I don't do any ultraviolet um blood radiation anymore just because I can apply the UV uh diode to the blood directly. And uh so and you know, as far as what we treat, it's it's all over the place in some ways. So we see a lot of people with chronic infections and often pathogens that we can't identify, but we know they have some type based on the lab work and their symptoms and signs that they have a chronic infection taking place in their body systemically. Um we also use it a lot um in our uh cancer patients, uh particularly with certain types of photosynthesizing agents that make the blood more photosensitive for different wavelengths that provide it with the laser. And then we also do um a fair amount of joint things uh with it as well for joint treatments. And I have been doing ozone therapy for many years with treating joints, and after getting the Weber system back in 2017, I got very interested in doing the PRP because I hadn't been doing any of that at the time, and have definitely seen some results that kind of amaze me at times with people's knees and shoulders is where I mostly used uh interarticular laser therapy with the PRP, and the results um sometimes astonish me, to be honest. So that's kind of I guess the big big you know um the conference of what we're doing with it in our practice.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Okay, yeah, and um, so you also became a little bit like one of the experts on systemic or IV laser therapy, especially when we talk about mechanisms. That's always the main part of your lecture. And we actually did not really talk too much on this podcast about the um cellular mechanisms, so maybe we can dig in here a little bit deeper and you can explain a little bit from your perspective what is maybe happening on a cellular level when we talk about IV and the different colours.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Well, that's the thing too, right? I mean, we thanks to the Russians, and you know, of course, we have this, you know, 20 years of data prior to the you know your the Germans picking it up, like running with it. So it's something to start with. And when you guys first invited me to speak, I think it was with 2018, it was like, well, what's out there? And you know, and here in the US, luckily we do have a fairly good system with the national, you know, library of medicine.