Show Notes

Light is one of the most powerful biological signals affecting human health, yet most doctors will never prescribe it.

In this episode of The Dr Kumar Discovery, Dr. Ravi Kumar sits down with Dr. Jason Rountree, a clinical photobiomodulation expert and Clinic Director of Montana Laser and Medical Center, to explore how red and near-infrared light can modulate our biology at the cellular level. From accelerating tissue healing and reducing chronic pain to supporting brain health in neurodegenerative disease, this conversation reveals a whole category of treatment that is effective, safe, and completely underutilized.

In this episode, you will discover:

• How red and near-infrared light (650–1,064 nm) interact with cytochrome c oxidase in mitochondria to boost ATP energy production
• The history of photobiomodulation, from the first ruby laser experiments on mice in the 1960s to modern clinical applications
• How light therapy promotes tissue healing, skin rejuvenation, and collagen production through improved blood flow and nitric oxide release
• Evidence for hair restoration using red light to reactivate dormant hair follicles in androgenic alopecia
• How light reduces chronic pain in spine and knee arthritis by suppressing nociceptive signaling and inflammatory cytokines
• The difference between LEDs and class four lasers for clinical versus home use, and why it matters
• How transcranial photobiomodulation penetrates the skull to improve glymphatic flow, reduce neuroinflammation, and support patients with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease
• The emerging connection between light therapy and gut microbiome health
• Practical guidance on choosing an effective device: wavelength accuracy, energy density, third-party testing, and what to avoid

Key Takeaways

• Specific wavelengths of light can modulate biology at the cellular level by stimulating mitochondrial energy production
• Red light (660 nm) is highly absorbed by skin and effective for surface-level treatments, while infrared (800–1,064 nm) penetrates deeper tissues
• For darker skin tones, 1,064 nm light bypasses melanin absorption and reaches deeper tissues more effectively
• Class four lasers are fast and precise for clinical use, but quality LED panels can deliver meaningful results at home
• Light therapy shows consistent improvement in early-stage neurodegenerative disease, especially when started early
• Avoid cheap devices without third-party testing; look for verified energy density of at least 100 mW/cm² and correct wavelengths
• Light therapy is not a replacement for diet, exercise, and medical management, but a powerful supportive tool
• Everyone should have a quality red light device at home for everyday use

Resources

• Dr. Jason Rountree: Laser Therapy Institute | LinkedIn | Email: [email protected]
• Dr. Ravi Kumar: Website | LinkedIn

Transcript

[00:00 –> 02:40] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Welcome to the Doctor Kumar Discovery podcast. I’m doctor Ravi Kumar, a board certified neurosurgeon and assistant professor at UNC. On this episode, we’re diving into photobiomodulation. That’s the study of how light affects the human body. And I know what you’re thinking. Light? Really? We’re exposed to light every day. How could shining different colored lights on our bodies possibly treat disease or improve health? Here’s the thing. There’s a massive body of research showing that specific wavelengths of light can actually modulate our biology at the cellular level. We’re talking about improving energy production in our mitochondria, accelerating healing, reducing inflammation, and treating pain. It turns out, our bodies evolved to respond to light inputs in ways we’re only beginning to understand. And this field has been rigorously studied for decades with real clinical applications. But you may never have heard of it, because when you walk into your doctor’s office with pain or inflammation, you’re getting a prescription drug, not a prescription for light therapy. Today, I’m talking with doctor Jason Rountree, who has deep expertise in how light can be used clinically to treat disease, optimize health, and reduce pain. This conversation is gonna open your eyes to a whole new category of treatment that’s effective, safe, and completely underutilized. Whether you’ve never heard of photobiomodulation before, or you’re already using red light at home, this episode will completely expand what you know about how light affects your body. And a quick disclaimer. Doctor Rountree and I are both healthcare practitioners, but we’re not your healthcare providers. This show is for informational purposes only. It’s meant to give you knowledge because knowledge is power. And when you have knowledge, you’re empowered to make better decisions about your health. Also, this show is separate from my role as assistant professor at UNC. Okay. Let’s get into it. My name is doctor Ravi Kumar. I’m a neurosurgeon in search of the causes of human illness and the solutions that help us heal and thrive. I want you to join me on a journey of discovery as I turn over every stone in search of the roots of disease and the mysteries of our resilience. The human body is a mysterious and miraculous machine with an amazing ability to self heal. Let us question everything and discover our true potentials. Welcome to the doctor Kumar discovery. Doctor Rountree, thanks for joining us on the on the show.

[02:40 –> 02:42] Dr. Jason Rountree: Hey. Thanks very much for having me. I appreciate the invite.

[02:42 –> 02:56] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. So I’m really happy to have you here because I’m I’m super interested in a topic called photobiomodulation, which is how light affects the human body. And let me ask you this first, can we use light to treat the human body?

[02:56 –> 03:10] Dr. Jason Rountree: 100%. There are so many different uses for different types of light. Photobiomodulation is a really exciting field, and it can apply to a lot of different case types, and there’s even different light types that you can use.

[03:10 –> 03:52] Dr. Ravi Kumar: That’s very cool. So, you know, when I first heard about this a long time ago, I thought, oh, no. That sounds like mumbo jumbo. Why would light affect human biology? I mean, we we have biochemical processes, and we have all this, you know, evolution that went into completely controlling these aspects of our biology. And then when I hear people shining red lights, blue lights, uh, you know, different color lights at different wavelengths and different intensities, I thought, no, that that’s not a thing. But when I looked at the literature, I was totally shocked to see how much had been done for a long time. Can you kinda talk to us about about how this was discovered that light affects the human body, actually changes our biology, and what is known about it currently?

[03:52 –> 06:04] Dr. Jason Rountree: Yeah. Absolutely. And I’ll start actually super basic. We all know that if you get out in the sunshine, your body will actually use UV rays to produce vitamin d. So we know that light types, because UV light is a type of light, know light can affect our biology at some level at least. And, also, then we’ve had now years of blue light therapy for infants who are dealing with jaundice. Right? And then that blue light helps clear that up faster. So we know that light can affect us somehow, but we haven’t really been exploring it until about the sixties. Back in the early sixties, they had the first creation of the laser, and laser was really incredible because you were getting a monochromatic type of light, meaning that it’s it’s all one color. Right? So if you flip on the light switch in a room, you get white light. You get tons of different types of visible light. But in the sixties, they came out with a ruby laser, and we had for the first time light at about 630 to 660 nanometers, and it was all the same wavelength. That that’s very, very unique to lasers in particular, and everybody started going, what can we use these lasers for? Maybe they could do all kinds of things. And so, uh, a physician in Hungary, doctor Andrei Mester, started looking at how maybe this can affect animals. And then and then, of course, if we know how to affect animals, maybe we can translate that to humans. And so the initial experiment that he ran that showed some different changes was on mice that had implanted cancer cells. So what he would do, they they take these mice and they would shave them and then shine this ruby laser on this tumor area. And he was just trying to see, you know, does it make things worse? Does it make things better? And the only thing that he saw was that the hair grew back faster on the mice that got the laser. And he went, hold on. That’s that’s not what I was looking for at all. But that’s what really kick started the idea of, well, maybe these different types of light can have different effects on the biology. But I’m right there with you. It sounds crazy. It sounds it sounds made up. Like, we’re really gonna use light, and it’s really gonna make a difference in the body. And it turns out the different types of light are what really do it, and the the the color of the light, the way that it’s used, where you use it, the intensity of the time, all those little factors do add up to success or failure with light therapy.

[06:04 –> 06:12] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Alright. So if I were to ask you what biologically is happening when these different wavelengths of light hit the body, Is there a good explanation for that?

[06:12 –> 09:29] Dr. Jason Rountree: There is a there’s a super basic one that I like to give to my patients, and it makes a lot of sense. And then there’s some some more details, and we can get as detailed as you want because there’s a good bit that we do know. Um, there’s still a lot that is that is kind of unclear. But what I tell my patients is essentially, light is an energy source. Right? Light is a form of transmittable energy, and certain types of light can actually pass through the skin and be absorbed in different parts of the cell that are involved in energy production. When you get energy absorption by these energy producing portions of the cell, the mitochondria specifically, you get more energy production in that cell. You get things like repair, rejuvenation, and cell replication, which is exactly what the healing process is. So that’s my simple version of giving that to patients is, hey, we’re just putting energy, the right type of energy into the body at a very, very safe level to stimulate these repair effects. And that’s really all most patients need to know. But if you wanna get super detailed And we are Good. Alright. Let’s do it. So there are different depths to which you can have light penetration, and now you’re gonna hear me talk about penetration, absorption, and scattering. Those are different actions of photons as they leave that laser or leave that LED or that light bulb even, and then encounter tissues. So you can have reflection off the skin or it can actually penetrate through the skin. And the way that it’s going to do that is based on the color of the light or what we call the wavelength. So red light is, say, 650 nanometers. Blue light is 445 nanometers, somewhere in there. Those are visible wavelengths. And they are pretty reflective on the skin, but they also are highly absorbed by the skin. Once you go past red light up into the infrared spectrum, you’re still in a very, very safe electromagnetic spectrum there, infrared light starts to be able to pass through the skin barrier quite easily. So once you get to 800 nanometers, you get extremely deep penetrating light that does not get absorbed very well by the skin. It passes right through, gets to those deeper tissues, and then is specifically absorbed by cytochrome c oxidase. Cytochrome c oxidase is one of the components of the mitochondrial transport chain, component four, you know you know all this. But that absorption actually stimulates faster shuttling to complex four, which is the rate limiting step of energy ATP production in the cell. And so you can speed up that ATP production vastly. And the experiments that have shown that have it’s it’s really pretty simple. You put some 800 nanometer light on a cell, and it just immediately juices up that ATP production. So cytochrome c oxidase is a big target for that one. But then you can go across different wavelengths too. So you go to, um, for example, a 64 nanometer light, and that light is not so much absorbed in that complex four, the mitochondria transport chain, it’s more absorbed in the calcium ion channels, and so you can actually get faster transport across membranes. Really, what you’re doing when you’re applying light laser therapy, especially in the infrared spectrum, is you’re just speeding up the rate at which the body already functions. Now you’re not burning it out. You’re not stressing the body. You’re just enabling a faster processing so that you can get more out of those natural functions that your cells already have.

[09:29 –> 10:32] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Right. So just for the audience to picture this in their heads, the electron transport chain is this group of proteins in the mitochondrial, uh, membrane, And it transfers electrons down a chain and eventually ends up in oxygen, which is the ultimate receptor of these electrons. But every time it transfers an electron, a proton gets pumped out into the inner mitochondrial membrane, which creates this gradient. And then these protons run down a turbine called ATPase, which creates ATP, which is your basic energy, uh, molecule. Your your currency for energy in your body. You’re saying that red light increases the activity and the efficiency of the last protein in this electron transport chain, cytochrome c oxidase, which is the protein that eventually transfers electrons to oxygen, creating water. So we are basically optimizing an already present and crucial biological process. And my question is, is this designed by nature? Is there an evolutionary basis for this? Because we are getting these wavelengths when we go outside. Right?

[10:32 –> 11:40] Dr. Jason Rountree: We are. Yes, we are. In small amounts. In small amounts. And generally, is this something that if we spent more time outdoors, you’d actually be getting more of this light? Would it be helpful? I would say yes. I I don’t think we have any super super strong studies that really prove that idea, but these wavelengths these these infrared wavelengths are a big component of sunlight. And what are most of us doing these days? We’re sitting inside. We’re staying out of the sun. And I’m not saying you should go outside and just bake yourself in all the UV rays you can get. The kinda neat thing is that, uh, if you’re using sunscreen, which I believe all people should be using sunscreen if you’re gonna be spending time in the sun, that’s hoping to block the harmful rays the harmful rays that can actually cause DNA damage, the high energy UV rays. The infrared light that you get from the sun from natural sources, the red light, the infrared light, that can actually go right through that sunblock, and it’s operating at a lower intensity that does not produce DNA damage like UV light does. So you can be outside, you can get beneficial red and infrared rays from the sun directly naturally, and you can still wear your your sunscreen like you should, but it it’s good to have sunlight.

[11:40 –> 12:53] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Hey, guys. If you’re enjoying this podcast or it’s helping you, please help me get it out to the rest of the world. All you need to do is rate and review it on Apple Podcasts. Share it with a friend, post it on Facebook, and that’s basically it. The algorithm rewards engagement. Every review, every mention puts this show in front of someone who’s looking for clear, no nonsense health information, the type of information that I’m putting in these podcasts. So thanks so much, and let’s get back to it. Okay. So we all know being outside is good, and there’s a reason you feel good when you go outside. And that’s probably one of the factors is my guess. There’s, you know, there’s this thought that higher vitamin d levels and feeling good might just be a proxy marker for being outside in the sunshine more, which creates a whole beneficial effect on your body. I definitely think people should optimize their vitamin D levels. But I think it’s more complex than just vitamin D. So, we know we go outside, we get natural red light. What happens when you artificially, or through intervention apply light to the body in in these different spectrums that you talked about? Because we know it increases mitochondrial efficiency like you talked about, but what would we expect to see in the body? What happens at the tissue level?

[12:53 –> 15:32] Dr. Jason Rountree: So several different things. And the reason why we’d wanna look at doing this too is because most of us don’t have the option to just be outside as much as we’d really like to. And, like, places like where I am in Montana, during the winter, we don’t really get much sun. Right? So and it’s cold, so you’re not out for that long. It so in being able to kind of supplement light is is a pretty good idea in terms of seasonal affective disorder. Right? We’ve got people that use full spectrum light, especially in places like Canada and Alaska where, again, not a lot of sunshine, having some type of light therapy supplement is good. So what are we looking at happening? If we do take this red light, if we take this infrared light and we actually apply it, what’s gonna happen in the tissues when we’re supplementing light in this way? Well, several different things. Yes. We have those cellular effects we just talked about with the electron transport chain. We also seem to have a few different tissue based responses where you have improved tissue oxygenation and increased blood flow. So you actually can stimulate an improvement in vasodilation. Vasodilation means you pop up in those blood vessels, you get more blood flow to the areas that are being illuminated, and that can happen at the skin surface. So especially with red light very absorbed by the skin, you’re gonna get more blood flow to the skin surface. You’ll get more oxygenation of the skin itself, and then you’re getting these nice little, uh, mitochondrial effects as well. So we start thinking about, what does that do for the skin? Amazing things for the skin. Talk about skin rejuvenation. You’re talking about wrinkle reduction. Just basically, you’re taking down a little bit of that age related decline that we all are facing because you’re just giving the body more of what it needs through that red light. At the deeper level, you start thinking about improving cellular function and then also improving the rate of blood flow to tissues. What does that give you? That guy can give you all kinds of things. Improved blood flow fixes tons of stuff. Right? We know we don’t get good healing of connective tissues like ligaments and tendons when they get torn because of a lack of blood flow. So if you can take this noninvasive light, apply it to some of these either damaged or aging tissues, you can see a reversal of that damage, and it’s pretty clear. So one of the things that I really like doing is looking at connective tissue underneath ultrasound. So diagnostic ultrasound can show us the details of things like tendon tears, rotator cuff tears, and you can apply light. And we’ve got multiple studies now that show that applying the right kind of light to things like rotator cuff tears can actually reverse that damage. You can watch it happen on ultrasound. So Yeah. It’s pretty impressive what can be done all in that noninvasive manner.

[15:32 –> 15:40] Dr. Ravi Kumar: So you’re using Doppler ultrasound to look at blood flow to tendons and ligaments while you’re applying red light and you’re seeing increased blood flow?

[15:40 –> 16:58] Dr. Jason Rountree: Almost. So it is it is hard to do both. It is hard to apply the light and get good accurate readings. There there are some indications that, yes, we are getting a slight increase in some of the microcirculation. But I I went a little bit bigger than that, and I I ran some studies on my own, just very unofficial. I used my mandatory volunteer, my daughter, to, uh, look and see because she’s healthy healthy, uh, young lady who was happy to sit there and and have some laser and let me ultrasound her over time. And so what I did, I actually looked at deep blood flow, the palpitiole artery in the back of the knee, and we measured blood flow velocity. And then we applied laser, and then we looked at that blood flow velocity again. We got a 20% increase in blood flow velocity in the popliteal artery, which is a deep artery. We’re not talking about skin level. We’re talking about quite deep. And then I was like, oh, that’s cool. I wonder how long that lasts. Twenty minutes later, it started to slowly decrease, and then I couldn’t keep her on the table anymore to keep watching it. But that, uh, that was one of my indications that, yes, we can get a little bit of improvement in that microcirculation, which is kinda hard to see on ultrasound, but the actual measurable blood flow in the arteries is a very good improvement, and it does last much longer than just right when you’re shining the light on the tissues. Okay.

[16:58 –> 17:29] Dr. Ravi Kumar: So, yeah. So you’re increasing blood flow to tissues, which we all know that with improved tissue oxygenation, you get better tissue vitality, integrity, healing, quicker healing. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why nicotine causes people so many problems is because it it’s a systemic basal constrictor. What about tissue healing rate? Because you hear a lot about people using red light for skin, for increasing their elastic tissue to their skin, their collagen content to their skin. Does it promote growth and basically revitalization of tissues?

[17:29 –> 19:57] Dr. Jason Rountree: It does. And there’s a couple things that we should talk about with that. First of all, as soon as you just talk about cellular growth, it should start to ring little little red flags going, what about cancer cells then? Right? Especially, we’re talking about skin, people have a lot of sun exposure, melanoma. What if we have cancerous tissues or cancerous cells that are in those tissues and and we’re shining light on them? And the answer to that is we’re gonna need to be careful. We know that light therapy, red light and infrared light therapy, stimulates these cellular functions. It speeds up energy production. And on the theoretical side, that could be like giving crack cocaine to these cancer cells. It just blasts the, uh, the metabolic rate up and could theoretically, again, feed that process. We have a couple of studies with in vitro testing where they took cells, cancer cells, put them in a dish, shown laser on them, and showed that they grow faster under Okay. Red light or infrared light. We also have studies where they’re in vivo, meaning they take a rat with a tumor and shine laser on the tumor, and it actually slows down the tumor progression rate. So there’s a there’s an I don’t know on that one. Right. Generally, what I will tell everyone is if you know you have either a risky, suspicious spot on your skin or you are concerned that you may be having cancer, I will tell you to stay away from red light and laser at the moment because we just we don’t know which way that can go. So that’s something to be aware of. Right? But for most people, if you’re going to stimulate these different tissue changes, it’s going to be a beneficial thing. So you do get a temporary release, a temporary increase release of nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is a great vasodilator. Right? Now if it goes on for a very, very long period of time, can cause some cellular damage, but nitric oxide in general for a short little burst almost refreshes the tissues. The other thing that it can do when you have that nitric oxide release and this increased oxygenation tissues is you do get an increased production of collagen. And so, yes, you’re looking at skin health, especially, and that can go for some of these home devices that you’ll see on the market now. I think some of the home devices are out there are fantastic for especially skin rejuvenation, even sometimes hair growth. I think they can be useful. And and and they seem to be very safe, but, again, that caveat too, if you know you have a cancerous lesion that you’re getting, you know, evaluated or if you’re suspicious you have a spot, you wanna prevent getting more light really, of any type on that area, at least until we have more research to show which way that goes.

[19:57 –> 20:16] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay. So if you apply if you have healthy skin and you apply red light or infrared light to the skin, it increases collagen formation and elastic tissue deposition. What does that look like practically? I mean, what would someone want to use it for, and what kind of results would they see with maybe with these home devices?

[20:16 –> 21:43] Dr. Jason Rountree: Yeah. Absolutely. And there’s a there’s a ton of them out there now. Essentially, it’s something where you’re going to gradually reverse some of the some of the effects of aging. And so if you use it consistently and if you use it for a long enough period of time and you take care of your skin, you hydrate your skin, you don’t get excessive sun exposure without sunscreen, you should see some of those subjective signs of aging reverse. So if you’re going to do this, take some pictures of yourself, use this light therapy, at least three months, and and then take some more pictures and see what you think. Generally, it’s it’s not gonna be like you had a face lift. Right? But are you gonna have some gentle tightening that happens? Yes. You’re gonna have some smoothing of some of the lines around the mouth, for sure. Usually, you have some color improvements of the skin too. If you have discolorations or some of the the kinda age related skin color changes that can happen, that usually reduces as well. And it’s a great tool, but it is something you have to do pretty consistently to see it happen. It’s like going to the gym. If you go two or three times this week, you’re not gonna be stronger six months later. It just it doesn’t work that way. You need to have that consistent reinforcement so that you actually do see changes that happen gradually over time. The nice thing with it is, yeah, you can do it at home. It doesn’t cost a bajillion dollars. You don’t have to be going into a med spa or a, you know, a dermatology office to have procedures like that done. It’s something you can do at home. It’s natural. It’s completely comfortable. And, heck, you can even listen music, watch a video, something like that while you’re doing it.

[21:43 –> 21:46] Dr. Ravi Kumar: So how often would you have to do it to see a noticeable result?

[21:46 –> 22:15] Dr. Jason Rountree: I generally encourage people to do that five days a week. You can probably get away with three days a week. I don’t think you have to do it every day. I think five days a week is pretty good. And then depending on the device you get, it can be as little as five minutes. It just Okay. Depends on what what type of device you get. Generally, more power is going to cost more, and more power means faster treatments. But when we’re talking about skin, especially, you don’t need some hugely powerful device that has all these different features. Basic red light is going to be helpful.

[22:15 –> 22:21] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay. So what about you you mentioned hair loss. Is that for androgenic alopecia? Does it work for that?

[22:21 –> 23:46] Dr. Jason Rountree: Specifically, androgenic alopecia, yes. Although, we’ve seen some results, um, for women as well. It, again, is something that does need to be repeated. That one is at least a three days a week kinda treatment. There are a number of different hats and helmets that you’ll see on the market now of very wildly different quality. And because we’re talking about, again, still the skin. Right? The the scalp, um, and the hair follicles are are very shallow, you can get away with a fairly low power device. So you don’t have to spend $5 on on a helmet for hair health and hair restoration. The other thing with hair restoration that, as you know, there’s a bajillion factors to hair loss. Right? Genetics are a big factor. Inflammation is a factor. Stress, all you know, the type of shampoo you use, all of that feeds in. So make sure you don’t skip the simple things. You know, stress reduction and sleep go a long way towards helping you retain your hair, but it is one of those things where light therapy can definitely be a big benefit in helping to reduce the inflammation that can attack the hair follicles and then shut them down, and also in reactivating hair follicles that have been dormant. And we know that hair follicles that have been dormant for, you know, even five years can be reactivated with the right triggers. So it’s a noninvasive, completely comfortable thing that you can do in, you know, at least three days a week, and it can be a big factor for helping you, uh, avoid that hair transplant potentially.

[23:46 –> 23:59] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay. So a guy who’s bald, he’s shaving his head, uh, and he’s been bald for a while, there’s still potentially living hair follicles there that can be reactivated with red light?

[23:59 –> 25:25] Dr. Jason Rountree: Yes. We we kinda use the rule of if it’s been seven years, that that hair follicle is gone. Right? But hair follicles go through a a number of different stages, and, uh, a dermatologist is gonna know more about this than than I will for sure, and you probably do too. But these hair follicle stages they go through, you go through about a six week cycle of growth, activation, and then thinning, and then you go into dormancy. You can sit in that dormancy period for five to seven years, and that hair follicle can still be reactivated in the right environment. So what we generally will tell people, no matter what type of, um, hair restoration we’re doing, whether it is simple light therapy like this or we’re doing, uh, PRP injections into the scalp, whatever type of hair loss strategy we’re going after is, whatever you look like seven years ago, it’s not gonna be better than that. So the sooner you start, the better. If you’re a 40 or 50 year old guy and you’re going, man, I’m I’m really starting to thin, start it now. Work on it now because every bit that you wait is that less result you’ll get. So the sooner you can get to it, start light therapy, start using good products for your hair, even even scalp massage. You know, that doesn’t cost a dime. You can do that in the shower every morning. Just make sure you’re getting good circulation into that that scalp. That can be helpful for reducing hair loss. But, yeah, light therapy is a really, really good tool, and you can use it forever. There’s no limit to how long you can use light therapy. It’s not like you can do it for a month and you have to take a break. You can use it for the rest of your life if you want to.

[25:25 –> 27:17] Dr. Ravi Kumar: I mean, it makes sense. It’s increasing blood flow to the scalp. It’s reducing inflammation. It’s increasing the biological and metabolic activity of these cells. It makes sense that would work. And it honestly, it’s surprising that given the evidence and the empirical results that your primary care doctor’s not prescribing this once you start to thin your hair. I mean, no doctor’s ever told me that, you know? And I’ve noticed over the last, you know, decade that my hair is thinning. And this is something I’ve started doing on my own as well because I’ve I’ve really had, uh, great benefits from red light. But, yeah, it’s it’s a real it’s a real thing. You know, this red light and different wavelengths of light increase the metabolic activity of your tissues, and the skin is on the outside. You know? The hair follicles are, like, millimeters with below the bottom of the skin. So it makes sense. What about deeper tissues? Because I think this is a big one. This is somewhere I’ve had a lot of benefit is in pain. When I was studying for my board exams to get board certified for neurosurgery, I got horrible back pain. And, you know, this is something I treat in my practice. And I was just suffering for months, literally. And that’s when I started reading on the literature on about red light and infrared light and how it can modulate pain. I’m not joking. I bought a about a kilowatt powered red light box. And within two days, my back pain was gone after months of it. And it was totally remarkable. And then I told my dad about it, who suffered with back pain, and my mother-in-law, and everyone everyone’s back pain got better. And, you know, here I am a neurosurgeon who treats people with chronic back pain, and I didn’t even know about this until I finally found its benefit on my own body. So tell me about that penetration of these deeper tissues and its benefits for pain and arthritis and inflammation.

[27:17 –> 31:15] Dr. Jason Rountree: Absolutely. So this is really where I got started in light and laser therapies was for pain, and I was a 100% against it. I had zero faith that this little flashlight looking thing was gonna do anything. I learned a little bit about laser when I was in chiropractic school. And, basically, it was a, hey. This helps a little bit for pain sometimes. It’s a tool. It’s one of the physiotherapy tools that they taught us along with things like therapeutic ultrasound and diathermy and things like that. That’s fine, but it’s really not fixing anything. Right? So then I moved on, whatever. And I’m not interested in things that don’t make much of a difference. But my mother was dealing with horrible amounts of back pain, um, and couldn’t sit, couldn’t hardly walk, was having just a real difficult time. Along with that, she was having headaches and had been getting headaches every day for about fifteen years, and she had twenty years of gut dissection with chronic constipation. And so she’s, like, just layered on all these things, and she wasn’t even old. At this point, she was, like, in her early fifties, mid fifties, and she was seeing a naturopath and an an MD, and she had a chiropractor she was working with. I mean, all these different people, and she really was just getting worse. And she’s talking to me. I was living in a different state than her at that point. And, um, I was like, I don’t know what to do. I sent her to a physical therapist thinking maybe we should get, you know, to getting things moving, maybe we can get the back pain down. Nothing was working, and she found a guy on the East Coast who is doing laser therapy. And I said, mom, that’s not gonna help. That’s I know about laser therapy. Right? That that just, you know, a temporary pain relief. Me and all my wisdom. Right? And she’s like, well, at this point, I have only time and money to lose, and I don’t care about either one of those because I have zero quality of life right now. Fair enough. So she heads out east to basically stay and be worked on by this gentleman who is running a laser therapy practice. And, um, within a week, her headaches were gone. Within two weeks, her gut was working completely normally. And the back pain actually took a little bit longer, but within about four weeks, that was better too. And so I was like, okay. There’s something to this, and that’s what led me to say, okay. What is really happening here? And just like you, I got into the research, realized there actually is enormous amounts of research. We’re over 6,000 studies now for laser therapy, and a lot of those are focused on musculoskeletal pain. So to get into what what happens, how does that work? Well, there’s several different mechanisms by which these different types of light can improve pain. So a lot of the pain sensors that are gonna give you those those red flags of, hey. This hurts. This is not good, are located in the skin. Those those those nerve endings in the skin, and that is something that you do need to address when it comes to pain, I feel. Red light, very absorbable in the skin, helps to settle down those hyperactive pain sensors in in those in those superficial tissues. And the near infrared light from either LEDs or lasers can penetrate to the deeper pain sensors, which are really, really important as well. One thing that happens when you can get enough light to those pain sensors, you get a decrease in those nociceptive signals. So we actually impede the rate at which the pain sensing nerve fibers will send you signals. So in a way, one of the effects is you diminish pain signaling, and that’s great. If you’re in pain, you want less pain signaling. It’s going to mean that you feel better. That doesn’t really fix the problem. But while you’re getting that pain reduction, that nociceptive suppression, you’re also getting the effects we already talked about with the cellular energy improvement. You’re getting more blood flow even to the deeper tissues. You’ve got this release of nitric oxide, which helps to stimulate improvement and function, and it also seems to reduce the inflammatory cytokine production from inflammatory processes, which is huge when you start talking about arthritis because the inflammation that goes with arthritis is where everybody’s pain comes from.

[31:15 –> 31:15] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah.

[31:15 –> 32:05] Dr. Jason Rountree: I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen people with horrible amounts of arthritis in their back, and they’re like, I feel fine. They’re not dealing with inflammation, but you even get mild mild arthritis in there, and it gets inflamed, and it is horrendous amounts of pain. So if you can help to control that inflammatory response, bring that down a little bit, and you’re helping to reduce that nociceptive input to the brain, people feel better really quickly. I have people that get off the table after treatment all the time and go, I can’t believe it already feels better from a single session. So it’s it’s got multiple layers of effect there, which again is, I think, why it is seen as really effective. It’s it’s impressive what you can do with both spine and knee arthritis really, really rapidly. And are we are we reversing their arthritis? No. But we’re diminishing that pain signaling and inflammation that goes along with that arthritic process.

[32:05 –> 32:09] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Right. So spine and knee are the areas where you see the biggest benefit for red light?

[32:09 –> 32:13] Dr. Jason Rountree: Spine and knee are the ones where we have the most research.

[32:13 –> 32:13] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay.

[32:13 –> 32:48] Dr. Jason Rountree: The knee, specifically, when when it comes to arthritis. We see a ton of research, and at this point, it’s it’s just very well accepted. We had a, um, we had a really nice consensus publication that came out last year that said, look, at this point, when it comes to musculoskeletal pain, laser’s a no brainer. It works. And when it comes to the amount of research we have for arthritis, the knee’s the big one, but we have research for ankle arthritis. We have research for shoulder arthritis and the spine as well, and the vast majority of studies that have been done all show positive responses, positive results. None of them have shown any negative effects.

[32:48 –> 33:51] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Hey, everybody. I want you to imagine something. Someone somewhere discovered that cutting out a certain food lowered their blood pressure, or a simple daily practice eliminated their headaches, or drinking coffee two hours later helped them sleep through the night. These discoveries exist, but that knowledge is like a grain of sand on a beach halfway around the world for the rest of us. And that’s the problem I’m trying to solve with an app I’m building called sharemytrial.com. This is a platform where people share health solutions that worked for them, and then the community validates what works on a broader scale. Right now, I’m looking for beta testers. So if you’re interested, go to sharemytrial.com, and sign up. Help me turn that grain of sand into a pearl in your palm. So it sounds like increased blood flow, decreased inflammation, increased healing, and basically nociceptive blocking or pain blocking. When you stack those together, you get some significant benefit.

[33:51 –> 34:41] Dr. Jason Rountree: Absolutely. Even one treatment can do at least some level of temporary improvement for people. And you start to put several of those treatments together. Once we get to, usually, it’s six or nine sessions or so that are all fairly close together, you also see an increase in angiogenesis or the building of new blood vessels into areas that have been stressed or injured, and that can have longer term payoff as well. So, yes, we get some immediate improvement. We usually if we can get a few treatments in a, um, you know, in close proximity, you’ll see some longer lasting results for people as well. I’ve been in practice here now ten years. I have people all the time that come back to me six, seven years later and go, hey. Yeah. That thing we worked on with my back, still great, but I just injured my elbow. So can you fix that now too? So that longer term follow-up there is just phenomenal. You don’t really see that, um, with with a lot of other interventions.

[34:41 –> 35:21] Dr. Ravi Kumar: You know, you think about it. I operate on the back all the time. Every single week I’m operating on people’s spines. And I’m doing basically destructive work. I have to remove parts of the spine. It’s called laminectomies, foraminotomies. I’m removing discs and putting in oftentimes implants. And that’s all basically taking away from the natural architecture of the spine to try to get pressure off nerves and and improve pain. And I’m not at all arguing against my specialty, but if you find an alternative that not only makes your symptoms better, but makes the tissues healthier, stronger, more vital, go with it, honestly.

[35:21 –> 36:35] Dr. Jason Rountree: I think that’s the mark of a good surgeon right there, is someone who goes, okay. Look, I can do all these things, but I really don’t wanna have to. If there’s some other way to do this to get your pain relief, then I can because I’m sure you’ve got cases that caudate equina syndrome. Right? And things like burst fractures and horrible things that they need surgery, they need to be fixated. But I’m sure a bunch of your practice is also people who have this chronic degenerative stuff that is just really painful. And, yes, they need surgery by the time they get to your office, but if folks in my position can help reduce that, they’re going to probably be better off. You’ve got things like adjacent segment disease when you have lumbar fusions. Right? It’s gonna happen. It’s you’re gonna have biomechanical effects on the levels above and below where you have that fusion done. There’s not a good way to avoid it. I don’t care how great you are as a surgeon. That’s just the biomechanics of the body, which means, potentially, that person’s going to maybe deal with more issues down the road. And if we can stop that before it gets so bad that they have to be in your office, I think that’s fantastic. And the neat thing with laser and light therapy in general is you can do a trial of care. And if you don’t see that improvement within even a couple of weeks, maybe it is time to look at surgery. But it’s worth a trial. You can know pretty quickly.

[36:35 –> 37:13] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Honestly, it’s it’s low risk, high potential yield. Like your mom said, the only thing you have to lose is time and money. And, honestly, if you do some of these home therapies, it’s not that much money either. Now, talk to us about how you actually introduce red light and infrared light to the body. Because, you know, I have a red light panel. It’s LEDs. LEDs at six sixty nanometers, which is red light, and then eight fifty nanometers, which is infrared light, and it uses them in combination to irradiate the tissues. But you’ve talked a lot about lasers. What’s the difference here, and how are you applying it and choosing how to use it on people’s bodies?

[37:13 –> 41:02] Dr. Jason Rountree: That is really a a big question, and it’s something that basically everybody needs to know about. So I I say laser a lot. Our older term was laser therapy. Our newest term is photobiomodulation, meaning that we’re changing the biology of the tissues with light or photons. And here’s the thing that really forms basis of it. A photon doesn’t care what makes it. It’s just a photon. Right? It’s a particle of light. It doesn’t care if it comes from an LED or the sun or a laser, but the initial studies were done with laser because we could isolate single wavelengths like 660 nanometers. And we can know that at this particular wavelength, this exact type, this exact color of light can have these different effects. So lasers have been the mainstay of most of the health care side of light therapies for a long time, but they are expensive. They’re very expensive. LEDs are cheaper. You can produce large amounts of light with LEDs at a much lower rate, and it’s also safe for the eyes. Most people know you don’t shine a laser light in your eye. Right? It’s because the lens of the eye will actually focus that and will burn a hole right in your retina when it comes to laser light. So lasers have that risk, uh, depending on their power of potential eye damage, and they’re, again, very expensive. They have some advantages. Lasers are truly monochromatic, meaning that it is one type of light. So 660 nanometers, every photon that comes out of that laser is exactly 660 nanometers. LEDs, pretty close. They’re gonna be probably six thirty to six eighty. You know, there’s a range. And is there a big difference in that range? Not so much on the visible red, but when it comes to the invisible infrared, the near infrared, even just 10 to 20 nanometers away from that 800 or 850 number can change the tissue effects. An example is 930, 940 nanometers is where you get a lot of fat absorption, meaning that the light gets basically soaked up into the fat and doesn’t go past the the fatty tissue underneath the skin. But 970 nanometers has a big effect on blood flow. So it actually passes through that fatty layer. So if you want a very specific type of tissue effect, lasers are gonna be your better choice because you’re looking for that very specific effect to not be interfered with. But they’re also very expensive. So a good a really good class four laser at a clinical grade level will cost you 30 to $60,000 today. It’s a lot. Most people don’t need a class four clinical laser in their home to do most of these treatments, and so you can get LEDs to do almost as good at a much, much greater advantage to your wallet. So there there are advantages to lasers. I recommend high intensity class four lasers to anybody that’s gonna use them in a healthcare practice because they are fast, they are precise, and you can exactly tune in what you wanna do. But for general care, wound healing, for general pain, antiaging stuff, if you’re gonna use something at home, LEDs are very good for that. The last thing about LEDs versus lasers is lasers are collimated and directed, so that light all travels one direction. LEDs are not. LEDs are more like a light bulb. You get light that goes everywhere. So you lose a lot of the intensity of LEDs the further you get away from that panel or that handpiece or whatever you’re using. And you can mitigate that to some degree by just being closer to that light source, but because you already have that spread, you’re gonna have more tissue scattering too, which means that light gets into the tissues and it’s already going different directions. So, generally, you’ll have a little bit less penetration. Does that make a huge difference for home uses? No. Not in my opinion. But, again, for clinicians, you’re you’re gonna want an actual laser for most of the treatments you’re gonna do there that are anything beyond skin wellness.

[41:02 –> 41:14] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay. So is there any benefit to scatter? Uh, you know, because I’ve read some sources saying that this scatter of red light you get when it enters your body creates this diffuse general, well, uh, benefit to the human body.

[41:14 –> 42:19] Dr. Jason Rountree: Yes. Nobody’s asked me that before. I’m so glad. This is great. Okay. So light scatters within the tissues. Think about, like, if you shine a flashlight through your hand. Right? You see a big glow, you know, if the room’s dark, you see a big glow through your hand, and it’s bigger than the flashlight beam. Right? That’s scatter. It’s light going into the tissues and then going different directions from there, and light scatters differently based on the wavelength. So red and 800 nanometer infrared light has a huge amount of scatter, which means it can hit the tissues, then it can go laterally, all kinds of different directions, and it can give you a larger area of effect, and that can be good. But every photon that scatters out also is not a photon that’s going deeper in. So when it comes to deeper tissue, less scatter is better. That’s where a wavelength like 1,064 nanometers has way less scatter, and so it has very, very deep penetration that it can do. Um, and so when it comes to things like transcranial applications, eight hundred and ten sixty four light, those are the wavelengths that actually can go through the scalp, through the skull, and start to affect the brain tissues themselves.

[42:19 –> 42:41] Dr. Ravi Kumar: And I do wanna talk about, uh, transcranial photobiomodulation, Uh, but I do wanna before we move on, I wanna ask you about how you specifically are gonna treat back, knee, shoulder, wrist pain. Say someone comes to your office. You got two patients. One says, I’ve got horrible back pain, had it for months. The other says, I can’t walk on my knee. It’s it’s so painful. How are you gonna treat them?

[42:41 –> 46:31] Dr. Jason Rountree: So we’re gonna do the basics. Right? We’re gonna do a good thorough exam. We’re gonna do any imaging that is really necessary if there’s any need for imaging there. We’re gonna try and make sure that we know what we’re getting into. But let’s say we’ve done that. We know both of these folks are dealing with some degenerative inflammatory disease, osteoarthritis, which is super, super common. We’re all gonna have some at some point. How do we treat that patient with that back pain? Well, first of all, I’m gonna make sure that they are supported so they’re not doing things day to day to make the back more angry. And that means if they’re bending and that hurts to bend, we’re gonna prevent them from bending for a little bit. Sometimes we’ll put them in a back brace. Right? Because the more we agitate those tissues or or let those tissues get irritated, it’s gonna fight against anything that we’re trying to do on the anti inflammatory side. That’s gonna be very temporary. Right? We want to just protect the tissues while we can, and then we want to get them back to natural movement when we can, as soon as we can. But while we protect the tissues, we’re going to then do a couple different things. If that patient’s gonna treat at home, we’re gonna make sure they have a very high power LED device that is eye safe, but that they can use every day at home. Depending on the device, maybe it’s ten minutes, maybe it’s thirty minutes. The back, you cut into backs all the time. You know how deep those structures are, and so we need to try and trickle enough light to those deeper levels that it actually has good payoff. Soon as we can get the pain down and they can start moving well again, we need to get those joints moving. We need to get the spine back to doing motions that it wasn’t wanting to do, and, hopefully, that’s within just a couple weeks. What we know, motion is lotion. Movement is good. We wanna restore good motion as soon as we can, and we can still keep using that LED panel at home. We can still keep using even the brace if we need to, but we wanna start restoring motion as soon as we can to get good motion in the joints, good fluid exchange, and so forth. They are in severe pain, um, and that’s usually when I see people is when their pain is like, yeah. I can’t I can’t handle this anymore. We’re gonna do class four laser immediately. As soon as they’re here and we know what we’re dealing with, we’re gonna get class four laser treatment on there. The lasers that I use, you can actually get about 10,000 joules, which is our our measure of energy for light. You can get a enormous amount of energy into those tissues in, like, three minutes. And so people are gonna feel they feel a little bit of warmth for that, but it’s completely comfortable. And pretty much every time, they feel better right then because we have diminished that nociceptive input because it’s a high dose. We’re we’re snuff we’re kinda holding down that pain signaling, but that also starts then our repair process. So we’re gonna send them home with instructions to hydrate well, get some good protein in, and then they’re gonna be back a few times a week until we can get that pain or control and again return into motion. The knee the knee is a little bit different. If somebody’s got severe knee pain, we’re gonna, again, probably focus on getting that class four laser going as soon as possible. It’s not really one that I wanna just send them home with an LED because the class four laser and and and class three lasers can do very well as well. Lower power lasers can do well too. But the class four is just fast. So we can get somebody feeling better really pretty rapidly, and I wanna get them started on exercise, just basic open chain motion pretty quickly because the knee thrives with good strength and good mobility. Now they may need to protect it, not go walking around, you know, hiking and stuff. Right. But motion is gonna be a good thing for that knee. And then that goes along with trying to stay on top of it really rapidly, try and get in, say, three treatments, four treatments a week in a within a couple weeks. That usually brings that pain level down really rapidly, and then we can focus on, okay, how do we make sure that this pain relief is gonna last and that we’re working against future episodes too? Because osteoarthritis pain is episodic. That’s why it can be it can be there, it can be a problem, and then people can go, no. It’s been pretty good for a couple years, and then it’ll hit them again. Right. Strength is your shield for that. And light therapy can be part of that shield too, but strengthening is free, and you can do it at home if you’ll just do it.

[46:31 –> 46:33] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Just gotta do it.

[46:33 –> 47:00] Dr. Jason Rountree: You gotta do it, man. Most patients won’t. Uh, strength really is is a huge one, and so that’s why I’m a big fan of using laser, using light therapy to bring down pain levels, get people where they feel like, okay. I’ve got control of this thing. Now I can start moving like I’m supposed to again, um, because that’s where we really see the most improvement is people who will stick with the treatment plan short short term, most of the time, short term treatment plan, and then start moving and following the directions for for exercise. Right.

[47:00 –> 47:10] Dr. Ravi Kumar: So when you use this, uh, category four laser, what parts of the spine and the knee are you targeting? Are you looking for particular parts of the anatomy that you actually hit with the laser?

[47:10 –> 47:24] Dr. Jason Rountree: We don’t so much now. So when I first got started in lasers thirteen thirteen years ago? A while ago. Most of lasers we were using were class three. We just didn’t have that many class four lasers available to us, and they were pretty high highly expensive.

[47:24 –> 47:29] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Tell us first what the difference between category three and category four is, so we understand.

[47:29 –> 50:24] Dr. Jason Rountree: I apologize. You’re exactly right. Lasers are classified based on power, and everything up to a half of a watt of power or brightness think about it just like a light bulb. Right? You put in screw in a 100 watt light bulb, it’s gonna be pretty bright. Lasers up to a half a watt of power are classified as class one, two, or three. Anything above half a watt is gonna be classified as class four. So if you have a one watt laser, that’s gonna be a class four laser. If you have a laser that maxes out at, say, 250 milliwatts, that’ll be a class three laser. If you have a 100 watt laser, which is what I typically use in practice, that’s still a class four laser. Still, even though it’s way, way, way high power. Um, and and then the lasers they use to shoot down missiles, those are class four lasers. So anything anything above half a watt is gonna be in the class four range. And so when we say class four, it’s just talking about the risk to the eye. There is a significant risk to the eye if you were to stare right into a class four laser. Class three, there’s a very, very small risk to the eye looking directly in, and then anything below class three isn’t either no risk or very minimal risk to the eye. That’s where those classes come from. There’s nothing magical or different about class four versus class three. We’re just talking more power, and that usually translates to a faster treatment and can translate to more penetration depth. Because the light is brighter and you’re using a larger spot size, you can actually get more photons to a a greater depth, but that’s the biggest difference there. So when when I first started using class three lasers, they’re like using a pen. You’ve got a very specific spot, and you almost do have to be strategic about where you place that. I wanna be right on the facet joint here or, you know, in the spine, or I wanna be right in this SI joint, the superior part of the SI joint, or I I need to be on the sacral tuberous ligament, or I need to be, you know and so you get really concerned about where you’re putting that light because you only have a little bit of light. Your class four lasers are you’re looking at a a spot that’s huge, and your LEDs, large areas. So we don’t necessarily anymore target specific structures, and I think that’s important for especially the spine because the spine is so complex, as you well know, that you can have multiple pain generating structures. You can have somebody with facet capsule pain and inflammation, but they can also, at the same time, be having discogenic pain. They can also be having SI joint pain, and it can all be happening together. And if you only address one of those things, the patient’s still in pain. You wanna make sure you’re addressing it all, and so we’ll typically cover a large area, which I think is one of the benefits of both the high intensity class four lasers and also the home use LEDs because you’re covering a large area. And when it comes to the spine, that’s just smart. The shoulder, less important. The elbow, definitely less important, you know, but when it comes to the spine, the complexities are just huge, and you don’t wanna miss anything for that patient. We’re gonna we’re gonna cover large areas, essentially.

[50:24 –> 50:36] Dr. Ravi Kumar: I see. So with these category four lasers, you’ve got a basically, a round target area that you can shine into the joint space. Is that where you’re going? Or are you moving it around?

[50:36 –> 51:40] Dr. Jason Rountree: Generally, you’ll keep a handpiece like that in continuous motion. If you leave it in place, depending on the power and the intensity, you can build up a decent amount of heat in the superficial tissues, and that can start to get uncomfortable. And, also, too much heat can actually work against you. Some heat is fine. Some heat is actually good for pain, especially, but the heat’s just a a byproduct really. And so most of the time, we’ll keep that that handpiece in motion with a high intensity class four laser. Whereas, with a low intensity laser, you can leave it in place, and you really have to because if you if you don’t leave it in place, if you try and scan a huge area, you’re just distributing a small amount of light over a large area, and it doesn’t do you much good. And that’s why with an LED treatment, you’re covering a large area. You don’t need to necessarily move that LED around, but it’s gonna take time. You’ve gotta give it time to really bake, kinda slow cook that area, if you will, so that you really soak the tissues down in the light. Um, but with class four, it just the the intensity is so high, you can really cover a large area with a handpiece, or you can keep it pretty small. You just have to watch, uh, how much intensity you’re looking at there.

[51:40 –> 51:49] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Right. So you or a technician is sitting in there treating a patient, and you’re moving this laser around on the affected area for three minutes. Is that what you said?

[51:49 –> 52:54] Dr. Jason Rountree: Yes, sir. Three minutes. You can go longer. You can you can go shorter. It really depends on the device and kinda your strategy. The time is one of the big factors there. But, yeah, very quick. We have a technician that can do it as long as they’re trained and certified. Health care providers, um, licensed health care health care providers can do laser in most states. So it really depends on then your device and what you’re going for. And and as an example, that translates both to LEDs and class four lasers, more dose does give you better pain reduction because it gives you more of that nociceptive reduction, more, you know, more pain signaling turning down. However, the higher in dose you go, you start to lose the effects of biostimulation or getting better ATP production, better blood flow. And so there’s a balance there where, yes, you wanna get plenty of light in, but you don’t wanna use your LED device for eight hours. Right? You’re gonna start to work against yourself, and it might feel okay for a bit, but you start to really lose the effects. So there is this balance of enough power, enough time, but not so much you start to actually work against yourself. Okay.

[52:54 –> 54:03] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Well, very cool. Let’s move on to the brain because this is something that’s very fascinating in me. I operate on the brain all the time. And, you know, the brain is 2% of our body weight, but it takes up 20 it uses 20% of our body’s energy. It is the most energy consumptive tissue in our body per weight. Our muscles might use more, but they’re much heavier. We’ve got these degenerative problems that happen later in life most of the time, like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease. And the overriding theory before all this other stuff happens, like, you know, fibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques and all of this, is that there is a problem with energy production in these cells that are so highly dependent on producing lots of energy. And red light, infrared light, penetrates the skull, interestingly. I mean, we have ultrasound can’t even penetrate the skull. We have to use magnetic resonance and CT imaging to even look at the brain because nothing else can get through the skull. So I’m curious to know how is red light and infrared light used in the brain? Are there benefits to increasing energy production and in the setting of these neurodegenerative diseases?

[54:03 –> 60:39] Dr. Jason Rountree: Yes. This is, I think, where we’re going to see light therapies really be of the largest benefit in the coming decade or so. I listened to your episode with doctor Elahi and transcranial magnetic stimulation. I kept thinking, man, a lot of this that these guys are talking about right now actually crosses over to the way that we use laser transcranial. So if you’re listening to this podcast today and you haven’t heard, uh, doctor Kumar’s interview with doctor Elahi, highly encourage you to listen to that one. I really enjoyed it. It the the science behind transcranial magnetic stimulation is really impressive. There’s gonna be some crossover and some things that I say right now that sound a lot alike. So, yes, the biggest thing with some of the changes in the brain that seems to trigger these deposition of the amyloid plaques and and formation of these neurofibrillary tangles really is sourced in neuroinflammation and potentially in a reduced glymphatic flow or actual evacuation of fluid from the brain. And so anything you can do to improve circulation, glymphatic flow, any of that should help with reducing neuroinflammation, which is why I think we see things like exercise. Basically, going for a walk every day can actually lower the risk of things like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Neurodegenerative diseases respond really well to even low levels of exercise because low level exercise provide more blood flow, provide more glymphatic exchange. If we can use light to do the same thing, then we can actually access those layers of the brain. And so people go, well, there’s no way that light actually goes through bone. That was my opinion until we started looking at the research, and turns out the skull, especially flat bones, are basically translucent to the right colors of infrared light, and especially 800 nanometers and ten sixty four, like I mentioned earlier. Those are the ones that have the deepest penetration and then also have a good balance of scattering to be able to actually reach the brain. Now, only about 2% of light will go from the outside to the actual top layers of the brain, the the outer layers of the brain. So one thing you’ve gotta do is you’ve gotta start with a lot of light. That’s where I really believe that the class four laser really does have an advantage over LEDs. Not to say LEDs aren’t useful, but class four laser is starting with an enormous amount of light directed in one position, and you’re going to get more penetration through the skull to the surface of the brain. But what happens once we get light to the brain? Well, we’re not cooking the brain. We’re not increasing the heat of the of the tissue at all. They’ve done some good studies on that recently to say, okay, you know, we’re not even seeing a a a point two Celsius increase at all in brain temperature. So what happens when you can get this light to the brain is you start to do what we do everywhere else. We get more circulation, you get a little burst of nitric oxide, uh, production that helps with many different processes, you get a reduction in the inflammatory state, and you get an improvement in the mitochondria, and those are all that’s all great stuff for the brain. Now is doing one or two treatments going to prevent you from getting Alzheimer’s? No. No. Everything else matters too. So when we start talking about using light for things like neurodegenerative disorders, this is this is a support role. Right? You’re not gonna laser your brain once a week and never get Alzheimer’s, and you can smoke and eat all the trash you want to. That’s not how that works. It really is focused on that laser can do a supportive role to enhance the rate at which the brain can actually recover and reduce that neuroinflammation. And we can see this across different disorders as well, not just Parkinson’s, not just Alzheimer’s. Doctor Fred Schiffer, he is a neuropsychologist who has done some massive, uh, research with even LEDs on the brain for addiction and opioid craving, and has seen crazy results there. There’s been results in depression, major depressive disorder, anxiety, traumatic brain injury, stroke. It’s almost like really? How? How is it that good? Well, very much like everything else we’ve talked about, we’re just helping the body’s own mechanisms to improve that glymphatic flow, to improve that inflammatory state, and that means that the body can do what it’s designed to do, which is keep itself in good shape. But the really cool thing with with laser is it’s easy. It’s got zero impact to somebody’s day beyond a few minutes of time, and it is something you can do at home. We have some pretty impressive wearable units now. I’m not associated with with Violyte, but Violyte has made a a wearable head harness that puts the right type of light into the brain, and they are showing some very, very good results for neurodegenerative diseases, and you can do it at home. Yeah. Neuronic is another one. Again, not associated with them, but have come up with a very good helmet style device that you can wear at home, you know, a few minutes a day, and it’s showing some pretty promising results. I think we’re gonna see a really good improvement in that. One of the things that people have that that people deal with with Alzheimer’s too is irritability and caregivers having problems trying to get them to do things. It’s really pretty easy to get most of these folks to be okay with wearing a hat for about ten minutes. It’s not it’s not too bad. It’s it’s way easier than getting to do a lot of other things. And so it’s something that is feasible to do at home and see some results, and if you can support that with even in clinic treatments with some of the more powerful units, that combination can be pretty much life changing for some of these folks. I had a gentleman, one of my favorite cases. It’s had to be a couple years ago now. He came in and he was in the early stages of dementia, and he had been diagnosed with mild Alzheimer’s. So he was past the mild cognitive impairment stage, and he was into actual diagnosed Alzheimer’s. But he was holding it together, his family was helping him, very supportive, and, um, we brought him in. He was desperate to try something on the light therapy side. We did some of the initial tests including the clock drawing test. I’m sure you’re really familiar with that. If, uh, somebody’s listening hasn’t heard that one, basically, you have the patient try and draw an analog clock face and give him a time to put on there. And it sounds really simple, but it’s kind of a complex motion that if the person’s brain is not functioning where it should because of a neurodegenerative disease, it’s a very, very difficult task to complete. And, uh, this gentleman, he couldn’t even get a circle. He couldn’t even start to draw that clock face. We worked on him for six weeks, and that gentleman was able to show us what time 03:30 was on his next clock drawing. And that is incredible changes incredible changes over a short period of time. It’s still a neurodegenerative disease. You still have to keep up with it, but you can actually improve quality of life and functioning by enormous amounts with something as simple as light.

[60:39 –> 61:29] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Right. So, yeah, that clock drawing, for us, you know, for someone who’s got normal brain health, it seems easy. Right? But there’s an extraordinary amount of coordination and conceptual thought that goes into drawing a symbol that represents a time. And it’s part of the, uh, mini mental status exam where we have this series of things that people do. And drawing the clock is almost universally not done well by someone who has dementia. The fact that you saw improvements of that is is an objective improvement. And that is not just he can draw a clock better. He can do other things in his life better that require planning and abstract thought to accomplish all the things we do in our daily lives. So that that’s really cool. And are you seeing consistent benefits for people with dementia and Alzheimer’s with red light therapy?

[61:29 –> 62:53] Dr. Jason Rountree: Yes. Very consistent. Okay. And, yeah, I’m glad you pointed out. Yeah. It’s not just about drawing clocks. There’s a lot more to it than that. Obviously, this gentleman had a lot of subjective reports of improvement, so did his family, but that was one of our objectives. Say, hey. This is actually different. It’s actually better. But very consistent improvement with the mild cases. So very much like hair loss, don’t wait. The sooner you start, the bigger your results will be. If you’re in that mild cognitive impairment side, you’ve been told, well, you’re not really you don’t really have Alzheimer’s yet. It’s just this no. You do. You do. It’s happening right now. Mild cognitive impairment will be Alzheimer’s. It’s gonna happen. Start doing things now. Laser therapy, light therapy, absolutely a great tool. Do it now. It will be more beneficial now, 100%. Do all the other things too. Do your cognitive exercises, go for walks, you know. Those are important, really important, but start laser now. It will have much more noticeable benefit. I’ve worked on cases that were in the moderate and severe, and, yes, you can get some improvements. They are much more limited improvements, and they are much more temporary. You need much more intensive care. So the sooner you can start making those changes, the more significant the improvements will be. And things like transcranial magnetic stimulation too, same idea. The sooner you start something like that for neurodegenerative disorders, the faster someone’s going to have improvements and the the more remarkable the improvements will be too.

[62:53 –> 64:21] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Exactly. Yeah. You know, there’s something you should think about with neurodegenerative diseases. And that is that the brain is degenerating. And so there’s loss of structure as the process goes on. The hippocampus atrophies. The frontal lobes atrophy. And these vital connections and processes, they’re lost once that architecture is gone. So you do wanna start early. And you’ve mentioned walking several times. Walking is the best medicine in the world, full stop. There’s nothing else that benefits our biology, you know, more than walking. We can talk about red light and transcranial magnetic stimulation, but you’ve got to stay active because the human body was meant to move. You’ve got to take care of your metabolic health because that’s something that is ailing in most people in our society. And metabolic health leads to all sorts of problems with energy production, which leads to inflammation. And we’re using red light in transcranial magnetic stimulation and cold water therapy and all these other things to try to reduce inflammation. But if you’ve got something that’s constantly causing it, you’re just wiping water off the floor in the end because you haven’t unplugged your sink. So you’ve got to unplug the sink by doing the basic things that doctor Rountree keeps mentioning. Red light can be a great way to get over that hump. You’re on the wrong path. You need to kind of jump over into a different rut. Using therapies like this is a great way to go. And I agree with you, early intervention is key.

[64:21 –> 64:22] Dr. Jason Rountree: So Yes, sir.

[64:22 –> 64:39] Dr. Ravi Kumar: That’s awesome. Some of the audience members here have a family member, or they themselves are suffering with early cognitive decline. What should they do? Should they see someone, uh, like you? Or can they buy a device on online and start using it at home? What what should be their approach to this?

[64:39 –> 68:24] Dr. Jason Rountree: I’m always in favor of proper follow-up with your primary care doc and possibly neurology if needed because having the right level of blood work is potentially important. Having somebody to just help manage the process is important. So my first thing is don’t try and do this on your own. Make sure you have the proper medical supervision and support for your condition overall. Is your primary care doc or your neurologist gonna know what type of light therapy device to recommend? No. They’re not. So you don’t have to ask them, but make sure you involve them. If you really feel like you are dealing with a neurodegenerative disease, you need medical management. Absolutely. And you need it. You need some kind of involvement there. Once you’ve got that and you start looking at what can I do for a home use device, the ideal thing to do is to, yes, talk to somebody like me? Talk to somebody who’s been in the light therapy industry for a while, especially if they’re on the clinician side like I am. I I use this stuff every day. We do these treatments all the time, and I’ve done it for years. I have a number of clinics to the that have trained with me. They’re listed on my website lasertherapyinstitute.org. And go there, you can find a clinic that has both good equipment and some level of training to do well with that. You can also just look for somebody who has a good laser unit and ask them, hey. I see that you have a a laser therapy unit, a class four device. Have you treated neurocognitive decline? Have you treated neurodegenerative disorders? And if they say, yeah. Absolutely. We have protocols and everything. That’s probably a good person to go see. If they’re like, what’s that? Probably not the person to go see. So if you can get somebody who has the equipment and has experience and training in treating this, that’s fantastic. But there’s still a very, very low number of good practitioners out there who actually know what they’re doing with this stuff. So that’s where we start looking at the home devices. There are a number out there. I’m not affiliated again with with any of the of the home use devices, but I like the research supported devices, and that’s gonna be primarily the Violyte and the Neuronic devices. And you can go to the website. You can look them up. There’s others too. So those aren’t the only ones, but those are the ones that have the best levels of research behind them so far. They are not cheap. They are fairly spendy, but they should be reliable devices that are safe to use and to be able to do it at home. And, um, especially if you’re already in the neurodegenerative fight, you know, if you’re already working through that mild cognitive impairment and trying to make sure that you’re getting the best results you can, you’re gonna need something you can use at home. Even if you come see somebody like me, you can’t see me five days a week every every week for the rest of your life. We can get you started and we can be supportive, um, with what we do, which is extremely effective, but you’re gonna wanna have that home use device too so you can make sure you keep up that treatment over time. Those are good devices. I would be recommending those and similar devices for the at home unit. Now those machines, they’re not gonna be good for really much else. They’re gonna be great on the neurodegenerative side. They’re not gonna help your back pain. Right? So that’s where maybe some LED panels, uh, could be good or, again, seeing somebody like me who’s gonna be able to use a class four laser to quickly get you back to your normal activity, get you back to doing the exercises and things that are gonna really truly keep you in good shape. But, yes, exactly like you said, doc, the basics are important here. Nothing beats diet and exercise. You probably heard the the the term class three diabetes. Have you heard that one yet? The type three diabetes rather? Yeah. That’s that’s neurodegenerative disease right there from, uh, metabolic disorders. So keeping your diet in good shape, the most basic diet and exercise things will make a huge difference. So don’t get the gadgets and skip the other things. Get the gadgets, sure, but do the basics like we’re talking about here. They they are absolutely critical, and then everything else supports that process too. Right? But don’t skip the, uh, the real work.

[68:24 –> 70:47] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Absolutely. And I just wanna go back to one thing you mentioned about seeing your doctor and following a conventional plan for addressing neurodegenerative diseases because you do need MRI imaging. And you need a neurologist to do mental status exams on you frequently so you can track how you’re progressing through the disease. I would say this, there are medications for Alzheimer’s. They suck. Okay? They’re just we just we just haven’t got there, honestly. It can take the edge off. It can improve symptoms in the short term a little bit with side effects because you are putting chemical inputs into your body that change your biology. So I’m not arguing against those at all. And I use medications every day in my practice, so I’m not anti medication. But we have not gotten there in traditional medicine as far as treating or curing Alzheimer’s. We’re working on it. And eventually, it’ll happen, and Alzheimer’s will be a thing of the past. But in the meantime, follow that traditional route, but also look outside the box. Because if you don’t, you’re missing something that could potentially give you years more of quality life, like red light therapy. And your neurologist and your primary care doctor will never mention red light or TMS. They just won’t. And most likely, some of the good ones may, but most of them won’t say go on a Mediterranean diet or walk daily. It’s just not it it’s not in the conventional treatment plan. The conventional treatment plan is a prescription pad and a pen for a drug that costs, you know, could cost many, many tens of thousands of dollars and have little benefit, which this is reality, folks. That’s really out there. So that’s that being said, I’m not a skeptic when it comes to traditional medicine. I practice it, But look outside the box and find things that can help you, and this is one of them. Okay. Let’s step into, uh, the second brain because you mentioned this with your mother-in-law that she had had microbiome problems. And the gut, which is where the microbiome lives, is our second brain. There is more nerves in the gut than there are in the spinal cord. And there’s a lot of neurotransmitter production. And the gut and the nerves in the gut are in constant communication with the bacteria and fungi and other microbes that live there. So tell us what role red light might play in our microbiome and how that might communicate with our brains.

[70:47 –> 73:31] Dr. Jason Rountree: I love that you brought this up. This is a big piece of, I think, where we’ll see laser and light therapies go with this neurodegenerative you know, we’re talking about getting through the skull. Right? Gotta get through the skull. Gotta improve that circulation. We’ve gotta improve glymphatic flow. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. But Anne Liebert has been doing some massive research on the combination of lighting up the brain and lighting up the gut as well, and seeing big changes, big improvements in the gut biome. The gut biome really controls so many different factors for how we process our foods, inflammatory states of the body, but there is a direct connection from that gut biome to the way the brain functions. I don’t think we quite know enough about exactly all the mechanics of it yet, but we just know that if you have a horrible gut biome and gut function, you are at much greater risk for these neurodegenerative diseases, for depression, for anxiety, for addiction. So an unhealthy gut biome is a big factor in really seeing any results here too. So some of the research that that Anne Liebert has been doing, which she’s an incredible researcher, she’s got a ton of papers out on photobiomodulation, but a couple of the studies she’s done recently are focused on getting light to the brain and the gut at the same time. And they’re seeing that you can improve the symptoms of neurodegenerative disease, and you also see a big change in the gut biome to be more complete and healthier. You can also see a reduction in things like IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, and just the basics of how the gut functions. There’s a big impact from the way that our bodies interact with food and the generation of inflammation. I’m sure people throw around the term leaky gut a lot. That’s that’s a big one that I hear all the time. People come in and say, oh, I’ve got leaky gut. I I understand what we’re talking about with that. I’m not saying leaky gut is or isn’t a thing. I’m just saying that if you put enough junk down your pipe, it’s gonna have after effects, and it’s going to affect the rest of your body in some manner. And if you’re doing it with things that your body doesn’t like, you know, certain people, I think, genetically, have a predisposition certainly towards, like, things like celiac, but even on a smaller level, sensitivities, and there’s more inflammatory response to certain foods for some people. And that, I think, influences the inflammatory reaction of the body as a whole. And so having a healthier gut that is less reactive to certain foods, Avoiding foods that you know maybe are an issue for you, I think has some really good benefit and payoff down the road, and light therapy seems to improve that reactive response and seems to improve the vitality of the gut biome, which, as you said, we’re seeing is a huge component of cognitive function.

[73:31 –> 73:42] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. Right. So at what point in any of your treatment of an individual, whether they’re suffering from neurodegenerative disease or inflammatory arthritis, do you treat the gut? Is that ever in your treatment plan?

[73:42 –> 75:50] Dr. Jason Rountree: Occasionally. Occasionally. Yes. Mainly because when I see patients in clinic, my big funk my big focus is getting them functional again, whether that is the way that they’re moving with their arthritic knee or whether the when they’re getting them back to work with their arthritic back pain or getting their function up to where they can interact a little more normally with their support, you know, their friends, their family for those neurodegenerative sides. Treating the gut becomes the thing that we look at doing directly with those more significant neurodegenerative effects for sure. It is never a bad idea to apply some light to the abdomen. It’s also never a bad idea to get the entire spine. As you know, the spine is incredibly important, the spinal cord, the spinal nerves, incredibly important for the function of really the entire body. And so many many times with an especially inflammatory disease like a rheumatoid arthritis condition, um, neurodegenerative diseases, applying light to the entire spine can be helpful on a larger than just the spine aspect, and the same thing for applying light to the gut. So when I’m when I’m teaching other docs about how to really utilize laser, a lot of times I’m having them treat the entire spine even though it’s a shoulder problem or even though it’s a it’s, um, you know, an inflammatory disease of some type. Treating the spine, putting the right kind of energy into the spine helps the nervous system in general, and I think it’s the same thing when you start looking at treating the gut as well. So bigger payoff, I would say, with treating the gut when you’re talking neurodegenerative. Is there anything wrong with it for other diseases too? Absolutely not. Still a good idea. And and that’s the neat thing with light. It’s completely safe. There’s, like, there’s almost no medication interactions. The only ones is with the light sensitizing drugs, but though that I mean, that is still a relative contraindication. You just have to be cautious about the total amount of light you put in. So somebody’s taking, um, some of the light sensitizers, you just watch the response. Past that, there’s there’s really no reason not to do some type of light therapy for any condition. It’s incredibly safe. There’s no serious adverse events. It’s one of those things that can do some amazing things.

[75:50 –> 76:58] Dr. Ravi Kumar: I mean, that’s why I always tell people, you know, look for the highest yield, lowest risk intervention. Because if that works for you, that’s what you wanna go with. We we talked about this earlier already, but, you know, oftentimes people come in asking for the highest risk, lowest yield intervention because that is just what’s out there. That’s what’s, you know, the industry charges for, and that’s what people see as being the most final possible intervention that they could do. But honestly, there are often hidden high yield, low risk, uh, interventions all over the place. You just gotta look for them. So let’s say someone wants to get a red light. You know, they they wanna use red light in their daily life. There are tons of red light devices on Amazon and eBay and all over the place, and they have different energy densities and different qualities and different wavelengths. I think a majority of them are junk. You can correct me if I’m wrong. So how would you counsel someone if they are looking for a device? Because they can go to, you know, big companies like Joovv and and get, like, a very expensive light. Or they can go on eBay and get one for $50, what should they do?

[76:58 –> 78:54] Dr. Jason Rountree: So the majority of the devices you’ll see on the Internet across the different brands are all gonna be safe. There’s there’s gonna be very few of those that would have any kind of risk. However, very few of them are actually going to be effective. So safety, probably. Effectiveness, if you’re buying at $50 on Amazon, highly unlikely that it’s going to be effective. And, uh, unless you plan to become a, uh, you know, a light and laser expert, you’re gonna have a hard time finding the right one, which is why this question that you’ve asked here is so important. So there’s some very basic guidelines that I generally will give people because I don’t endorse any particular brand, but what you should look for is, number one, the right wavelengths. So, doc, you already said your device that you’ve got that has worked well for you has six sixty nanometers and eight fifty nanometers. Mhmm. That’s a combination of red and infrared light that works very, very well. The only person that’s not gonna work great for is our very dark skin types. So I’m incredibly pale. Light passes right through my skin pretty much any color. Alright? But a lot of other people are not as pale as me. If you’re darker skinned, 850 nanometer light, 660 nanometer light is not going to get through your skin or not very well. So I would encourage you to if you are dark skinned, you are gonna need to have a different device than I would being super, super pale. So the wavelengths that you gave us a bit ago for your device, six sixty, eight fifty, fantastic if you are lighter skinned, right, or medium skinned. Okay. If you’re darker skinned, you need to find a device that will give you 1,064 nanometer light. Ten sixty four light is not absorbed hardly at all by the melanin, so it will go through the skin and it will affect your deeper tissues. Look for that one primarily. Not that eight fifty won’t be of any benefit, but you’re gonna have more success as a darker skinned person if you have ten sixty four. It can bypass that melanin content.

[78:54 –> 78:57] Dr. Ravi Kumar: And ten sixty four will still have the biological effects that eight fifty have?

[78:57 –> 79:59] Dr. Jason Rountree: Similar. Very similar. So it has good penetration. It is much more active in the calcium ion channels than it is in the mitochondrial complex, but it does still have mitochondrial effects. I love the combination of eight hundred and ten sixty four. That it’s a stellar, stellar combination. But for darker skin people, gonna you’re gonna get more effect at deeper tissues with ten sixty four. So look at the wavelength first. If you are light to medium skinned, you can look at six sixty or six thirty in that range, so between six thirty and six seventy nanometers for your visible red, and then you do want an infrared light that is somewhere between 800 and, say, eight fifty. Uh, that’s a that’s a good range to be in. If you’re darker skinned, make sure you get a ten sixty four. That’s the biggest factor right there is the wavelength. Now do we trust what the devices say they are, though? Because there’s no way for most of us to test it. And if it comes from a low end manufacturer that does not publish their specifications, um, that does not have third party testing, I don’t trust them.

[79:59 –> 79:59] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay.

[79:59 –> 80:51] Dr. Jason Rountree: There’s no reason to. This is this is a very unregulated market. There’s no oversight for these companies to actually produce what they say they’re producing. Right. And it costs money to produce the right kind of light. So that’s where some of the the higher end devices really are gonna be better. You can waste $50 through an Amazon device. It’s probably not gonna be doing anything for you, or you can spend a bit more and get something that’s higher, uh, quality and probably going to put out what it says it does. Okay. So certain companies will actually publish third party test results, and that’s really the gold standard. They’ve that means they sent their device to a separate lab, said, hey. Test it. You tell us what it does, and then that lab will give them back the results of what it really does. Now that costs money. You’re gonna spend more. But if you’re gonna put the time and some money into it, spend a little bit more to get something that’s been third party verified.

[80:51 –> 80:52] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Right. Okay.

[80:52 –> 81:31] Dr. Jason Rountree: It’s worth it. Um, and there’s there’s a few companies out there that pride themselves on being very transparent, very upfront, third party testing. You’re gonna pay a little more for it, but it’s worth it. There are, unfortunately, a couple of companies that will charge you a ton of money and are not third party verified. Don’t do the hard work, and they’re just ready to take your money. Do some shopping around. Don’t be in a rush, and call the companies and ask them, hey. Who does testing your devices? What happens if I have a problem with my device? All these things matter before you go spending your hard earned bucks on something that may not even do the things that it says it does. Right? So but there are a couple of companies out there that are good. So look into them and avoid the cheap Amazon stuff.

[81:31 –> 81:44] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay. So you’ve got basically, the price and the wavelength are two things that kinda guide you towards your further investigation. What about energy density? Is that a thing that you should be looking at?

[81:44 –> 83:53] Dr. Jason Rountree: It is. And that’s the hardest one to actually get a a handle on for the layperson. Because if I tell you what color light, you can make sure you get the right color. And if I tell you to, you know, investigate the company, most of us know, at this point, kinda, we can investigate companies. We need to see, okay, is this trustworthy or not? You know? If if I really put some effort into it, I I can figure that out. The energy density is gonna refer to how many photons are hitting the area, the target area, given how big the area is. The energy density does matter. To get the right level of energy density, you need high power LEDs or lasers, and that’s where you’ll spend a good bit of money. But you can get good results from a lower energy density too or from a smaller unit. And so if budget is a big factor for what you are gonna be able to spend, which for most of us at least it’s at least one factor, then you may need to go with a a lower energy density unit or a smaller unit that can give you a good high power ratio there. And it may take you longer to do treatments, but it can still be beneficial. So the energy density that you’re gonna look for is gonna be somewhere in the 100 milliwatts per square centimeter zone. And that means that in a in a 100 square centimeters, you’re gonna have x number of photons at this intensity in order to get the right level of energy delivery, and that’s where most devices really do start to fall apart. They might have the right color of light, but they’re not producing enough light. And the energy consumption is not a good measure. So just because it consumes a kilowatt of energy does not mean you’re getting a kilowatt of light out of it. You’re probably losing 80% of that energy, that kilowatt of energy input into the device in terms of heat and fans and all the other things that go along with it. And, really, what you’re outputting is gonna be a fraction of that. So, again, your third party testing should be able to show you what is my energy density and how far away too. Like, the home use devices, the further away you get, that energy density drops off dramatically. Right. So it needs to be tested at a reasonable distance. You might not be able to just put it right against your skin. You might need a little bit of a gap. That means you’re gonna have less energy density even an inch away. So higher energy density is going to be better.

[83:53 –> 83:53] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay.

[83:53 –> 83:54] Dr. Jason Rountree: And it’s a factor.

[83:54 –> 83:58] Dr. Ravi Kumar: So and you mentioned a 100 milliwatts per centimeter square?

[83:58 –> 84:35] Dr. Jason Rountree: That seems to be a good level. That seems to be a good level. I like more. I like I like getting up quite a bit higher if I can, but you’re gonna pay a lot for getting higher in those density levels. So if you’ve got a 100 milliwatts per square centimeter, that’s a pretty good level for the most part, and it and it’s a it’s a budget friendly level for most people. If you can’t get that high, it’s gonna take you a long time to gradually deliver the same amount of light. Right? Um, and and it won’t be as deeply effective for the tissues. If you can go higher than that, you’re gonna pay for it, but it means faster treatments, and generally, you’re gonna have better results.

[84:35 –> 84:51] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay. Now what about these devices that are like wraps? You know, they wrap around your waist or your elbow. They there’s no fans in them. They’re usually in a fabric, plug into a five volt l e, um, USB port or something like that. Are those gonna do anything for you? Minimal. Minimal. Okay.

[84:51 –> 84:53] Dr. Jason Rountree: Minimal. Again, it’s gonna be safe, but

[84:53 –> 85:02] Dr. Ravi Kumar: that’s the majority of what you see on there. And people pay, like, a $100 for one of those, honestly, on Amazon. And, uh, those are generally you would stay away from those.

[85:02 –> 85:50] Dr. Jason Rountree: They’re just not that helpful. Okay. Yeah. I I would I’d rather not spend the money on it. You know? I I have seen some people it’ll be like a knee brace with some integrated, like, teeny little LEDs. That’s fine. It’s still a knee brace, you know, but it’s it’s probably not gonna do you much good. And the other thing to remember, and because we’re talking about people using these things at home, light’s not gonna go through your clothes. So you can’t put one of these wraps around your shirt and think that it’s gonna do anything. You also can’t use your panel at home fully clothed. You know? That’s just it’s you lose 99% of the light trying to get through clothing. So just remember, it needs to be on skin, be as close to the light source as you really possibly can be. And then if it’s something like you described, tiny LEDs wrapped up with no cooling, plug into a USB, It’s just not enough power to really make much of a difference.

[85:50 –> 86:35] Dr. Ravi Kumar: So that’s something to keep in mind. Honestly, my opinion with my results and working as a surgeon, changing people’s spines all the time is everyone should have a red light device in their house. The kids can use it. The adults can use it. The elderly can use it. Everything from, you know, hurt elbow to sore back to inflamed sinuses. I mean, anywhere where there’s inflammation in your body, this can be used almost like you use Tylenol or any other common treatment. So I do want people to have a good idea of how to buy a device because I think that’s the biggest problem that most people come across is they hear, oh, red light’s good for you. So they go to Amazon, and they say, oh, I’m a spend a $100. This is a good investment. And it does nothing for them. They’re like, oh, red light doesn’t work.

[86:35 –> 88:38] Dr. Jason Rountree: Yep. That’s exactly right. You you do have to spend a little bit of money to get something that’s going to work. One of the one of the companies, again, that I’m not promoting or affiliated with, but one of the companies, SunPower LED, has been making really high quality devices for a while. Their their devices cost, you know, $121,500 dollars. You’re you’re gonna probably need to spend somewhere in that neighborhood to get something that is verified as being actually what it says it is, that is useful, that’s not gonna just crap out on you after you use it for a couple months, and it’s actually gonna give you some benefits so that exactly like you said, you’re not just like, oh, well, red light therapy doesn’t work because my $50 Amazon little pen light didn’t do anything. Yeah. It’s it’s gotta be enough light. It’s gotta be the right kind of light, um, and it’s out there. But yeah. You mentioned kids. A lot of people say, well, is this safe for kids? Absolutely. It’s safe for kids. We’ve got some studies on growth plates, which would be the only really concern. You know, can you apply light to a growth plate without having any kind of negative effects? Turns out you absolutely can. It’s fine. Kids love these things too because you get your little LED out after they have a bump or a bruise, and it legitimately helps the the pain, but it also makes them feel pretty cool and and it’s completely safe. Makes them, uh, you know, reduces pain, reduces bruising, and, um, reduces bruising really rapidly. I don’t know if you’ve seen this with your unit yet, but if you if you get pretty banged up, you can use that light, and it’s like it clears up bruising in a third of the time Yeah. That norm normally it would. And then you’re talking about surgery too. Post op, a fantastic tool for both pain and healing. So tons of people get knee replacements. Right? Fantastic surgery. Life changing surgery. Definitely a risk for things like contractures and scar tissue and post op pain, for sure. Can you use light therapy on it? 100% you can. The only thing you wanna make sure is that there’s no active bleeding. If there’s no active bleeding, everything’s healing up, go for it. It’s a fantastic tool. Doesn’t matter that there’s a prosthesis there in the leg. You can 100% use light therapy over that area. It’s gonna reduce pain. It’s gonna improve healing. It’s gonna reduce the chances of having, um, loss of range of motion due to scar tissue. Yeah. Everybody should have one.

[88:38 –> 89:19] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. Absolutely. So, I mean, we could talk about this for hours, honestly. There are a 100% multiple topics in which photobiomodulation has beneficial effects on the human body that we have just not even touched. I mean, you just briefly mentioned scar tissue. That’s a huge one. Anything with pain like TMJ, headaches, even there’s guys use it on their testicles to increase their leydid production of testosterone. There’s so many avenues here for use of red light, and there’s many that haven’t been discovered too. That’s the thing. So Yes. But I strongly encourage the audience to do your research. If they wanna find you, read more about what you do, listen to your podcast, how where do they go?

[89:19 –> 90:38] Dr. Jason Rountree: So our website is lasertherapyinstitute.org. There’s resources on there for people patients who would be interested in getting light therapy. There’s also research on there for health care providers who are interested in offering light therapy, um, correctly and safely to their patients, and we also are super happy to try and help anyone who’s pursuing this for a treatment. And, again, I I don’t endorse particular devices, so if you’ve got a couple devices that you’re like, hey. I just can’t figure out which one’s better. If you want my input, I’ll give you my input. You can email me. Uh, my email is [email protected]. I, like we’ve been doing right now, I can talk this stuff all day. I love talking about lasers. So whether you’re a patient who’s concerned about getting this done correctly, um, who’s concerned about what kind of device do I use, can I use light for this kind of thing, you know, I’m not gonna give you medical advice over email, but I can help you find some solutions and make sure that you’re not getting swindled by an Amazon LED device? So I’d encourage you to reach out to us on email. At least go to the website. There’s links there to blog articles. There’s there’s a ton of extra information that we try and promote because I truly believe that light and laser therapies have a great place in health care. I think they’re fantastic. And like you said, doc, I think everybody should have one and have access to this.

[90:38 –> 90:51] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Doctor Rountree, thanks so much. I’ll put your contact information in the show notes, but this has been awesome. I’ve learned so much, and I’m super excited about using my red light again after after this episode.

[90:51 –> 91:14] Dr. Jason Rountree: Absolutely. Well, thank you. I appreciate you bringing awareness to this. I think this is something that we need to see more of is, um, you know, people in your position that that know the body, that know these different difficult conditions, bring awareness to things like laser therapy, photobiomodulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation. This this is really important stuff, and it’s life changing for patients. So thank you for what you do.

[91:14 –> 91:24] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Yeah. Well, thank you for coming on the show, and we’ll have to have you on again. I’m sure there’s a lot more to talk about, so maybe next season we’ll get you back on again. Thanks so much, doctor Rountree.

[91:24 –> 91:26] Dr. Jason Rountree: Thank you.

[91:26 –> 91:26] Dr. Ravi Kumar: Okay. So I hope you enjoyed that episode as much as I did. I already knew a fair amount about red and infrared light therapy, but this conversation really expanded my understanding and got me excited to use my own red light device. But here’s what I want you to take away from this episode. First, light absolutely has measurable effects on our biology. When used properly, it can be incredibly beneficial. And second, effective treatments don’t all come from traditional medicine. I’m a neurosurgeon. I practice traditional medicine every day, and I do believe in it. But I also love learning about treatments that most people have never heard of. Treatments that are scientifically validated, have real biological mechanisms, are safe, and actually work. When you find something like that, it’s like winning the lottery. It’s another tool we can all use to optimize our health and wellness. It’s something I’ve found and used personally to make myself a healthier person. So that’s my hope for this show, that it gives you options you didn’t know existed. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with someone you know and love, and feel free to reach out to me. Until next time, stay curious, stay skeptical, and stay healthy. Cheers.