Red Light Laser Therapy for Pain, Inflammation & Joint Healing

Nick Urban [00:00:05]: What if there was a way to recover faster from your workouts, to address pain, and to help modulate bodily systems back into balance? Hi. I’m Nick Urban, host of the Mindbody Peak Performance podcast. And today, we’re talking all things red and infrared light therapy, specifically in this little form factor of a device I have here for those listening on audio. It’s a band that contains several little units. You click a button, and it emits a mix of red and near infrared using laser technology rather than the industry standard of LEDs. In this episode, you’ll learn why that’s important, the unique use cases you can do with this system, such as applying it to the gut to improve gut health, to potentially address headaches, to use it to improve cognition, to modulate the thyroid, and a whole lot more. We also cover the myths and misconceptions around red light therapy, near infrared light, and how this little device is able to deliver the equivalent targeted power of a full body system.

Nick Urban [00:02:56]: Although I don’t have any thyroid issues, I’ve been also using it on my thyroid in the mornings as I did previously and, again, on my gut just to see what I noticed. And I mentioned it in the episode, but I still don’t notice a huge effect from those. But it would be really interesting to do a bioassay and see how my enzyme levels change, my digestion improves, and how my endocrine system improves also.

Forrest Smith [00:04:10]: Thank you. So excited to be here. I can’t wait to dive in on this with you.

Nick Urban [00:04:13]: Yes. And we were just talking offline. Congrats on the recent round of funding that you guys just raised.

Forrest Smith [00:04:19]: Thank you very much. It’s an exciting time. It’s a lot of work to get it done, but our community has really supported us well for it. And it’s one of the basis of why we’ve taken so much time and really spent it with our community is that we’d also like them to see the benefits of what we’re doing, not just from a pain reduction, inflammation reduction, but also, we can now be a community owned company, which is really exciting for us as well.

Nick Urban [00:04:44]: Yeah. And part of the reason we’ve covered red light therapy, and we’ve talked about infrared light on the show several times, but I wanted to have you on today because you guys are doing something different, and there are a lot of different use cases and applications with your system that I’ve been using. But we will dive into that in a moment. Let’s warm up first with the unusual or nonnegotiable things you’ve done so far today for your health, your performance, and your bioharmony.

Forrest Smith [00:05:18]: As an individual, meditation. I do kind of a more general meditation in the mornings. And I do one that’s more focused on rest and recovery in the afternoons and evenings. I do some kind of exercise every morning, some kind of high intensity exercise. Right now, it’s burpees with my kids. We started off at 10 and then added 1 per day, and we’re at 115 right now, which is a great way to just kind of add a bit of work in the mornings. But I do that every morning before I have anything to eat or drink or coffee or anything like this. Just get in, get the blood moving, and that’s definitely nonnegotiable. I started wearing these blue blocker glasses that were given to me within the last 3 months, which is really nice. It actually helps from a melatonin suppression standpoint, and getting better sleep because of those and really committing in the right time to be able to get sleep.

Forrest Smith [00:06:21]: So that’s my core number of things. On a daily basis, I’m also using the laser therapy, and I use it on injuries, but I also use it for gut health. So I use it on kind of soft tissue issues. I have an old torn meniscus that flares up and it’s actually flared up right now, so I’m using it 15 minutes a day on that. And then on my gut, to increase or to balance that FB ratio, which is 2 different classes of bacteria that you have in your stomach, that when the ratio is balanced, you feel better. Increasing dopamine and I just feel generally better when I’m treating my stomach on a daily basis with laser therapy.

Nick Urban [00:07:14]: Yeah. That’s a well optimized routine. Actually, I came across your product a while back, and I got some questions on it. Hadn’t tried it. Then you guys were gracious enough to send me one to test out, and I put it through the paces. But unfortunately, I didn’t have any injuries to test it on.

Forrest Smith [00:07:52]: It is. It’s more of a cumulative effect. The nice thing about it is one of the reasons why we feel it’s so important to kind of get this education piece out to people is this is one of the few ways that gives you an opportunity to improve the underlying tissue. Even though it’s kind of marginal from a daily standpoint. One of the things that we’ve seen recently, and our dosing from our device actually covers very well, is Hashimoto. So you start seeing these thyroid based issues. Even up until about 3 or 4 years ago, we were seeing things like thyroid treatment with lasers be contraindicated. And the dosing had just not been tested. Even though there’s 6, 7000 papers out there, a number of the different pathologies that you can treat with the device are still coming to light.

Forrest Smith [00:09:15]: What they did for these trials was, they paired the supplements with a laser therapy device and both of them had an impact. The laser therapy device was a positive impact and even more substantially a positive impact than the supplements, but they were also stackable so that they’re synergistic. So for thyroid, kind of especially when there’s an underlying pathology like Hashimoto’s, but for thyroid function in general, there’s definitely a positive impact.

Nick Urban [00:11:08]: The other way I was using it is on my major muscle groups after a workout, like 5 minutes, 10 minutes after workout, immediately after. And I have to say that I did notice that I wasn’t as sore the next day.

Forrest Smith [00:11:28]: It’s amazing. A couple of the things that we’ve seen are better objective measures for delayed onset muscle soreness. What’s been more powerful for us is seeing these muscle inflammatory markers, like C reactive proteins and creatinine kinase. The reduction in these muscle inflammatory markers isn’t marginal. It’s 60 to 80%.

Forrest Smith [00:12:26]: One of the things that was very important for professional athletes to understand and validate is that in reducing these muscle inflammatory markers, am I also going to reduce my muscle adaptations? And you don’t. You reduce kind of the bad stuff, but these muscle adaptations that you’re trying to trigger from a hypertrophy standpoint, you’re actually putting yourself on a faster route to those because you can go back to training faster.

Forrest Smith [00:15:24]: A lot of the existing products on the market, what’s quoted from a dosing standpoint are measurements like irradiance and total optical power density that talk about what light is coming out of the device, what light is landing at the skin level. What we try to do is work backwards from the outcomes we’re trying to trigger. And so what triggers these outcomes are different signaling molecules, from photo acceptors that you can impact. Our models are more based around how we’re delivering the optimal number of photons to these photo acceptors to trigger the signaling we want for the adaptations we’d like to see.

Nick Urban [00:19:12]: Let’s back up, rewind a bit. We’re 15 minutes in, and people don’t even know what it is that your device is. So I have the system in the box right here. It consists of a bunch of different little modules and then a band, and you put those, you wrap them around the body part, click a button, and then there’s an interval for about 5 minutes that it sends out the light, the red and the infrared. And then at the end, you hear a little chime and that is one dose.

Forrest Smith [00:19:44]: That’s right. And we’ve made it based on our community feedback, adjustable. From 5 to 10 to 15 minutes. 15 minutes is optimal, but we didn’t want to set the entire time at 15 minutes because the higher the amount of time you’re asking for per day, the less likely people are to maintain the therapy. Better to do 5 minutes every day than 15 minutes twice a week.

Forrest Smith [00:21:36]: So dosing works on what they call an Arndt-Schulz or biphasic dose curve, which is essentially as you increase the dose, the outcomes keep increasing up to a certain point. And then after that point, they come back down. But you don’t really ever see it go back below 0. So you’re never going to be worse off than you were originally. And the reason for that is we’re using power levels that are non-ablative and non-ionizing.

Nick Urban [00:25:15]: What is the difference between an LED based light therapy panel and then also a laser?

Forrest Smith [00:25:23]: LEDs, when they emit, they emit in 360 degrees. Usually that gets brought back to 120 degrees. With lasers, there’s a chamber with 2 mirrors that more or less guarantees that the light bounces until it hits the correct 90 degree angle to go out. This means everything coming out of the laser is collimated and it doesn’t spread. It makes it much easier to target and reach internal tissue. We use LEDs for deep red wavelength that really should treat more of the surface tissue. For the internal tissue, like in your joints or in your gut or in your brain, the infrared near infrared actually penetrates more effectively into the body.

Nick Urban [00:30:36]: I often hear that in order to deliver a therapeutic amount of light, you need a certain power. You can’t have a handheld battery operated device because it would die in 10 seconds of use. But then again, if you think about a 1 watt light bulb, you’re going to barely see anything versus a 1 watt laser that can pop a balloon and has a lot more power because it’s so concentrated.

Forrest Smith [00:31:01]: That’s exactly right. It’s more concentrated. And we also found that people take the class 3 and class 4 and think that this is a better dose because of the different classes. But we tested splitting roughly 150 to 200 milliwatts per admission area into 5 on each side, 10 per module versus 2, keeping the same level of optical power. The effects on the physiology were much better when we split these into multiple lasers.

Nick Urban [00:33:56]: Let’s dig into the use cases now. Post surgery, maybe even presurgery, injury rehab. How would someone use the Kineon MOVE+ device for those circumstances?

Forrest Smith [00:34:24]: You can actually do it optimally twice a day, morning and evening. The molecules that you’re impacting stay impacted for a reasonable amount of time. Doing it 5 times a day is really not going to move the needle much more than twice a day. We’ve seen unbelievable results from a post surgery standpoint. One of the spaces that we’ve seen the most results is in orthopedic surgeons. When people are having post surgery processes, they have a ton of inflammation.

Forrest Smith [00:36:02]: What we don’t like to see is those tick over into chronic inflammation, which is something that we deal with very directly. So we reduce that oxidative stress level and that reduces the ongoing chronic inflammation. Being able to reduce that chronic inflammation in many cases for these patients gets them through that healing process in almost unbelievably fast timeframes.

Forrest Smith [00:38:07]: With NSAIDs, the increase in cardiovascular disease risk is 30 to 50% across the board whether you’re 6 or 60. A lot of our chronic users of NSAIDs are older. Their doctors told them to take this. They’re unaware of the impact it’s going to have on their cardiovascular endothelium. You’re essentially taking the batteries out of the fire alarm. The fire is still burning in the kitchen.

Nick Urban [00:40:16]: The only one that I’ll use on great occasion if I really need to is aspirin. It looks to have the least amount of cytotoxicity and downstream consequences.

Forrest Smith [00:42:49]: A lot of these things have come about from a study standpoint to be better understood as metabolically based. Exercise, as an example, is more effective than a lot of existing pharmaceutical treatments for a number of different pathologies. With the fact that we’re addressing mitochondrial function, at least the oxidative phosphorylation section, it’s not really a question as to the impacts that it’s having.

Forrest Smith [00:43:58]: One of the things that’s really an anchor point is this improvement of the metabolic function in your body. No matter what cells we’re trying to treat, that metabolic function is such an anchor point for function in general that you see a number of different knock on effects, whether it’s increased brain derived neurotrophic factor in your brain, whether it’s balancing your FB ratio in your gut, increased dopamine in the gut.

Nick Urban [00:48:12]: What about something like a headache? That seems like it’s more acute and this probably wouldn’t work as well against a headache.

Forrest Smith [00:48:33]: Headaches is a multivariate cause. There are certain types of stress headaches that this will help with, increasing nitric oxide, increasing blood flow. The most common ones, we actually help with. But it’s a lot of those are overstrained tissue. Your brain, you can’t really sense your brain. So it’s the tissue around your head, where you have stress and tightening from a muscular and myofascial standpoint. Being able to release additional nitric oxide helps to release and relieve some of that pressure.

Forrest Smith [00:49:50]: We treat tissue edema around the sprained ankle. We get more blood flow to the area. By dumping more nitric oxide into the blood flow, it’s a dilator of these blood vessels. It helps deliver more healthy blood into the area. That’s essentially what we do, reduce the chronic, introduce more acute inflammatory markers and help the tissue to heal a lot faster.

Forrest Smith [00:51:35]: It also increases the soft tissue proliferation rates. With soft tissue specifically, you’re looking at an increase in the rate of proliferation for chondroblasts, and these are fast growing cells that kind of live at the edge of your growth path for new cartilage or ligaments. When you have more of them, they grow faster and they grow healthier.

Nick Urban [00:53:52]: That’s really promising. You can actually regrow cartilage as long as you fix the underlying imbalance of inflammation.

Forrest Smith [00:53:57]: That’s exactly it. You’re working on both sides of that problem. You have a negative side which is this inflammation is wearing down my cartilage and you have this positive side of how fast do my chondroblasts proliferate. And you’re positively impacting both sides of the equation. Over a 6 month period, the microscopy is very clear. You see much thicker and healthier tissue based on the ongoing use.

Nick Urban [00:55:50]: To go back to the thyroid example, if I had hypo or hyperthyroid, would this modulate it and bring it back into balance, or is it going to always stimulate my thyroid?

Forrest Smith [00:56:08]: My gut would be that there’s also some level of modulation back to center based on the signaling molecules. If your oxidative stress is super low or super high, it’s not great for you. And we see that photobiomodulation can help to bring it to center versus just reduce it. This would be similar, but I need to dig into it and find the actual answer.

Forrest Smith [00:57:22]: My kids love it. They’re 2, 4, and 7. They’re falling down and cutting up on a daily basis. The first thing they come back in for, and they feel like Wolverine. My wife actually just did box jumps, just scraped across the shins and lost a bunch of skin there. And the same thing, you just see it close up, not overnight, but very fast.

Forrest Smith [00:58:08]: One of the things I actually use it for is if I don’t sleep enough. One of the things that happens with your brain is that it will increase and stack up the amount of waste, because your lymphatic system can’t process that all. This can increase the rate of that processing. So I treat kind of prefrontal cortex and then above the eyes and then below the eyes for sinuses.

Forrest Smith [01:00:00]: One of the ones that people have done from a testing standpoint for the brain is methylene blue. Essentially with the oxidative phosphorylation chain, there are 4 kind of processes in that energy production process. We essentially work on the 3rd and 4th, and the methylene blue can actually increase 1 through 3. So you get more feedstock and can turn more energy out of your mitochondria.

Forrest Smith [01:01:41]: Platelet rich plasma. Even for people who PRP has not worked for, who have been non-responders, there were 2 great studies. PRP plus laser works extremely well. One of the things that our users asked was, is there a way to do something similar that would aggregate more platelets and hemoglobin to the area? And so we’re doing testing with blood flow restriction cuffs. If you have BFR upstream, put that on, let it pull some of those platelets and hemoglobin into the area, and then treat it for 15 minutes with the device while you have the BFR cuff on.

Nick Urban [01:03:06]: I’ve done that exact test with your tool and KAATSU, they’re the original BFR, the best. That’s an incredible combo. And I also use methylene blue twice per week on average.

Nick Urban [01:03:55]: Forrest, this has been a blast. If people want to connect with you to try one of the Kineon devices, how do they find you on the internet?

Forrest Smith [01:04:10]: We are at kineon.io. And you can reach me specifically at forrest@kineon.io. That’s 2 r’s for Forrest. We love to work with our community and our users.

Nick Urban [01:05:02]: I think your team set up a code too. I believe it’s URBAN that’ll save them on their order if they want to grab a MOVE+.

Forrest Smith [01:05:08]: Absolutely. You have a 30 day risk free trial for it. Get in and use your URBAN code and try it out.

Nick Urban [01:05:55]: If there is a worldwide burning of the books and all knowledge on earth is lost, but you get to save the works of 3 teachers, who would you choose and why?

Forrest Smith [01:06:11]: One of the guys I really like from a conceptual standpoint is Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote a book called Godel, Escher, Bach. I read it at a formative age. It had a really big impact on how I think about kind of logic and AI. It’s essentially about recursive self-measuring systems, which is essentially how life generates.

Nick Urban [01:07:18]: How would you like to close our episode together today?

Forrest Smith [01:07:25]: I would just like to close out with a little gratitude, for yourself for having me on today, and really appreciate the time and focus and attention that you’ve given this topic. And just for the ability to do this work. I’m super happy to be in a seat where I am trying to create something that I feel like is going to positively impact so many people.

Nick Urban [01:08:01]: Thank you for bringing another bioharmonious treatment option to the forefront for everyone who has potential nagging injuries or more acute injuries and giving us another tool in the toolbox.

Nick Urban [01:08:25]: I’m Nick Urban here with Forrest Smith of Kineon, signing out from outliyr.com. Have a great week, and be an outlier.