There are all kinds of expensive beauty treatments on the market — various creams, zappy lasers, and fine mists of heavily-refined chemicals. For [Ruth Amos], a $78,000 LED bed had caught her eye, and she wondered if she could recreate the same functionality on the cheap.
The concept behind [Ruth]’s build is simple enough. Rather than buy a crazy-expensive off-the-shelf beauty product, she decided to just buy equivalent functional components: a bunch of cheap red LEDs. Then, all she had to do was build these into a facemask and loungewear set to get the same supposed skin improving benefits at much lower cost.
[Ruth] started her build with a welding mask, inside which she fitted red LED strips of the correct wavelength for beneficial skin effects. She then did the same with an over-sized tracksuit, lacing it with an array of LED strips to cover as much of the body as possible. While it’s unlikely she was able to achieve the same sort of total body coverage as a full-body red light bed, nor was it particularly comfortable—her design cost a lot less—on the order of $100 or so.
Of course, you might question the light therapy itself. We’re not qualified to say whether or not red LEDs will give you better skin, but it’s not the first time we’ve seen a DIY attempt at light therapy.
Well, looks like the times of ripping off esoteric people are gone. Now its the time to build some weird stuff and call it “beauty therapy”.
Mark my words.
Not long and someone will build a suit filled with piezo buzzers and call it “acoustic frequency hormonizer” and state it betters your skin by harmonizes your resonances or some BS.
You mean like the Schumann resonance gadgets on aliexpress?
Power Balance all over again, except they didn’t even need piezo buzzers!
Shh, stop giving them ideas. ;)
This is however something supported by scientific research.
Don’t expose your ignorance.
You mean like the in-ear LEDs?
It looks like a very solid way to generate body hair in a statistically significant manner. https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2025/02/24/red-light-therapy-skin-hair-medical-clinics/
Clearly it has very specific uses (like focusing chemo on cancer cells etc.) but buying consumer grade “Red LED strips” and expecting them to have “the correct wavelength” sounds like a good way to hurt your skin. I am pretty sure the medical apparatus producers do not supply their LEDs from IKEA.
‘You canna change the laws of physics!’
There are two wavelengths of red LED.
You can see the difference, one is a little orange.
The medical device industry has no secret sauce.
My uncle thinks he can heal people by parping his didgeridoo at them. If he could buy a set of tubes that seem to automatically parp at him in a vaguely Australian way I’m sure he’d buy it.
I know a lot of people who think that SSRIs help them even though the mechanism has been disproven several times over the past thirty years
“Disproven” is subjective. Vaccines have been disproven several times through the years.
Of course they have been proven many, many more times than disproven, which is why the consensus is that vaccines and SSRIs work.
It’s not fringe studies that report the lack of causal mechanism for SSRIs, it’s the mainstream stuff. The current prevailing explanation is that we do not know how they work, but that we coincidentally stumbled upon a pharmaceutical that improves outcomes beyond the placebo effect through a thus-far unknown mechanism instead of the proposed “chemical imbalance” mechanism which is now widely considered to be false (and has been for decades).
Seems a little farfetched to me, but I suppose it is technically within the realm of possibility.
Also nobody mentioned vaccines one way or the other; that seems like a non-sequitur meant to evoke a conditioned emotional response.
Why don’t people realize that daylight includes light in the red spectrum?
You aren’t applying logic and are contradicting yourself. You basically mock people who think they help but then in another comment, “stumbled upon a pharmaceutical that improves outcomes beyond the placebo effect”, so you admit it does work but we just don’t know how. Not working and not knowing how they work are not the same thing.
If you look into the human body and conditions you will quickly find that there is much we don’t know about what causes or how to treat conditions, for a lot of medications and treatments we don’t know how they work or don’t fully understand how they work. Why do you think it often involves trying various types of medication until you find one that works? Because they work differently and we don’t actually know what the exact problem is or which type of treatment will work for your specific problem. There is a reason that we need large scale human trials to see how effective medications are, it is not deterministic or easily predictable like a lot of other science and engineering fields.
It would be better to know how everything works but the most important thing is that it works. If it works for these people you know then what is wrong with that? Just because a few studies disproved how it works doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
I don’t actually think they stumbled onto a totally different cure for the same disease that isn’t the one they set out to create, I think they already had such a large market by that time that they p-hacked some studies to continue propping up snake oil that doesn’t work and often harms people. Like I said, it is technically within the realm of possibility, but it’s extremely dubious.
It’s not the first time such a thing would have happened. It’s not the V-word, but people seem to take it as utter heresy that this could occur–it absolutely does. It’s difficult to reign in market forces on a timescale of decades, and even the best science takes some time to counter such forces.
Use of these therapies among young women is now at 64%. Almost two-thirds. That’s going to be a tough sell for many reasons. Try and tell me how there isn’t fraud involved somewhere in this pipeline.
I think it’s justified to question the efficacy and rationality of prescribing a class of pharmaceuticals described as “antidepressants” which, counterintuitively, appear to increase the rates of suicide. We clearly don’t understand the true effects of SSRI’s and their initially claimed mechanism of action has been demonstrated to be incorrect. Substantial financial incentives exist to field new study which can justify continued mass use of SSRI’s. And the positive efficacy results they’re getting are so small, I begin to question if they truly exist at all because it’s easy to bias study results a little bit one way with how you collect and aggregate the data. Seems like if SSRI’s worked the data would show much higher levels of efficacy instead of results that are barely better than placebo. Just saying.
A quick google search shows a digital didgeridoo project.
Apparently involves a blue tooth microphone and an old computer.
Is basically a digital delay that keeps repeating input noise into the ‘instrument’.
Would make good RP nano project, or you could make one out of music effects.
Sounds incredibly annoying.
Even more than just a hippie and an instrument.
Not sure if you should point him at the project.
Even worse idea:
Hide the BT microphone in the toilet, leave jar of kimchi in fridge.
Sound activated, so the didgeridoo keeps repeating the last ‘noise sequence’ (‘brap brap grunt splash, ‘gods angry fist’ splash…Mom’s voice…ahhh, Vindaloo’).
Good idea:
Make pop on didgeridoo/bong conversion base.
Owners of didgeridoos always also own bongs.
I think it’s a rule. Cops can get search warrant for bong based on presence of didgeridoo…
Also note:
You can carry any bong anywhere by putting a lampshade on it.
Or by saying ‘it’s a didgeridoo’.
I digress.
Crop was nice this year.
argone accumulator anyone? I got asked to make one for someone once…
Argon accumulator: useful for welders!
Orgone Accumulator: useful for gathering Anti-entropic energy for the spirit if Wilhelm Reich
At least this is mostly harmless and the originals are only separating rich idiots from their money.
But, it’s reminiscent of the woo woo gadgets which are sold with implied claims of being alzheimers, cancer, whichever nasty life limiting disease they care to name treatments and allegedly work by shining lights of different colours in various patterns/frequencies onto bits of the body.
I wish the slime who prey on the desperate were afflicted with the disease they’re claiming to cure with their BS.
Here in Czech republic i saw public health insurance to cover magnet therapy. So it’s an incentive for a clinics to sing you up for magnet therapy instead of actual cure, because cost for them is zero and insurance copany will pay them anyway.
sounds like Electronic Snake oil to me.
Easy to say ‘mostly harmless’ or that a different oddity is pure snake oil, but really you have to research even pretty stupid seeming things before you can make that claim. Random seeming bit of tree bark is toxic to the point you likely die with small exposure, while similarly random seeming bit of bark might be comparable to Aspirin, or rather good for you in some way at a very low concentration etc.
The core of the concept here is actually pretty simple to prove sound – as does your skin react to exposure to different wavelengths in different ways? The answer to which is really darn obvious and easy to see now at least for the lighter coloured skintones that tan/burn in a very visible way. Which thanks to research you can prove is a reaction to the UV end of the spectrum. So the concept that exposure to a controlled amount of a very specific X-ray, IR, Radio frequency, or microwaves might actually prove beneficial (at least to your appearance) trigger some other mechanism wouldn’t be a surprise.
Which is not to say I actually believe this is genuine, as I’ve not read the papers, seen the peer reviews or done any research on it myself (and I personally really don’t care enough on this topic to do so). But it isn’t impossible, at least till proven otherwise keep an open mind.
The reason why “traditional” or folk medicine works is because diseases and ailments tend to heal themselves anyways regardless of the treatment – leaving people with the observation that the last treatment worked.
Naive folk science is often misleading, and you can end up treating the toxic tree bark the same as the medicinal tree bark. Moreover, the fact that the toxic tree bark kills you is an indication of how potent it is, and therefore using smaller non-lethal amounts will surely be a very potent remedy. That’s how we ended up with mercury as medicine in the past, or drinking colloidal silver even if it turns your skin blue.
It’s a form of the streetlight fallacy, where people look for solutions in places where they observe a significant difference, even if the difference has nothing to do with the problem they’re facing. In the original story, the drunkard was looking for his lost keys under the street lamp, not because they were necessarily lost there, but because there was enough light to see.
Similarly, you may reason that it’s easy to see that certain frequencies of light have an effect on human skin – but that doesn’t mean other wavelengths, especially long wavelengths that are actually not absorbed by the skin, should do anything at all. The core of the concept isn’t “sound” – it’s just like the drunkard’s search: you can’t expect to find the lost keys just anywhere. Why should they be here instead of there?
More to the point, UV light may cure (and cause) skin cancer as a form of radiation therapy, but that may have nothing to do with e.g. a rash caused by a virus or cell changes due to aging, or poor diet, or whatever. What does it mean to make your skin prettier or healthier? What exactly are you trying to do?
Without even knowing what the problem is you’re trying to solve, or not having defined it in the first place, you’re twice removed from any soundness of reasoning. A difference by one action doesn’t inherently suggest a difference by a related but different action (one color of light vs. another), and without knowing what the difference should be, you can’t evaluate whether you’ve achieved it.
You might stumble upon a new mechanism of action, but that has nothing to do with your reasoning of the matter – you just got lucky and then moved the goalposts to say that the effect you found was the effect you were looking for. That’s like the drunkard accidentally finding someone else’s keys, and by sheer coincidence ending up at the door they fit in, declaring “I’m home!”.
The core concept here is simply that the skin or your body in general reacts to certain wavelengths differently, which is categorically proved. I agree there is no reason every wavelength picked arbitrarily will do anything beneficial, and in the case of beauty products actually defining beneficial… But still the very nucleus of the concept that a wavelength has some effect is proven which makes this very very plausible that other wavelengths will do something.
I also agree many traditional remedies are not genuinely useful, but equally many have been proven valid – till you actually study them you can’t know if this one is just a placebo, harmless and its just the body repairing itself, or perhaps useful but actually in an entirely different way to the supposed mechanism etc etc. So you can’t just ignore an idea as snake oil simply because the mechanism it works by isn’t obvious to you! Until it has been studied sufficiently the only thing you have to judge by is the basic principles in play, which when it comes to biology is often barely understood complex chemistry…
There is a lot of nonsense out there but that just means we need more research. A lot of modern medicine can probably be traced back to “traditional” remedies.
That’s exactly the error in reasoning, and why people believe bunk science and charlatans. You’re fixating on the positive effect and ignoring the full evidence: there is light that does something, and there is light that does not. There’s actually more evidence for a lack of effect than there is for effect.
But ultimately it doesn’t confirm or deny the case – observing one wavelength of light does not in and of itself make it any more or less plausible that another wavelength would do anything, especially when you don’t know what “anything” should be.
In order to use the evidence, you would need to formulate a hypothesis about why the effect happens or doesn’t happen. Without that, you’re jumping to conclusions.
Where does the claim of “equally many” come from? Have you listed all of them?
That’s a different argument. We’re talking about how do you evaluate whether it is. Lending credibility to claims by faulty reasoning is the hallmark of snake-oil and bunk science.
Mind: the effect may be real, but the reasoning makes it bunk.
After all, snake-oil salesmen of old commonly added cocaine in their tonics, which indeed makes you feel better almost regardless of the ailment. The tonic works – just not how you think it does, or how it was sold to you.
No I really am not. The whole point is this particular idea actually has well proven and basically identical set up with one wavelength, so the core concept that your body reacts to wavelengths different is sound. And thus you can’t easily discount it – Making it very different to real no hope quackery that you can know for certain has exactly no hope of any effect. It is not like firing a laser pointer at the moon and claiming spending an hour sat under the ‘red’ moon will fix you, or buying a pretty hunk of entirely normal glass that is somehow a ‘magic crystal’…
You really don’t need a hypothesis at all, and are not jumping to conclusions at all. When you can prove something works, which is what evidence would be, then even if you have no clue why at all it still works.
You can know what happens next with absolutely certainly things work without knowing the mechanism – every time you push button A, Y happen – its 100% predictable, but you don’t know if its an electronic or mechanical automation, or some trained monkey in the black box… Which in terms of being able to use that effect it is entirely irreverent – the hypothesis and subsequent proof for hopefully only one of them is interesting, valuable and might open up better pathways to the same result or more options but it doesn’t change that pushing button A gets you result Y.
“Equally many” as in another way of expressing “on the other hand” type concepts not a mathematically perfect 1:1 ratio of examples but an equality between truth and BS on these remedies in a more general sense – there are many obvious examples that are well studied with Aspirin begin perhaps the most obvious.
Again, you start from the premise that your body reacts which is a bias in thinking by ignoring that for the most part the body doesn’t react at all. You’re fixating on the positive difference – that is the streetlight effect. If you take both the positive AND the negative evidence you have at hand, then it becomes easy to discount the idea that there should be other effects at other wavelengths.
But there are more problems in the way you’re thinking:
Proof for one case does not extend plausibility to the other case without explaining the connecting factor – that is the hypothesis of the reason for the action. Without it, you are definitely jumping to conclusions. Just saying it’s because of “wavelength” to give it a label is not sufficient – that is called the nominal fallacy.
Consider the case: hot water cooks an egg. Therefore it should be plausible that different kinds of water have different effects on an egg. Cold water, colored water, perhaps holy water, or water that has been swirled around three times in the presence of chanting monks – but as we are well aware, it’s the heat that cooks the egg, not the water. The water is irrelevant to the case, as hot sand or hot air would do the same. If you claim that it’s plausible that a special kind of water has special effects because hot water cooks an egg, you’re making a completely irrelevant and irrational jump to conclusions. Non-sequitur. This is what’s happening here.
That’s associative thinking, sometimes called “magical thinking”. Consider another case: how do you lift a heavy stone? Answer – you paint it white. Why? Because lighter objects are easier to lift. That’s how associative thinking works. Your brain is not fundamentally a reasoning organ, but a pattern matching organ. Simply finding patterns is an incredibly efficient way to solve most problems, but it has serious limitations: if you forget to apply rational reasoning, painting the rock white is just as valid an answer as any. It’s how people come to see the face of Jesus on a piece of toast, or inventing homeopathy, or in this case arguing in favor of a cranky idea of a therapy device without demanding a shred of reason for it.
Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re selling the idea to yourself even before asking “why should this work at all?”. That is what charlatans use to trick you.
Semantics aside, that is another error in thinking called the “fallacy of the middle ground”. If for 99 cases you have no result, and for 1 case you have a result, you’re not justified in saying “equally many” because that is a gross distortion of facts even if we’re not taking the words literally. Worse yet if you take that stance without even knowing or checking. Your thinking will be distorted by the weakest evidence to the contrary. See for example how people keep “finding” weak evidence that something or the other causes cancer in the statistical margins of small studies, but never anything definitive, and using that to argue that the thing does cause cancer despite the overwhelming evidence saying no.
One positive observation trumps the 99 negative observations because you’re ignoring the latter. Obviously, because nothing is happening, you’re not paying any attention, and since you’re not paying attention you think you have the full picture already. That is not rational thinking.
It is the same sort of thinking – and I explained this in a detailed reply, but that apparently got caught in moderation so we’ll have to wait if it goes through.
Again, you start from the premise that your body reacts which is a bias in thinking by ignoring that for the most part the body doesn’t react at all. You’re fixating on the positive difference – that is the streetlight effect. If you take both the positive AND the negative evidence you have at hand, then it becomes easy to discount the idea that there should be other effects at other wavelengths.
But there are more problems in the way you’re thinking:
Proof for one case does not extend plausibility to the other case without explaining the connecting factor – that is the hypothesis of the reason for the action. Without it, you are definitely jumping to conclusions. Just saying it’s because of “wavelength” to give it a label is not sufficient – that is called the nominal fallacy.
Consider the case: hot water cooks an egg. Therefore it should be plausible that different kinds of water have different effects on an egg. Cold water, colored water, perhaps holy water, or water that has been swirled around three times in the presence of chanting monks – but as we are well aware, it’s the heat that cooks the egg, not the water. The water is irrelevant to the case, as hot sand or hot air would do the same. If you claim that it’s plausible that a special kind of water has special effects because hot water cooks an egg, you’re making a completely irrelevant and irrational jump to conclusions. Non-sequitur. This is what’s happening here.
That’s associative thinking, sometimes called “magical thinking”. Consider another case: how do you lift a heavy stone? Answer – you paint it white. Why? Because lighter objects are easier to lift. That’s how associative thinking works. Your brain is not fundamentally a reasoning organ, but a pattern matching organ. Simply finding patterns is an incredibly efficient way to solve most problems, but it has serious limitations: if you forget to apply rational reasoning, painting the rock white is just as valid an answer as any. It’s how people come to see the face of Jesus on a piece of toast, or inventing homeopathy, or in this case arguing in favor of a cranky idea of a therapy device without demanding a shred of reason for it.
Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re selling the idea to yourself even before asking “why should this work at all?”. That is what charlatans use to trick you.
Semantics aside, that is another error in thinking called the “fallacy of the middle ground”. If for 99 cases you have no result, and for 1 case you have a result, you’re not justified in saying “equally many” because that is a gross distortion of facts even if we’re not taking the words literally. Worse yet if you take that stance without even knowing or checking. Your thinking will be distorted by the weakest evidence to the contrary.
Apparently we’re not allowed to use the word that starts with t and ends with rump without being flagged for moderation.
Actually it rather does, it doesn’t make it any more certain to be true but proof for one case makes very similar cases much much more likely to be worth researching, and more likely to prove true.
Even in your egg case which is clearly bonkers as we actually know its not the water but using it to transfer the heat, but even if you didn’t know that. Well then you know water does something and you don’t know why testing cold/holy/coloured water is perfectly plausible and might have a good result, in this case it would take all of 30 seconds to prove it is the heat that matters… It is a crap analogy anyway – this is more like contemplating just how hot the water should be to cook the egg better – As the heat being the operating principle is already a known thing, so changing heat levels is akin to changing the wavelengths – you know one works, and somewhat the mechanism behind its function. And in that case you’d find there is a temperature below which the egg doesn’t ever cook, and probably at the other end a temperature in which you made the egg a pipebomb, either of which failure state may be what happened with this other wavelength.
But in any case my comment you were replying to was talking about PROOF OF THE CASE IN QUESTION anyway. “When you can prove something works, which is what evidence would be…” as in an example where we have categorical proof this Red light bath does work, but we have no idea why – no hypothesis required to make use of the effect, you have proof it works. One day understanding how it works is likely to be beneficial at getting more efficient, or more effective variety, and maybe whole new ideas.
ChatGPT: “There are several scientific studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of red light therapy for skin care. For instance, a study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology found that low-level red and infrared light therapy can significantly increase the production of collagen, elastin, and hyaluronic acid in skin cells. This suggests potential benefits such as enhanced skin texture, reduced wrinkles, and improved skin elasticity
Another study outlined in BMJ Open is focused on comparing the effects of red and amber LED light on facial aging. This research is designed as a randomized controlled trial and aims to specifically evaluate the reduction in the volume of periocular wrinkles, highlighting the potential rejuvenation effects of red light therapy on the skin
These studies indicate that red light therapy can be a beneficial treatment for improving skin health and appearance, supporting its use in clinical and cosmetic dermatology.”
https://www.jaad.org/article/S0190-9622(19)33160-3/abstract
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/8/5/e021419
IMHO this is a good example of chatgpt providing text without serious value towards answering the question at hand, while suggesting otherwise in the answer.
The first publication is funded by johnson & johnson and describes research performed on donor cells from plastic surgery (i.e. left over tissue from the operating theatre) cultivated in the lab. How well results from this context can translate to the real world is unclear.
The second publication merely describes a protocol for an intended study. It does not indicate nor support anything as chatgpt claims.
Neither of the example publications “demonstrate the effectiveness of red light therapy for skin care”.
ChatGPT tends to answer positively to positive questions and negative to negative questions. If you ask it why something is X it will try to say why something is X even if it’s fundamentally not. It depends on whether it can find enough sources and texts supporting the claim one way or the other. You can make it flip-flop any way you want by suitable prompting.
For obscure crank claims like light therapy, there are more crank websites and non-critical sources that agree with it than there are real research papers debunking it, which biases ChatGPT to support such fringe claims.
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/15/diy-glasses-aim-to-improve-color-vision/
Thanks! Thanks for pasting the output of a machine known to lie and hallucinate! You’ve definitely added to the conversation here!
Tell me in what part did it lie? Did you read the papers?
Did you verify that the claims made by ChatGPT are supported by the papers?
Red light therapy is actually well studied and has demonstrable effects on skin and deeper tissue. It has regenerative effects. It improves scars and speeds up wound recovery (from ulcers for example. It is actually used medically. Look up the medical research about it, it’s real.
Okay but what does the red light actually do? I watched the entire video, and I still don’t know this.
Read scientific papers I linked above.
Thanks for your effort
I am very interested in the effect of light on human body (and mind). Tried to diy a lucid dreaming mask but it never went anywhere
I recently met some people who work in optogenetics, which is the use of light to selectively activate neurons or other tissue types. Much more invasive than a light mask, but very cool nonetheless.
You mean the scientific papers ChatGPT linked above.
They are still scientific papers with a research. Now show yours.
Show my what? I’m not arguing the validity of the studies. I’m talking about how ChatGPT contributes to a dumbing-down of interaction on the internet.
Jesus, give it up. If the papers came up in a Google search, would you be so stubbornly dug in over how they were found?
The papers are not the issue here. I honestly don’t care whether they support this therapy or not. What I care about is whether ChatGPT can be trusted to accurately summarise them, and whether they support the claims ChatGPT is making. My own experience and countless examples have shown that ChatGPT lies and hallucinates. It makes stuff up that isn’t in the citation it gives. It is worse than useless – it is actively harmful.
Helena, I just realized…
ChatGPT is a a genius act of poisoning the data well, on VCs dime.
My opinions about it are completely revised now.
ChatGPT is worth a million+:
‘For sale 20kg of lithium deuteride. Will trade for large bioreactor and crop dusting aircraft. Ask for Osama.’ ads on Topeka Craigslist.
I bet ChatGPT has the NSA chasing shadows, even more then normal.
I can’t speak to skin treatments, but for treatment of TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) & Concussions (slightly less traumatic brain injury) I was surprised with how effective this type of therapy can be.
My GF had a concussion last summer, and after ~5-6 months of slow recovery, even with extensive cognitive rest, we started looking for other options. Red Light Therapy was mentioned a few times, and I was pretty skeptical, but I figured I could do a little research and it turns out that it’s actually quite effective at neurological rehab! I was pretty surprised, honestly – it’s just shining lights at someone’s head, right?
Actually – using specific wavelengths in the low-infrared/red spectrum, the energy penetrates a few cm into the skull and causes increased bloodflow to those areas – apparently? I found a few decent peer reviewed studies that didn’t really explain the entire mechanism, but showed significant improvement, and for my GF it’s been night/day. She’s able to hold conversations again, sleep, has her short term memory back – basically she can function after treatments. She’s done ~2 months of biweekly treatments, and they’re starting to ramp her down – but this was a huge step forward in recovery for her.
Significant Improvements in Cognitive Performance Post-Transcranial, Red/Near-Infrared Light-Emitting Diode Treatments in Chronic, Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: Open-Protocol Study – Journal of Neurotrauma 2014.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4043367/
Transcranial Low-Level Laser (Light) Therapy for Brain Injury – Photomed Laser Surgery, 2016
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5180077/
The radiation intensity mentioned in that paper (22 mW/cm^2) is about the same as if you took a walk in sunshine (100 mW/cm^2 over the whole spectrum, roughly 20-25 mW/cm^2 in the “red”, depending on what you call “red”).
Note the postulated mechanism is absorption by cytochrome-c oxidase, part of the metabolic process that produces ATP, the internal “fuel” in cells. It has an absorption peak at 600 nm, what most people would call the orange end of red.
Cerebral blood flow is regulated by nitric oxide (NO), in turn modulated by local carbon dioxide concentration. You can double the blood flow in your brain just by holding your breath for a minute. It also changes with postural changes, and even by just thinking hard. It’s a pretty crappy measure of a “treatment”.
Not saying it’s snake oil, but just because it’s published and peer-reviewed doesn’t necessarily make it ‘true’, even if positive effects are associated with it.
The first paper is self-reported outcomes, and the last line of the abstract is that placebo controlled studies are indicated. While I agree with those statements on a technical level, self-reported outcomes are very, very suspect and, as stated, should really only be used as a pilot or justification for a “proper” (aka pain to conduct, expensive) study. Placebo works really well for some people. I’m not here to say their improvements are any less real, just that the mechanism is (likely) vastly different than what is claimed.
The second paper is a pretty weird combination review article and “summary of experiments we did” in mice. Off the top of my head many other mechanisms are possible- localized heating, who knows.
YES‼️This and Methylane Blue used in conjunction. I am satisfied you will be diligent and do your research .
It makes you feel like you’re in a Gaspar Noe flick, which has significant biological effects
I can confirm.
Am old hacker, much of my youth was spent in rooms lit by red led power indicators.
I’m still just as attractive as I was at 20!
Everybody’s standards have slipped, some by enough.
Which is to say not attractive at all BURN
I have the same story, but all my stuff has used green or blue indicators. I am now completely nocturnal and have transparent skin, like a sea creature. I hear strange chanting coming from beneath my basement floorboards… Iä, Iä… Cthulhu fhtagn… Ph’nglui mglw’nfah Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!
Perhaps the introduction of these new LED colors more recently explains certain societal trends
Changing all my computer applications to a red theme now… look at that screen glow, although my room now looks like the inside of an old submarine in battle mode. But we can’t have wrinkles…
Combat the wrinkles! Red photon torpedoes on tubes 5 and 6! Fire!
Nice YouTube thumbnail, I can’t wait to watch this video. /s
HaD is now into chakras.
There is some science behind it. Even if it doesn’t work, isn’t hacking something to allow you to try it out rather than buying a commercial product what HaD is all about?
Ever considered just logging off, I mean permanently? The world would obviously benefit.
Apparently so is NASA
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20030001599
One reason it caught NASA’s attention is the fact that an injury on a long duration mission is going to be hard to supply with conventional pharmaceuticals.
NASA has let their name be used by hucksters for decades…zero point energy, reactionless drives, perpetual motion, dowsing, astrology, economics, sociology, marxism etc etc.
Like a TEDx talk, pure bullshit riding on the TED name. TED was briefly something. Not anymore. Guess why?
I don’t get it, why build a brand just to shit all over it?
NASA is a brand IMHO.
Ah yes, the vibe-based method of spotting disinformation. Very nice
I vividly remember “studies” that showed that red LED lights caused muscle weakness. Someone once even demonstrated to a bunch of AT&T engineers (I sh*t you not) that a Texas Instrument digital watch (the old red led kind) made the wearer’s arms weaker (it was the old “slow push / fast push” trick that hucksters had been using forever.
Could we please normalize the fact that there just because there are “studies” doesn’t mean that “there’s science behind it.”
Guess what else has “studies”? Homeopathy, reiki, Ayurveda, “biofields”.
10,000+ papers were retracted in 2023. With AI chum and for-profit paper mills that should probably be millions.
I agree be careful and verify before you believe. However also keep an open mind as so many ‘natural’ and ‘quack’ and other ‘crazy’ remedies over the years have proven to have some basis in fact once the studies are done (though not always the way it was thought etc).
What’s the ratio of “quackery proven turned legit” to “quackery still quackery”?
Because from my perspective for every “yes, a plant based diet may be good for some health issues” there seems to be about a 100 “apple cider vinegar cures everything”.
A $78,000 LED bed when 30 minutes of sunlight will give you exactly the same dosage seems a bit of a “red flag” for me.
A dose of full spectrum vs targeted wavelengths can’t really be considered equal without study.. For all I know the sunlight might be able to do the job but at the same time we already know what UV that is in sunlight does to the skin, and that isn’t particularly good for you (in higher doses anyway), so the concept of a targeted wavelength treatment that triggers only the right biological process selectively likely has merits.
Also the price of the bed is not really relevant – the science behind it will either be true, false or some nuanced middle ground even if it was several powers of 10 more expensive or cheaper. Getting some rich folks to buy something at a high price really isn’t a shocker, its the whole reason Lamborghini (etc) cars exist, as those really are not about being cost effective…
That’s just special pleading, and as such it asks us to believe not one unsupported claim but two unsupported claims at once: one being the existence of the effect, and another being the masking of the effect by circumstances where we would expect to see the effect, if it were real.
This is just to explain why the effect might still be real even though we’re not seeing it. In other words, you’re doing the age old “I have an invisible dragon on my hand”, routine. It’s there, but you can’t see it because it’s invisible.
The more you have to look for special reasons and gotchas to support the plausibility of the original claim, the more likely it is to just be false, because you’re stacking improbabilities on improbabilities.
@Dude In any chemistry/Bio type process there is always a plethora of reactions going on that will meet a specific equilibrium or exhaust the reagents at different rates for many reasons. The control of all the other variables is commonly required to get the reaction you actually want preferentially, if you’ll even get the reaction you want at all without such control. In this case you are trying to provide the initial energy to trigger a specific collection of reactions it seems very very plausible. And if you struggle with wavelength targeted reactions consider how anything you’ve put in the microwave works, with the superheated x and the still cold y…
NB not claiming it is genuine, though there does seem to be more than enough solid sources to show there is some degree of truth to the concept, and going back many decades now. So I’d suggest there is something there, but I’ve not got the time or interest to dig into every darn study or perform my own…
Also there is a huge difference between saying the effects are hard to detect outside of controlled environments, and the effects don’t exist at all. You can’t see my LED glows in daylight, doesn’t mean it isn’t glowing. And in this case probably much the same thing from the evidence presented so far it works but you can’t easily see it under full spectrum lighting because the effect is swamped…
Also worth considering that the other way as well as how many ‘legit’ ideas get proved to be quackery or at least erroneous in the end – for a prolonged period Earth was the centre of the universe and all else rotates around it, electronics have that hopefully well known oddity in our circles of Conventional Current, it was thought just about the only thing that mattered to survival odds in an amputation was the speed as which it was performed etc etc.
As soon as you start to assume you know without having actually done several lifetimes of research I’d suggest history implies you will be wrong or at best only in the ballpark of correct pretty darn often… Though it might take a century or two for somebody else to prove it, so I guess you could ‘get away’ with it…
Best to believe everything new then, just to be safe.
Truth is you don’t have to listen to that much of the pure bullshit before their lies are just obvious.
It starts getting a little tricky, when the huckster know the ‘bullshit yourself first for quality lies’ trick.
But, bottom line, they’re not that smart on average.
Miss Information isn’t trying to sell us Cherokee hair tampons/red LED beds.
We’re not the target market.
@HaHa because Asbestos really was a wonder material that should be used for everything…
With all new discoveries and ideas scepticism is good, peer review and verification required and caution before widespread use would be generally advisable. But if you don’t actually have proof of snake oil…
I do agree many of these things are clearly pure BS, or worse actively dangerous like those radioactive ‘magic’ bracelets etc. But at least on paper this sounds plausible enough as we do already know certain wavelengths promote tanning, cause skin cancers etc, and that certain reactions happen or happen faster when given the right inputs. The concept seems to have got some research interest, which is promising but not certainty of it being real. And this time its got to be safe enough to try as if was dangerous to be exposed to relatively low levels of red light…
This is why people are continuously developing the philosophy of science and epistemology in general. To know what it means to know, and how to know it. We’re developing better ideas and better ways of thinking and dealing with uncertainty than just hard-balling it until you’re absolutely sure.
Consider for example that the concept of p-value checking goes back to the 1700’s. That’s when we first started to quantify how sure we are about the results we’re getting. Then in the late 1900’s we were starting to question how accurate this test really is, and where and how it actually applies given various kinds of evidence when we were applying it on more complicated questions over smaller and finer effects. We even discovered scientists gaming the value to make “statistically significant findings” out of noise, just to publish and earn reputation.
Yet to this day the common person on the street has no idea what any of that even means. People still rely on the same intuitive heuristics as they did 5,000 years ago, and that causes no end of trouble when trying to discern BS from fact.
A red LED watch turned to face your skin is sort of worthless, especially the type where you had to press a button to read the time.
Oh so studies aren’t always reliable huh? Jamie let’s pull up those mask studies from 2020 that overturned decades of previous research which used no human subjects, no control, and only water droplets with no live virus
Fantastic reasoning. We should absolutely not research or study anything that doesn’t sound real because even if there’s some studies suggesting there’s merit they could be wrong.
Quantum physics is snake oil and we should stop researching it. If it isn’t intuitive, then it isn’t worth study!
I don’t think OP says “let’s not study”, I think the OP says “the average consumer shouldn’t believe such fads and pseudoscience just because there is a paper supporting it”.
If and when the research proves that there is a population-wide, proven benefit to using such tools, then this scientific knowledge would become common knowledge.
An average home user building these gadgets is good because “making is good” but otherwise it is just silly.
So, I was wondering if she traded the family cow for these beans. And what can I get for an old angry cat?
I’m trying really hard to be respectful, but the core concept that red wavelength light somehow magically fixes skin (which is never defined, as noted by another commenter above) is super suspect. Not impossible, but everything points to absolutely bunk science. From being extraordinarily expensive to celebrity endorsements to simply not passing the “sniff test.”
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Being charitable, though, it is certainly true that red light in particular passes through tissue pretty well as any kid that stuck a hand over a flashlight (ok, “torch” to our UK colleagues) has demonstrated. And medical pulse oximeters function in that very same way. Is it doing anything, though? And even if it is doing something, what are the chances that is is beneficial, and so profoundly effective that it is easily detectible in a “hey look how great my skin looks now” … especially on the background of celebrity endorsement, those same people that have a professional team of publicists, stylists, photographers and literally who’s job it is to sell you stuff. Sell you anything. I mean. Slim to none.
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All that said, super rad (red?) project by the hacker to spend not a lot of money to at least give it a whirl. If, as I suspect, it is all totally bogus, it is probably also at least totally harmless. Fun stuff.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20030001599
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260964425_The_NASA_light-emitting_diode_medical_program-progress_in_space_flight_and_terrestrial_applications
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2005/hm_1.html
So two of those papers are 20 years old and the third is a press release. If NASA had discovered the key to health improvements by using a handful of LED’s I have a feeling it wouldn’t be in the form of a celebrity endorsed magic bed 20 years later.
Hey look! There are “more than 150 published, controlled clinical trials using homeopathy.” https://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/there-good-scientific-evidence-homeopathy
Let’s go cure and prevent horrible diseases with tiny vials of water …
You guys are getting silly and grasping at straws.
Do you think that research has never been ignored for 20 years and then caught on as a fad for capricious reasons?
All you guys have is smug reddit snark, then you are shown studies, then you have smug irrelevant reddit comparisons to chakras or homeopathy “but whatabout” nonsense. It’s a complete non-sequitur. I’m not completely sold on the red light thing either, but the evidence that you are better than those you look down on is pretty thin
Also true that many research concepts will sit on a shelf when the original researcher moves on to a new idea/job, dies etc. Doesn’t mean it was a bad idea, or wrong, just that the immediate results of that original research didn’t gain enough traction to secure funding,. Or sometimes that the concept really needs future tech/knowledge in other areas to actually move further..
“All you guys have is smug reddit snark, then you are shown studies..”
I mean. I also have my 20 years as a professional medical researcher, double doctorate degrees in the field and, like, teach post graduate lectures on objective review of scientific literature. But whatever, that’s definitely what I (aka The Man) would say. It’s worth the digital ink this is printed on tho
@craig I wasn’t talking to you, but I’m impressed with your credentials. Myself, I’m the Prince of Wales.
Jokes aside, your particular comment was not snarky and did have some nuance. I don’t think you would be one to dismiss a study merely because it came from two decades ago, like Titus did. If you did, I probably would not attend any of your lectures on objective review.
The concept that certain wavelengths of light have effects on the body is not exactly novel.. We all know what a underdose or overdose of ultraviolet can do. But yes, the celebrity endorsements are silly and the idea that you need to spend tens of thousands or even a hundred dollars is absurd. A chicken lamp is a few bucks. Will it do anything? Idk but the chickens do seem to like it
I don’t know if this actually works but I can believe it’s possible.
We know UV matters, also what UV matters? A B C?
A good starting point would be what wavelength are these red LEDs?
Does it even match up with the “science”?
…And could it be the infrared, and the visible red that comes along with it is a red herring? Pun not intended.
Or, of course, another option is that it does nothing at all.
If it has Kim K. on it it’s just expensive Bravo Sierra.
One of the earliest light therapy studies observed hair regrowth in rats. This occurred in the 1960s, during the infancy of laser technology, when its effects were largely unknown.
Research on these devices yields mixed results, which is problematic. However, the limited economic value in funding robust, independent studies, due to the low barriers to entry in this market, leads manufacturers to conduct their own, often biased, research. Furthermore, the underlying biochemistry is not fully understood, complicating matters.
We know that red light penetrates deeper into human tissue via the ‘optical window.’ Could a narrower spectrum produce different results compared to full-spectrum light, even at comparable power per wavelength? This seems plausible, as it could create different energy gradients.
Another uncertainty lies in comparing lasers and red LEDs. Can lasers, with their narrower spectral content, achieve superior results to red LEDs?
It’s intriguing that light therapies are targeted for diverse applications: skin rejuvenation, hair regrowth, adipose tissue reduction, deep tissue injury recovery, and wound healing.
While I believe light stimulation elicits biological responses, I question the extent to which these results depend on other physiological conditions or the placebo effect.
Having worked on one of these devices, I welcome low-cost, open-source options for experimentation. The potential benefits still outweigh the risks (because they are near zero).
I’d argue that when you factor in that these DIY gadgets will be produced by average home user, with average consumer grade LEDs and used in an uncontrolled environment, there is a significant population risk — skin burns, house fires, cancer to name a few. And the supposed benefits are almost zero (except for very specific applications where the medical professionals actually administer/prescribe the therapy in such cases).
10 minutes lost for 3 minutes of ideas on the matter, yet no info regarding wavelength or results.
I knew about this red light that helps the skin and also help with wounds.
I also know about a blue light mask to help with jetlag.
I also know about a green costume used those days for an irish reason to have a cold one.
Cheers.
I recall the BBC did a story on this red light ‘therapy’, years ago:
How to hallucinate with ping pong balls
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180124-how-to-hallucinate-with-ping-pong-balls
I’ve tried this actually. It’s not exactly a fat hit of DMT, but it does do something.
The general concept has been around for a long time, and this isn’t one of the better implementations. For instance, this one dates from the 1950s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine
Probably should be avoided by epileptics. Actually I wonder if the mechanism is similar in baseline brains as to what happens too much and goes afoul in epileptic brains. I don’t know.
Very interesting, thanks, I’d never heard of the Dreamachine.