NASA Research Illuminates Medical Uses of Light with US Navy Seals study
Red Light LED devices were given to U.S. Navy crews for treatment of training injuries. These produced more than a 40 percent greater improvement in musculoskeletal injuries and a 50 percent faster healing time for lacerations, compared to control groups.
Experimentation helped demystify, legitimize, and simplify medical uses for long-known but little-understood light therapy
Can light help a wound heal faster? Alleviate pain? Prevent loss of eyesight?
Although decades of studies indicate it can – including extensive research funded by NASA – the mounting evidence hasn’t always drawn the attention that might be expected for such a striking discovery.
This may be because the science behind it hasn’t been well understood. For example, although a Danish physician received a Nobel Prize in 1903 for discovering that exposure to concentrated red light accelerated the healing of sores, he remained reluctant to put it into practice without understanding why it worked.
A larger barrier to acceptance, though, has probably been that it simply sounds unbelievable.
In a 1989 paper about the health benefits of low-powered laser light, biophysicist Tiina Karu noted that the treatment appeared “highly incredible and even mysterious.” What’s more, she wrote, its effectiveness against many different ailments only added to doubts by creating the appearance of a proverbial snake-oil panacea.
Karu hypothesized that red light treated many afflictions because it improved overall cell function by stimulating the mitochondria that drive metabolism in animal cells. This would accelerate cell production and relieve oxidative stress, a factor that causes inflammation and symptoms of aging and ultimately contributes to diabetes, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and other illnesses.
Today it’s thought that red and infrared wavelengths are absorbed by cytochrome C oxidase, a key enzyme in cellular metabolism, and probably by other light-sensitive chemicals, triggering a cascade of effects within the cell.
Karu and others began to suspect that “uniform” laser light probably wasn’t necessary for producing beneficial effects, but it was NASA that finally answered that question after the space agency stumbled on it accidentally.