I might thread this.

One of my patients told me she is trying photobiomodulation therapy for her parkinson’s disease. Her neurologist told her it’s OK to try but not to pay out thousands of dollars for the special devices on the market. So her son has made up a bike helmet with the LEDs inside it. She’s used it for 6 weeks and hasn’t noticed any difference in her hand strength (which is what worries her most) but she understands it’s a long term thing. It’s going to be very difficult (and not possible to explain to her even if I was her neurologist) that her concurrent other treatment and physio stuff may well be having an effect and teasing the two out won’t be possible. But anyway, this one does seem to be harmless. I looked up PubMed. There is some research and an attempt to explain how much light you might get to the brain through the scalp and skull. Gotta wonder a little bit if simply more time outside in good strong sunlight might be just as effective. It’s going to be a lot brighter than any light helmet I suspect.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066074/

buffy said:

I might thread this.

One of my patients told me she is trying photobiomodulation therapy for her parkinson’s disease. Her neurologist told her it’s OK to try but not to pay out thousands of dollars for the special devices on the market. So her son has made up a bike helmet with the LEDs inside it. She’s used it for 6 weeks and hasn’t noticed any difference in her hand strength (which is what worries her most) but she understands it’s a long term thing. It’s going to be very difficult (and not possible to explain to her even if I was her neurologist) that her concurrent other treatment and physio stuff may well be having an effect and teasing the two out won’t be possible. But anyway, this one does seem to be harmless. I looked up PubMed. There is some research and an attempt to explain how much light you might get to the brain through the scalp and skull. Gotta wonder a little bit if simply more time outside in good strong sunlight might be just as effective. It’s going to be a lot brighter than any light helmet I suspect.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066074/

A lot brighter than helmet lights but not as flickery, if that has an effect.

Not a Vitamin D issue for at least three reasons, wrong wavelength, no Vitamin D producing cells, and not a bone issue.

The brain has no pigments to absorb light, except in the red blood cells of the blood vessels of the brain where the result might be a slight heating. Mild brain heating is known to produce feelings of lassitude and euphoria.

Outside the brain, increased blood flow aids repair of minor wounds, but is very bad for major wounds.

> The most well studied mechanism of action of PBM centers around cytochrome c oxidase (CCO), which is unit four of the mitochondrial respiratory chain, responsible for the final reduction of oxygen to water using the electrons generated from glucose metabolism. The theory is that CCO enzyme activity may be inhibited by nitric oxide (NO). This inhibitory NO can be dissociated by photons of light that are absorbed by CCO (which contains two heme and two copper centers).

I’m not buying it. Dissociation of NO requires photons with far more energy than this, and CCO is a really poor light absorber.

Nitric oxide bond dissociation requires an energy of 626 kJ/mol, which is more than required for dissociation of oxygen O2, so you’d get formation of oxygen free radicals first, which would cause cell damage. But this dissociation energy is way outside the range possible with red light.

On the other hand, NO in the brain is normally lost through chemical reaction in a couple of seconds. The primary purpose of NO in the brain is as a vasodilator, so a similar action to mild heating.