Hey I need some assistance from the community. I asked Dave Farina of the Professor Dave Explains YouTube channel to do a debunk of red light therapy and he agreed if I can get together some information about the specific bad actors and psuedoscience involved. If anyone can collect some info about the specific peddlers, their background, the purported mechanisms of action, and any scientific papers about it and share them here I would really appreciate it.
Here’s an example of a “good” paper about it done by one such scientist Michael R. Hamblin.
A commonly cited source for the origin of this treatment is the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Niels Ryberg Finsen made discoveries about treating the bacterial infection lupus vulgaris with ultraviolet light, which is valid. Before that he was attempting to treat smallpox with infrared light which was unsuccessful. This is used in the claim that “research into red light therapy has been ongoing for more than 100 years”, which is very misleading.
Using “red” to treat smallpox goes back to ancient Eastern medicines and sun worshipping.
