I recently wrote about all of the nutrients and other needs for repairing cartilage to heal back pain. I also wrote about the necessity for sunlight.  A new revelation about near infrared light has now increased my understanding of the need for sun exposure for healing back pain. The exposure of near infrared light (NIR) is as critical as the exposure to the ultra violet light (UV). It is interesting to note that NIR and UV are not visible light but are found in the full spectrum of sunlight.

My first understanding about sun exposure for healing came in a very serendipitously manner. Some years ago, I was telling the owner of a book store about my return to health with nutrients.  I had explained to him that my cartilage had healed and relieved the stress on my nerve roots in my back.  He related a story to me that was a real surprise.  His mother was having back pain.  She had spent the spring and summer in her garden and her back pain had resolved.  She had grown an inch during this period and thought that was the reason for the back-pain relief.  I did not understand how just being outdoors could help the cartilage repair.  I thought then that it was exercise, the consumption of vegetables from her garden, and the increased amount of vitamin D from the sun.

The new revelation is this paper by George D. Gale: Infrared therapy for chronic low back pain, a randomized control trial. In this trial, patients from a clinic were randomly assigned to the treatment group or the placebo group.  The treatment group was given infrared light treatment in the wavelength of 800 nm to 1200 nm.  The placebo group was wearing the same exposure apparatus without the power connected.  The patients were asked to rate their pain on the numerical rating scale (NRS) of 0-10.  At the beginning of the trail the average on the NRS was 7 for both groups. In seven weeks, the treatment group’s pain was reduced to an average of 3, while there was no significant change in the placebo group.  What an amazing discovery of a low-cost and easily-applied treatment with significant results and no adverse effects.

Since this was so successful, I suggested this treatment to several members of a coffee group that are suffering from chronic back pain and they did not want to try my nutritional suggestions.  I suggested the 250w, single infrared light that you can get at any hardware store.  The method used was from this article by Wendy Myers.  In just a few weeks, they related to me how significantly the light had helped their pain.  There is also a welder that occasionally comes in the morning for coffee.  He said that he had hurt his knee and the doctor told him that he should stay out of work for two weeks.  I told him about the infrared light.  Two days later he returned to say that his knee pain had healed and he was going back to work—amazing.

Here is my infrared light setup that I use when experiencing aches and pains from exercising.  It is amazing how the aches and pains go away in a short period. I should also note that my eye floater that I reported in earlier post from over exposure to LEDs is completely gone with the NIR.

There is science to support these findings.  It appears that full spectrum light does many things to our biology.  I recently reread Health and Light by John N. Ott.  This photo-biologist is the person that pioneered time-lapsed videos of plants, as they grew, for Walt Disney.  He also discovered many effects of full spectrum light on animals and humans.  This included his hip being healed after he broke his prescription sun glasses and went back to plain glass lenses.  He had his hip x-rayed to show the improvement from prior x-rays to be sure that he was just not imaging his healing.  He was denied many times for funding for research projects in association with many universities.  With this taking place in the 1950s through the 1980s, it makes you wonder why the medical profession scared us from the sun for the last sixty years.  Here is an eight-minute video describing his work. Ott believes that light through the eye, impacting the pineal gland, is responsible for balancing hormones. 

Dr. Michael R. Hamblin of Harvard University wrote a summary of the use of low level light therapy for treatment—Mechanism of Low Level Light Therapy.  He describes how low level light (near infrared) affects many areas of our health: increased ATP production, wound healing, tissue repair, prevention of tissue death, relief of inflammation, pain, edema, acute injuries, chronic disease, neurogenic pain, neurological problems, and amelioration of damage after heart attacks, stroke, nerve injury, and retinal toxicity. At the end of the paper, he provides a link to pub med with thousands of research papers on the use of light for treatment.  Many of the papers are about the use of lasers, but the real healing comes from full spectrum light.

Dr. Gerald Pollack’s work on structured water and how it affects life is amazing. This includes an exclusion zone that enlarges with infrared light at the boundaries of cells and organelles inside the cells.  This boundary layer creates a charged zone of negative ions.  He even shows how this creates a battery storage for electrical charge. He also shows how it increases blood flow and the effect on proteins to make them more active (Think about hemoglobin’s oxygen carrying capacity of a folded cell versus a fully extended cell.) when exposed to infrared light.  He is also a proponent of grounding or connecting our bodies to the earth to balance our electrical charge. Here is his TED video—Water, Cells, and Life.

Ultra violet light, visible light, and near infrared light or the full spectrum of sunlight are all necessary for health.  You do not have to decide if getting your vitamin D by supplementation is as effective as obtaining it from sunlight.  Exposure to sunlight is not just about Vitamin D.  The exposure to sunlight provides us with many other benefits that science is yet to discover.  The next time the doctor suggest a drug that makes you photosensitive, be very careful and ask if there is another treatment option.  What about the sunglasses you are wearing whenever you go in the sun.  Is that causing your hip to fail as reported by Dr. Ott? Is too much blue light from LED bulbs without full spectrum light damaging your eyes?  –Pandemic Survivor