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Andy Smith 01:10 
A quick disclaimer before we begin. The PEMF podcast does not contain any medical advice and the content provided is for informational purposes only. If you have any health concerns, please visit a healthcare professional. Welcome back to another episode of the PEMF podcast. Today I'm joined by James Carroll, one of the longest standing figures in the red light or also known as photo bio modulation space. James has been working with red light therapy since the 1990s and has spoken on the topic at the United Nations, the US Congress. So it's safe to say he's seen the field evolve from early research right through to where it is today. James welcome to the podcast. Hi thanks Andy. What we're going to do in this episode we're going to start with the fundamentals of what red light therapy is or also known as photo bio modulation. Actually what it is, how it works and the different ways it can be applied. We'll then move on to real world cases before going deeper into the like device specifications, dosing and some of the biggest myths and misconceptions that we see in the red light industry. I've been involved in the PEMF industry for like 13 years now but I haven't been involved in the red light industry for as long so I'm pretty excited about this episode because a lot of the time these podcasts help educate me too. So having someone like yourself James on the podcast is really exciting because I can draw from a wealth of knowledge. So let's start a real quick summary of kind of how you got into this space because I listened to a podcast earlier and it was just quite an interesting story about you know your your first steps into this industry and when you got sued and how all that kind of transpired.

James Carroll 02:54 
Well, I actually started in 1987, not in the 1990s. So next year is my 40th year in the field, because it'll be 2027 next year. So I was before I just, you know, got into photobiomodulation as it became so, you know, I put the other way around to you photobiomodulation was the name long before there was red light therapy as a name, as that's the become the biohacker preferred phrase for this. And even before then, it was all low level laser therapy. And before that, when I got involved, it was called laser biostimulation. So the I got involved in 87 when I was working in had a business helping companies get grant money from governments for research and development. And one of the companies we worked for was a laser company, and they were involved in this medical research. And I went along to see a lecture, and they showed how these lasers could be used to improve wound healing, some non healing wounds. And when I saw that, I thought this should be in every corner of every department of every hospital in the whole world, probably be there within five years, it's so miraculous, it must happen. And so I gave up my job to go and work for the laser company, because I thought this is the coolest thing you could ever want to do.  That was 1987. I had no idea how hard it was to bring a medical device to market and actually retail it. And so, and it's been getting harder. That was 1987. When things were much easier, I would be able to 1987 walk into a hospital, find the head of a physiotherapy department, when they did like using gadgets and physiotherapy in those days, and say, hey, look at this, it's a laser biostimulation. And you can use it for healing wounds, you can use it for treating tendinopathies and joint pain, and back and neck pain. Would you like to have a go? And they'll say, yeah, leave it for two weeks. And they would try it for two weeks. And then they say, yeah, it's amazing. We'll buy one and we'll get some, get a budget for it. And that's how we would get orders from that company. You can't do that these days. I mean, you really the the entry ticket to go and speak to somebody these days is you have to get nice approval, National Institute of Health and Care Excellence. And if I'd known in 1987, that in 2017, 30 years later, it would still be a fairly fringe medical device, or technology that I might probably never started. So, and it didn't help us anyway. I actually like it now. But the regulatory environments been getting much harder. I mean, we were making these things. And we didn't have a CE mark on the product. And you'd have a CE mark on a teddy bear to say, well, it doesn't catch fire. And there's nothing sharp. And it went nothing toxic for a child. There were no CE marks for medical lasers at that time. And it was another 10 years before we got a quality management system together. And we became a legitimate medical device company. So there's a bit in between that you mentioned being sued. Yes, the company I worked for went out of business. And in 1990, so 1991, I got together with two of the engineers that worked there. And we started our own version of that company. And the assets of the old company was sold to a new owner. And then the owner saw that we were making some products and decided or were told by the previous CEO of the company, oh, they stolen all our ideas, they stolen a copyright and they've infringed our patents and they've sold some of the goods illegally, they stole some goods, they've made up a lot of stuff. So we finally met in the high court and everything. And the short story, if you like, is we won everything. And they walked away from it. In the end, so it turned out to be all bogus. So that's how we got started with Thor's we started Thor in 1991. And by within 10 years, we had an order from the joint venture between the United States Navy and the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration in the United States. They were using our lasers for or started to use our lasers for spinal cord injuries and rats just to prove the improved the concept, I went to a conference, I could see that that they were people they're using it on the brain and the eye and the spinal cord. And the heart as well. And I came back to my colleagues and said, Hey, we need to write a plan and raise some money and take this thing seriously. This is not just for wound healing and physiotherapists. This is really big medical potential. My colleague said, No, don't do that. We don't want to write a plan, raise any money venture capitalists, they'll take over the company. They'll probably fire all of us. And they'll probably crash the company anyway. So we don't want to get involved in things like that. And I said, Well, I can't wait for this to take off without us. I want to get involved right by and in the long term. So I want to, I'm gonna leave, I'm gonna write a plan, I'm gonna raise some money and I'm gonna do it properly by myself. So I did that and left and they came back said, you know, come back, we'll do it your way. So we wrote a plan, we raised some money, they fired everybody and crashed the company. So they were absolutely right. The venture capitalists absolutely did ruin us. So that is a short version of what happened. So that money, we raised the money in 2006. We were dead by the end of 2007. So I created a new version of Thor in 2008. We launched in 1st of January 2008, and that's the current business that we are today. And it's solely by me, I'm the only shareholder.

Andy Smith 08:55 
Yeah, so it's been a long road and you know, the good thing about being in this industry is that you know, we're not just running businesses, we're you know, we're helping people along the way. So these products that we're using, you know, like you say in the medical industry or in the wellness industry, we're making a difference to people's health. So it kind of makes it worthwhile in the grand scheme of things. So what is your explanation of photobimodulation? Let's start at the beginning. And you know, why do you prefer to call it that rather than red light therapy?

James Carroll 09:27 
Well, first of all, photobio-modulation, photo means light, bio means life, modulation means you can stimulate or you can inhibit, you can slow things down. So that's why the name. So a group of us got together and I think it was around 2014. There were people from, you know, from Harvard, from the Uniform Services University Hospital for Health Sciences, so that's a military medical research hospital. There were many other academics and some industry people there as well. About two dozen of us got together and we adopted photobio-modulation simply because it was a better explanation. Until that date, we'd been calling it low-level laser therapy, but it doesn't have to be a laser in order to work. So that wasn't a good term. It doesn't sound good when you're talking to a patient and you're saying, would you like a low-level laser therapy treatment? It doesn't sound like it's going to do anything for you. And it's a tongue twister for the doctors and nurses and therapists and to go around saying, well, low-level laser therapy or LLLT all the time. So it's agreed that we needed a shorter, more succinct, patient-friendly term for this therapy. And that's why we called it photobio-modulation therapy. But it wasn't shorter. It wasn't simple. It's not more patient-friendly, but it better described what therapy was. And very quickly, people started using PBM or PBM therapy or PBM-T for short. And that's what you see in the literature now. And that is, if you were to look up photobio-modulation on PubMed, it probably finds about two-thirds of all the research in the field. And I forget, it's going to be something like eight and a half thousand academic papers come up under that name. If you would type in the phrase red light therapy as a phrase inside speech marks, it's a handful. So all the academic research is called photobio-modulation with a couple dozen maybe exceptions. And it's also been accepted by the National Library of Medicine in the United States. It's what's called a MeSH term, a medical subject heading, and it's official. So that is the official, if you like, American National Library of Medicine. And everybody tends to go along with their nomenclature. So that's why we're sticking with it.

Andy Smith 11:43 
No, great explanation. And we're seeing, you know, photobiomodulation, the word gets promoted for everything from skin health to muscle recovery and even bone health. But, you know, what would you say are the key evidence-backed benefits that actually are? And what would you say is like the top, top benefits that come from photobiomodulation?

James Carroll 12:06 
I think its anti-inflammatory effects are that probably the words consistently across all the areas of its application is its effect on inflammation. In terms of disease areas, so there are around 600 or 700 musculoskeletal pain studies. So that's brains and strains in creaky joints, so tendinopathies, joint pain back in neck pain. There's also about 700 randomized control clinical trials in and around the oral cavity, so that's dentistry, oral medicine, maxillofacial conditions. A subset of that is probably areas, one of the areas where they've probably got the most work is to tell you there's 20 something studies on tendinopathies. There's 54 in treating one of the side effects of radiation and chemotherapy, so that's oral mucositis. So that's side effects that you get in your mouth, the tissues begin to break down due to the stress of the radiation and the chemotherapy, they get infected, they develop ulceration and there's different grades of it, basically zero through to four. If you've got grade four oral mucositis, then you can't eat, drink, or swallow anything not eating your own spit, it is awful. So it's very painful, horrible quality of life, and you have to be fed by tube, so either through your nose or gastric tube insertion end, or you get straight into a gut, you can't eat your own food. And photoviral modulation, properly applied, will reduce the incidence of severity of oral mucositis. It certainly shifts it down the grades, you can almost eliminate grade four oral mucositis and you will certainly reduce the number of people that get grade three significantly as well, so they mostly end up with grade one and two, and so that's tolerable, it's just a little bit painful, and most people are able to eat and drink liquids and even some solid food at that level. So that's 54 randomized trials, and then by the way, and just keep in mind, that shows you that if you can treat something that prevents those kind of conditions, it tells you how powerful the anti-inflammatory effects are of this treatment. So musculoskeletal pain was a lot of work, there are around about 100 rather small relatively low quality studies on treating the brain. There's not much on, I can't think of any controlled clinical trials on human spinal cord injuries, macular degeneration, so that's an area which I have a vested interest in, so obviously the way you've introduced me is I'm founder and CEO of Thor, so I'm obviously ever biased in favor of my company in this field, but I'm also a co-founder of another photoviral modulation company called Lumethera, where we developed a device specifically for treating the eyes. The leading cause of blindness in the developed world is dry age-related macular degeneration, which is considered untreatable. You do have a treatable form which is called the wet age-related macular degeneration, but the dry form is considered untreatable. Most people with AMD have got their dry form, it's untreatable, they are going to mostly be blind within 10 years, there's no proven treatment for it, but we've actually now got our FDA approval in the United States, we've got a procedure code which you need for treating hospital treatments and a reimbursement code, which means in America people will start getting paid for their treatments. So that is really three out of the seven main steps to mainstream medicine, you think we're three, 73, what are the seven that take you all the way there, you need an FDA approval, so they've got that, so FDA, they've got procedure code, they've got reimbursement code, sorry that is three, there is the, you've got to get into clinical care guidelines as well, so there's being recommended to the doctors, better still you really want it taught in medical schools for it to be fully adopted, I'm now trying to remember what the other two are that get you there, clinical care guidelines taught in medical schools, that one there, oh you need, even that isn't a guarantee that your medical device is actually going to get routinely used, you need champions, champions of the word that we use to describe the characters in the institutions like the National Health Service here in the UK, but it happens in America as well, you get people who say I've read about this photoviral modulation treatment for this disease that we have in our wards of our hospitals here today, why aren't we using it, and there'll be some bureaucratic reason why, and these people will break down the barriers within their own institution to make sure this thing gets introduced to patients. that's a sixth critical step to it all. I forgot and I did once work out there were seven things you need to get right and so that's what we, that's just what I've been learning since 2017 is trying to understand why were we stuck in the doldrums where there was no FDA approvals for this treatment, there were no specific medical CE marks for it and then how what is what if you like I hate to say this word what is the business of medicine understanding and it's it's all it's I shouldn't say the business what's the regulatory roadmap for these things so that's what I've been studying more as well as my obsession with as you highlighted I mean I love the whole research on dose, dose, dose rate effects that's a major area of interest mechanisms of action as well but I've had to become an expert in regulatory compliance as well.

Andy Smith 18:03 
We'll come on to the dose effect because that's really important, I think we should talk about that. Just reading that back a little bit, is there a common underlying mechanism that explains why it can influence so many different tissues in the body and why it has this profound effect?

James Carroll 18:18 
Yeah, there's three really. Everybody hears about the mechanism to do with mitochondria, so the hypothesis there is that it increases oxygen consumption and the way that it does that is it activates an enzyme in the mitochondria. So hopefully everybody has heard enough now, maybe even at school probably learned, oh, mitochondria, they're the powerhouse of the cell. Yes, you may not realize there's hundreds and thousands of every single cell of the body. Their job ultimately is to process where, well, everybody will probably learn about glucose and glycolysis and the production of pyruvate, and pyruvate is taken up by the mitochondria, first through the Krebs cycle and then NADH, FADH, handover electrons on the electron transport chain, and the terminal enzyme of that chain is cytochrome c-oxidase, and it is, if you can imagine, it would be like electrons moving in this chain of protein complexes and they have to get to the end and they have to make it off the last one. It'd be like imagining a game, I remember we used to play Prince of Persia when I was into gaming, and just moving from one thing to another, going to get these electrons down, and then the last thing is they got to do is they got to be taken away by oxygen at the end. So the reason we breathe is in order to get the electron transport to move because the oxygen gets into our lungs, gets handed to hemoglobin, hemoglobin carries oxygen around the body, delivers it to every cell, delivers it to every mitochondria, and then the oxygen has to take the electrons off of the electron transport chain and they basically move along, and then that process, those who've studied mitochondria will have learned about the intermembrane, the matrix and the intermembrane space and pumping hydrogen ions, and they drove ATP synthase. So that's the last step in the process of making the energy currency, the cellular energy currency ATP. I know I got nerdy in there. Don't worry, don't switch off. It's going to come back to something normal. But basically, the energy currency of the cell, called ATP, is accelerated by this process by which the process of making energy is accelerated by the light. The light is absorbed in cytochrome C oxidase, and it enables this process. It doesn't just increase the production of energy. What it also does very well is it reduces the production of reactive oxygen species, which are the underlying cause of what doctors call oxidative stress and what normal people call free radicals. They are what lead to inflammation. So you're getting two things, getting more energy, and you're reducing the underlying cause of free radical production, which is what's behind all the inflammation in the body. And it's very good at basically improving the efficiency of the mitochondria so they make fewer reactive oxygen species, which you do need in small quantities. So it's not a bad thing. They're very important signaling molecules. But anyway, it seems to regulate the efficiency of the mitochondria. You make less inflammation as a consequence. You make more energy as a consequence. That's a good thing for your general cellular function and function. And then that's one mechanism. The other one, the other two, is it seems to improve cell membrane permeability. So things which are important to get in and out of the cell are doing that. They exchange more readily, like calcium ions, for example, coming in and out. So that seems to be more efficient. And then also, you get better blood flow as well. So if you've got, if the cells are exchanging lots of little molecules in the side and out of them, and they've got more available energy to use, and they're less inflammatory, and there's more blood flow going to the area, then that's going to be good for your general health, whether you'd be injured or not. Because some interesting things discovered are that, and we didn't know this in the early days. In the early days, it looked like photoviral modulation in the laboratory on cells only worked on stress cells. And that looked like a good thing. Good. If the cell isn't stressed, it doesn't do anything. And therefore, it has no effect. And that's what it does. It doesn't appear to do anything. Now let's kill them. Let's go and put some methanol in there. Some bombard them with x-rays or LPS. Let's see what damage we can do here. And we have a group of cells which have been treated with this light and cells that haven't been treated with the light. And the ones that were not treated with the light would die at a much faster rate than the ones that didn't. So now we know that cells are somehow using this light to turn on some sort of protective qualities that makes them more resilient. And so if I take the story back to oral mucositis in cancer patients, and I said that we are preventing or we're reducing the incidence and severity of oral mucositis, we treat in cancer patients in the NHS, we are treating patients to prevent. They have our treatment before they have the radiation and the chemotherapy and it prevents it or reduces the incidence and severity of it. A really important point.

Andy Smith 23:58 
Yeah, it's going to say a really important point you're making there is like, you know, the red light therapy and PEMF therapy is super effective at repairing those damage cells. So it's not always the case of people getting huge effects that are generally healthy. But we're looking at a preventative method a lot of the time. So, you know, some people will be super optimized and they'll start using red light therapy or PEMF therapy. And they're like, okay, well, I haven't taken off today. I'm not flying. You know, why is this not making that much difference? But, you know, we want to use these preventative methods as well as when people are super sick and they've got unhealthy cells and as a way of regenerating and making new, healthier cells. So, and people that are listening to this podcast quite frequently, they might be having a bit of deja vu here because there's a lot of overlap when it comes to red light and PEMF therapy and in terms of the benefits and how it works on the body and why we're seeing a lot of people now stacking the two together and the two different coming from two different angles and actually that being quite a synergistic effect. From your angle, who are you seeing using red light or photobiomodulation more these days? Who do you think are benefiting the most from it? And who are you seeing investing in this technology the most? Is it like athletes or are you looking at mainly people that are chronically sick? You know, it's a bit of a difficult question because obviously it kind of it involves all of those markets. But where do you think you're seeing the most people using and benefiting from photobiomodulation?

James Carroll 25:32 
So the categories break down into anybody treating pain, whether it be the pain of oral mucositis or musculoskeletal pain, people using it for neuropathic pain as well. So that's very much hospitals and professional medical clinics using it. There's a whole area of being used in sport. So people using it to recover, people using it before they exercise in order to reduce fatigue. While they're doing their exercise. So those are two things. And therefore, and there's quite clear evidence that if you use this treatment, you can also be maybe training harder, closer to competition as well. So if you've got a match that you're coming up to, that you might think you have to dial back so you're not fatigued going into the day of the games. With this, you should be able to train harder up to the last minute, fully recover from that. And so that's another area. Military is all part of that as well. Military readiness is a thing. So that's quite a big area for us, at least as big as in sport. And then there are obviously wellness clinics. So the people who don't have their own photoviral modulation or red light therapy systems, well can actually go and get treatments at resorts. And so that's quite a big area for us. And then there is the personal use of them as well. So that is for people who can afford our kind of equipment, because it's obviously the 100,000 pound plus equipment. For those kind of people who got that kind of money, then that's another big area for us too. So that's still, if you like, the same as the health and longevity resorts and clinics, using it professionally, then there are a lot of people who've got enough money to actually buy it for themselves as well.

Andy Smith 27:26 
Yeah, and I wanted to ask you like how the professionals are using it because we've seen the, you know, the Nova 4 devices in Premier League football, NBA, NFL, and all these sorts of professional teams. So I think you mentioned there that it's good to be used for recovery, but also pre-event and so there's multiple use for these. And like I say, the device is quite expensive, but the benefits that come from it in these elite clubs is quite profound. I want to run through some quickfire questions. So we've started introducing these quickfire and what we'll do is I'll ask you a couple of questions. Just give me a short brief answer and then generally in the episode, we'll take a deeper dive into those questions. So starting with what is the most important factor for effective red light therapy?

James Carroll 28:14 
The factor is, my favorite factor that most people get wrong is the irradiance, meaning the intensity of the light, which is hard to get right because it's hard to measure and it must cover the whole treatment area if it's a disease, you must cover the whole disease and you must use it for the right amount of time and the right interval because most things need to be used and so if you were ever wondering should I be using once an hour or once a week or something and my mantra is well, twice a week is good, daily is probably better for that.

Andy Smith 28:44 
Do you want the highest radiance possible?

James Carroll 28:47 
No, not always. So there's quite clear evidence that over-treatment is a problem in wound healing that's been shown many times. That's the one. So unfortunately, we get this information from the laboratory. We tend to be on mice and rats. And how do you have to scale that for humans? We go through a process of systematic reviews in the literature. It's quite clear that about 50% of all tendinopathy studies had no result from it. And all of them were at the more powerful end of the scale. So they say in their probably the upper limit, the way they wrote it in the paper was 100 milliwatts per semis squared is the limit at the high end of things. And they were so basically everything between five and 100 seemed to do something. But anything over 100 definitely didn't work. So yeah, we will be careful of that.

Andy Smith 29:37 
We'll talk about that, we'll go into a bit more detail with the irradiance, because like you say, it's quite an important point and also a lot of people in the market are measuring it wrong. So, what is the most effective way to apply red light therapy?

James Carroll 29:51 
Well, I suppose you want to be at a distance at, you want to make sure the intensity of light, let's say your goal, like our goal, is to be in that 30 to 50 milliwatt per centimeter squared range, and therefore being able to identify with devices that you don't like panels, they seem to be most, we would also use in contact. But then we make a device sort of like this, which you actually put in contact with something, so this is a medical device. Or we have something, this is a giant laser cluster, it's got 80 lasers in it. And this we use for analgesia and for low back pain. That's in contact. So that would be that with the current, but given most people are probably listening, have probably got panels, in which case, then you've got to be at distance, which is, and I know a lot of people claim, oh, we're 100 milliwatts per centimeter squared or something, there is, our instruments for measuring that kind of light are $27,000 each. And so, and I don't think many people are using those. We know from other tests, independent tests, these are very often not delivering what they think they're delivering.

Andy Smith 31:06 
No worries, a couple more quick fire questions. Should you expose yourself to as many wavelengths as possible?

James Carroll 31:12 
There will be daylight, so if you've ever seen a rainbow, where does it come from? It comes from sunlight, you know, and daylight is basically made up of all the different colors of the rainbow all at once. And so if that was true, then you just go out in the sun and expose yourself to all the wavelengths. So obviously not, and obviously when you get to the fringes of the visible spectrum, you begin to get either into wavelengths, which cause similar damage, or the wavelengths that just make a lot of heat. So the nice thing about the red end of the spectrum is that in the laboratory, all wavelengths seem to work, so why doesn't sunlight work? Because they don't get past the skin. The reason you can see me today is because light is bouncing off of my face. So most light will not get past the skin here, so it bounces off. So you'll have a reflection of around 70 to 80% if you've got pink skin bouncing off like that. In the near-infrared though, it gets a bit better, so it will reflect something more like 60%. So near-infrared penetrates a bit deeper, and it has a good effect on mitochondria, cell membrane permeability, and on blood flow. So really sticking to the reddish ones, there's a strange dip in the low 700 range. The two peaks for mitochondria are in the middle of the 600 and the middle of the 800 range. That's where the proven evidence is. I know people like to go further up the spectrum. Nobody's got the data published on that, so once you get past 1,000 nanometers, the kind of detail we know about mitochondria has not been researched.

Andy Smith 32:51 
Do you always need to wear safety glasses when using red light therapy?

James Carroll 32:54 
Not for the wavelengths and intensity and the way we diffuse our light, the answer would be no. But that's a Thor-specific answer, and we don't know what everybody else does. Generally, if you've got visible red light coming out of it in equal amounts, approximately to any near-infrared light, then it's probably safe because it's going to be so bright your pupils will contract, and you'll probably never like it because it's too much, it's too bright, I'm going to close my eyes. And therefore, closed eyes is going to be fine, and you will probably want to close your eyes anyway if there's red light around it. We'll watch out for blue light, blue light is potentially toxic, I know people like to use it on masks and things for reducing acne because it's antibacterial, it helps kill the bacteria, well guess what, it can kill good cells as well. So you've got to know what you're doing with blue light, it should be like in small quantities, and I would suggest protect your eyes, it's known to be something that actually stimulates or causes, it's an underlying cause of macular degeneration, so you don't want to do that.

Andy Smith 34:06 
What's the biggest misunderstanding in red light therapy today?

James Carroll 34:10 
I suppose it sounds like it cures everything. I would tell you something it doesn't cure. It's not antimicrobials. In other words, it doesn't kill bacteria, viruses, or fungal infection. I mean, there are wavelengths that will. You go into the ultraviolet, and even into the blue spectrum will be antibacterial and antiviral and antifungal treatments. So it doesn't cure everything. If you think that we're gonna empty your hospitals by giving them all red light therapy, photoviral modulation, the answer is not anybody with infectious disease or without infection, like a non-healing wound due to a bacterial infection or the wound, that's not gonna work. You do not kill bacteria with PBM. Yes, I know it helps your immune system, but it's not as good as using things, antimicrobial agents and antibiotics. They're gonna be much better at than PBM.

Andy Smith 34:58 
And last one, red or near infrared, which one gets deeper results?

James Carroll 35:02 
Well, the near-infrared does. If it's in that 800 spectrum, then yes, it's going to go deeper than the others.

Andy Smith 35:08 
So, I'm going to ask you maybe some triggering questions now because we want to talk about some of the trends and you know, red light therapy is I think very misused in the wellness industry these days. So let's talk about masks. We see them all over social media. Are red light masks hype or you know, is there any kind of good versions of red light masks? Can they benefit in any way?

James Carroll 35:41 
I haven't tested any. I imagine we will. All my insights have gained over the years. I've decided I'm going to do a PhD in the subject. In part of that, I will hold as many consumer products as I can. I know there's a lot, but whatever I can pick up without spending too much money. We'll check them out. We've got some very clever instruments here for measuring things. We have a sphere that you can put a device in, and it will measure every wave coming out, and it'll tell you the total amount of light coming out of it. We'll be able to use that to evaluate these. It's called an integrating sphere. We'll be using that amongst many other things I intend to do with a PhD. At a glance, when I look at them, I see the LEDs are too far apart. I think, well, you've got an LED here, and you've got another one there, and another one there, and another one there, and there. What about all the cells in between? Yes, the light scatters, but guess what? It's much brighter in the middle, and the bit you get there is so not your whole face isn't getting an even treatment. The further the space they are, the less uniform the benefits are going to be. It might be that it's too bright there, and compared with somewhere else, that's a potential risk with those things. I've seen one where it's, and I can't remember, it had three colours on it. It was like, oh, they had yellow ones here, and they had green ones here and here, and they had red ones there, and I'm thinking, that looks beautiful like a Christmas tree, but you don't know what you're doing. I mean, why would these cells want a different colour light to those ones, to this one or that one? I mean, it doesn't make any sense. They wouldn't. It's nonsense. What they're selling is something that, and it does, it looks great. It looks like a packet of fruit pastels, but it's not, it's like find out what works best and use that everywhere. That's my criticism of what I've seen, and some people think you just need a bit of red light. Well, I can show you the research that shows how a little bit of light doesn't do anything, a bit more light has some great effects, too much light, the benefits will disappear, and way too much light, you can actually slow things down. It's a bandwagon that a lot of people are on. I'm sure some of them are going to be better than others. I'm sure they will do something. I think the harder thing is for consumers is measuring light is a specialist job. If you're not an optical engineer or a physicist, then you're probably not going to figure out. There is no real way for people to know what's working, so it's difficult. You've got to spend some money on some fancy instruments to really know, and then you've got to be able to understand what you're looking at. I think it's definitely the wild west at the moment.

Andy Smith 38:44 
And we see a lot of brands putting solar meter readings on their radiance for panels or, you know, like this sort of thing.

James Carroll 38:53 
Yes, it's great for being a photographer, and you want to know how much light there is in the room and then on there, or something, but maybe it's not so, but these meters for the Houston photography or for defining the sunlight outside are good at those jobs, but they're not telling how much photobiomodulation light you're getting in the right spectrum.

Andy Smith 39:11 
And in practice what that means generally is like you get about a double the strength of the radiance and what we're finding so, you know, people are advertising hundreds and they're actually only giving about 50. We've looked at because we bought a light spectrometer and, you know, that cost us one thousand five hundred pounds. So it's still not as expensive as some of the equipment out there, but I think that's a better way of testing than definitely than a than a solar meter. Yes. So, yeah, something that people can do if they want to if they want to invest in the, you know, the equipment, that's one route to possibly take. But one of the other things we see in flooding the market at the moment of these blankets, red light blankets, you know, big plastic things, you get yourself in and zip up. And, you know, again, your thoughts on that. But, you know, for me, we see the same sort of problem here. This the the LEDs are very weak and they're very well spaced apart. And we see all these influences also fully dressed, getting in them and saying I just had a session.

James Carroll 40:15 
I think like you clearly know what kind of, where's your conscience, where's your integrity? I mean, you cannot, it was just, why would you put somebody fully clothed in front of your device? You know, you clearly have no idea. A black leotard or something's been worn by somebody and things like, it's like you want the least amount of clothing and preferably not at all. And I appreciate in advertising, that's not a smart thing to do. So it's what you've, but then, I don't know, you disgrace yourself by having pictures of people substantially clothed in your device, if that's what they're doing. And anybody who puts photography on like that on their website, I would question what they actually know about this technology. And the other thing about that, you mentioned the blanket. So, yes, they're weak. And yes, I would worry about two other things. I mean, flexibility, wires don't like moving around forever. So how long are those going to break, last before they break? But the other thing is, these are embedded in a soft material. Now, behind you got a device on, you can hear the fans going on there to keep them cool. You know, they get hot. And if they're delivering up any kind of reasonable amount of light, then they are going to get hot, and then they could either get to a point where they just burn out and or they are burning the individual in there, if they're not burning you, then they're probably not strong enough. You know, so yeah, if you didn't have fans, that thing would get pretty hot. And so, yes, absolutely. You know, those things are those I would say are probably the worst products I've seen are probably blankets. Yeah, and I actually haven't had one in my, you know, in our, you know, engineering department. So I don't know. But I'm surmising from what I can see.

Andy Smith 42:05 
The last one we see in a lot on socials at the moment are these ones. So red light ones, and they're sort of saying about rubbing them across sprinkles and, you know, basically erasing the wrinkles. Um, we see them from very different, you know, from very different price points. You get them from, you know, 50 pounds, $50 up to, you know, even a thousand dollars or a thousand pounds. So is there ones that can be effective? Are they again, just a gimmick? Should people be avoiding these sorts of things?

James Carroll 42:34 
I can't think of one that I've actually seen, but I understand what you're saying. And as soon as you start moving something, let's say the tip of my finger was one square centimetre and that it was emitting, let's say, I don't know, 50 milliwatts per centimetre squared, and you're doing this with it. How many centimetres did I just cross there, you know? And you're spending like a second per centimetre doing something, and maybe a second going back there, and maybe I'm covering five centimetres with my one centimetre size beam there. So you've now got 50 milliwatts per centimetre squared divided by five centimetres, it's now 10 milliwatts per centimetre squared. And I'm not saying that wouldn't work, but you really need to be using it something, if you're getting down to 10 milliwatts per centimetre squared, you've got to be using it probably for, let's have a think, you'll be using it for one, you'd have to be using it for a solid five minutes to be able to get to something, a reasonable dose, five minutes of doing that, and then you do five minutes on the other side, and you want to do something down here, and you want to do something, I mean, you're going to spend, yes, I mean, maybe they'll do something if it's, that's what the kind of thing you'd have to do. Have I got my sums right? I think if that would be there, there'd be five times that, or no times five centimetres, no, it's worth it, 25 minutes of doing that. So it'd be 25 minutes just for that bit of your eye, and that bit of your eye, you know, so I suggest...

Andy Smith 44:20 
The time investment you'll have to put in to, to get any benefits from these. And this is the problem.

James Carroll 44:25 
You got me looking at my own lines and wrinkles now kind of thing. Am I doing it myself? No, I don't. I don't have such a device but I use an Nova THOR so you know I'm gonna be 65 next year so

Andy Smith 44:37 
Exactly. I mean when you were saying about when you entered the market, you know, 1987, that was the year I was born.

James Carroll 44:44 
This has been doing this for 40 years, yes.

Andy Smith 44:46 
Yeah. So, and I'm 40 next year, so. But no, you're looking good for that. So, must be, something must be working.

James Carroll 44:54 
Something's working, yeah. Because it takes a lot of things to work, you know, choose the right parents and have some good teams, it would be a good thing, diet, exercise and I think generally having a sense of purpose is a good thing, having good relationships, they all add up to a healthy body and a healthy mind.

Andy Smith 45:15 
And a good photobiomodulation protocol. There you go. Thanks for mentioning that. I forgot to mention that one.

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Andy Smith 46:24 
So let's bring this up a notch now. We've gone into the dirty side of the markets. Let's talk about irradiance because it's something we've mentioned a little bit on this and there is a dose curve and there is something to consider when we're looking at irradiance. So is it you've kind of answered this already but let's touch on it before like again in terms of is it better when you're looking for a red light device to always go for the strongest one you can find.

James Carroll 46:52 
I think from, so I mean, let's say a mask or a panel or a what, you know, what kind of device are you thinking of when you're asking that question?

Andy Smith 47:05 
Let's go for comparing, you know, a full body session like the Nova Force, a big, big device, and then a panel, you know, let's, let's, let's, if you're looking at the between these two, you know, maybe a clinic is looking to invest in some kit and they want to get the most for their clients, what should they be looking out for, for those two products that again, do they want to kind of go as high irradiance as they can find? Is that going to get them quicker, faster results? You know, is that, is it as easy as simple as that?

James Carroll 47:38 
Unfortunately, it's not that simple, mostly because they're lying. So there have been studies done. We've done our own tests on some of the best-selling devices in the world. The United States Air Force have done their own tests and they got the same results as we did. The best-selling device in America was a Theralite. I know they got a new device at the moment, but there was the device out in the market was 100 milliwatts per centimeter squared, then it changed to 129, and then they changed it to say it's 150. We tested it, we measured it at 8.5 milliwatts per centimeter squared, and at the time they were claiming 100, and they put a range, 100 to 129, but it was about 8.5 when we measured it. Then they were selling it at 150 milliwatts per centimeter squared, and the Air Force tested it, and they said it was 7.5. Best-selling device in America. Best-selling lightbed in France is called the Body Boost Bed. They didn't say how much they used, but they did say what the total power consumption was. You can roughly guess that about 35 per cent, 40 per cent of the consumed power will be what comes out in life in terms of the efficiency of the LEDs and how much is lost in the wiring and the power supplies. You can take the total amount of light, divide it by the area of the bed, because you can see there's lots of LEDs that had the light fairly well distributed. So I could back calculate from that that it would have been delivering 45 milliwatts per centimeter squared based on what they said it was consuming from the mains electricity, and then we got the opportunity to test one, and it was delivering 2.5. And so in the United States, it's called LightStim. It's a single-sided lightbed. They claim 60. We tested it. It was 13. So that was the least worst lightbed in the world. And I don't know why...

Andy Smith 49:48 
You know, the same happens with panels. We see this often, you know, there's, there's, there is a lot of noise out there when it comes to panels. Um, again, like I said, a lot of people using solar meters to measure the, the irradiance claiming over a hundred, um, and you know, in reality when we're testing them, so it, you know, consumers have to kind of see through the noise and what can they ask, you know, what would somebody need to ask Nova for? To understand that it's been tested correctly and that, you know, what, what are they, what would they need to ask these manufacturers?

James Carroll 50:22 
I think it's very difficult because I don't think that people selling them have any interest in telling people the truth. It would be nice if there was a good independent lab doing it. The two main labs in the UK for testing irradiance was the National Physics Laboratory and the company called Lasermet, and neither of them actually offer that service anymore. So that's sad. I know that in the United States the something called the PBM Foundation have bought some instruments to go and do it, but they don't have a device designed for whole body treatment for lightbeds. I mean they have them for individual devices and all they can, I think with what, and I don't know, they may have more, I might be a year out of date, they were able to tell you the total amount of light coming out, which is a start. And in crude terms you could say, well, divide that by the whole surface area, that is an irradiance of approximately something. And by the way, I mean you could have an LED which is, you know, with a big lens on it, it's about that size, kind of a size, and you could measure the amount of light coming out. After that size hole there, and that wouldn't be so bad. But what would be bad if somebody was getting 100 milliwatts per centimeter squared, and instead of being that kind of size, it was the size of the end of a pencil or something very small, that could be 100 milliwatts per centimeter squared. Are they delivering the same amount of light? Well yes, on the surface per square centimeter, per millimeter squared if you like, it would be, but the actual total amount of light going into the patient is much smaller. If it's the size of it coming out of a fiber optic, it might just be a tenth of a millimeter in size. And it could be 100 milliwatts per centimeter squared, but almost nothing's coming out of it. So if you don't know the area of the beam, and you say there's 100 milliwatts coming out of my beam, and it's one centimeter squared, and it's 100 milliwatts per centimeter squared, yes, okay, but it's, I don't know, it's the lack of awareness of the whole PBM industry, even scientists who are great at the biology, great at the medicine, know everything about your brain injury, but nothing about light, light density, and to be able to think thoughts like, oh, this device is 30 milliwatts per centimeter squared, and this one is 30, but one's that size of a beam, and the other one's tiny like that, they're both 30 milliwatts per centimeter squared. But guess what? I mean, this is almost nothing, even a centimeter per centimeter squared. They have the same problem in professional products, there's lots of published data showing that the devices being sold for medical purposes do not deliver the amount of light they claim comes out of it. So one I can easily quote, because it's easy numbers to remember, they said that the average output of a laser system, basically they took all of, they looked at all of the, they took all the devices that they measured and said that on average, I mean, some were delivering none, some were delivering the right amount, on average it was 60% of what the manufacturer claimed, and LED systems were delivering 30% of what the manufacturer claimed. And there's six other, another five other independent studies of just checking what should be medical devices in the market, not delivering what they say they should be.

Andy Smith 54:02 
So, and that's a big problem that we have in the PEMF industry as well. And something we talk about a lot on this, on this podcast is that it isn't easy to measure PEMF, it isn't easy to measure a good magnetic field. So exactly the same problem, you know, to get a proper reading, you've got to go to a proper test house, or you've got to spend thousands, thousands on proper equipment, um, you know, people buy these EMF testers on Amazon for 30 pounds and they think they're going to get an accurate reading of, you know, a PEMF device. So yeah, it's, it's a frustration that we share in the PEMF industry and, you know, something that hopefully over time will get better when people can actually do their own testing and, you know, and, and expose all of the, these kind of trends in the market and where, and where the, you know, the Cowboys are in the industry. But let's, let's imagine now that we do have, um, a good device we're laying under a Thor, uh, we know, you know, it's a trusted product. We know it's got the right radiance. Let's talk about the dose response and the dose curve. So just give us a bit of an explanation as to what that is and why that's important in photo by modulation.

James Carroll 55:10 
Well, if you can cook, you're going to understand this very easily. So even if you only make toast or boil an egg, but it's easier to describe if it's you're actually going to cook something in the oven. And I think imagine cooking a large chicken or a small turkey. So you know that when you're cooking and you're watching your favorite TV chef and they say, and put it in the oven at 180 degrees Celsius and put it in for about four hours, you know, because, you know, small turkey will take about four hours to cook nicely and that would be a good instruction. So they will give you the heat intensity and they will give you the time as two separate numbers. In photovine modulation, traditionally, people will tell you the dose in joules per centimeter squared. So what's that? Well, it's the light intensity multiplied by time. So light intensity in milliwatts per centimeter squared, but we that's colloquially we say in milliwatts per centimeter squared a bit like, you know, the meter is the is the SI unit, the official unit for measurement. But we talk in sometimes centimeters or millimeters, centimeters squared. When you're going to do maths with with irradiance, you've really got to use the watts per centimeter squared and time in seconds to do these calculations. So it's time intensity times time for light and the same as heat intensity times time for cooking. But chefs never multiply those two numbers together and say, put a million joules per centimeter squared into this turkey. They don't say that they give the keep the numbers separate. It wouldn't work because if you tried to cook the same turkey with an oven that's 10 times as hot. If you were cooking in joules per centimeter squared, you'd reduce the time by a factor of 10 and therefore you put the same joules per centimeter squared in. But your turkey would be burnt on the outside. It would still be half raw in the middle. But I gave it the right dose. Why isn't it cooked? And it's exactly the same for PBM. You can give the right dose, but if it's too intense, then you end up burning it before it's actually if we deliver the right result. So, yeah, the it's not burning in photobiomodulation. But the point is you can oversaturate a cell by delivering the light too quickly. There is a speed limit to PBM. So but I was very nervous when we made the first Novathor and nobody ever used such a thing before. And so I got inside it when everybody got on the envelope. We got this. The engineers had turned it all on and they pressed the button. Whoa, that works. Yes. OK, that's nice. Go home on a Friday and left it there. And I went in on a Saturday, took all my clothes off, got inside and decided to use it for 40 minutes and see if I exploded because I had no idea what was going to happen at that time. I had some idea. I mean, I intended it for it to be safe. And that was my main concern is how much can the body stand? And so we did did that and pretty much everybody can tolerate 20 minutes of it and somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes is what people need. I've actually forgotten your original question about.

Andy Smith 58:13 
It was about like those dose curves and dose curves and what are they

James Carroll 58:17 
So, yes, you can, the curves are that, I mean, it's better shown as a sort of a slideshow, but the intensity and time are two separate things, and if you have too little intensity, you just don't read a threshold of any effect. If you have the intensity too high, you rapidly reach what might be considered the optimal dose, but you can go straight past it, and if, like, because it's a dose-response curve, you get positive effects and then negative effects follow, and I think you could be with a higher intensity, you can go way straight back down and on the wrong side of it if it's too intense. Now, I'm talking about, you know, when we use this thing here, whether I'm using lasers, these are around about 1,000 milliwatts per centimeter squared each in here. We are trying to reduce analgesia, and that is the suppression of nerves. So, we want suppression with that, but I wouldn't treat a wound with it, for example. This other one here is, you know, 50 milliwatts per centimeter squared on here, and it's safe, but I, and I would even put it in my eye, but it's, but it's not going to give me analgesia. So, it's using the the right intensity for the right job

Andy Smith 59:38 
No, I think that's a really good analogy. And I like, I've not heard that one about cooking before because, you know, like you say, if you don't want to put it in for too short, you don't want to put it in too long because you actually go past the beneficial effects. So you need to figure out what's the right intensity for the right time with the application you're using. So is there, is there an easy, you know, I'm just trying to think about our listeners now and they're trying to work this out and is, is there an easy, calculation that they can find like on a dose curve calculator or something and that they can put in, you know, my devices, uh, 30 milliwatts and I want to use it for, you know, how long do I need to use it to get the perfect effect? Does that sort of thing exist? Can they, can we find that?

James Carroll 01:00:25 
Unfortunately, the literature is going all over the place. I mean, I'll give you the answer, but there is no consistency in the measurement and reporting of those, even in medicine. And you will see systematic reviews of the literature saying, oh, look, photobiomodulation or omega cytos. It's amazing, but nobody can agree what the dose is in this thing. And it's substantially down to the measurement errors that people make, not having the right instruments to do it. So that's just the thing. If you know, like with anaerothor, it's got a diffuser, it's very flat. You don't see lots of spots of light on the body. It's just, you know, you hold your hand near it and there's no spots in there. Everything's getting 30 milliwatts per centimeter squared, which is, it's enough to have an effect and not enough to hurt anybody, particularly given you're gonna treat the whole body. And like I said, I'd say 10 minutes at a minimum and 20 minutes, you've got time for that. Yeah, so.

Andy Smith 01:01:25 
And I think it's all really important, you know, people that are listening to this must be thinking, well, this is getting quite complicated, red light therapy, I thought I could just go on and buy a red light blanket and jump in it and zip myself up and, you know, I'll get an effective, effective treatment. They're the worst, you did mention the worst kind of product, the blanket. And I think it just makes it, you know, it makes it even more clear to people that it's not an easy technology to get right. And you know, you need to go to a trusted company that knows what they're offering, that knows what they have, giving you the right intensities, the right times and different protocols. So it's all, it's all quite interesting.

James Carroll 01:01:59 
It's a very important phrase you just said. How you establish trustworthiness is maybe not so easy, but that's exactly what you're looking for, is who do you trust? And then the next question, Kim was like, well, how can you have independent validation of it? Non-medical devices are not required to go for independent validation, and we don't even get the right kind of validation out of our institutions anymore. And PL and Lasermet are not gonna do the irradiance test. They'll tell you how much the total amount of light coming out of your devices, but they won't be able to tell you the irradiance anymore because it's a service they don't sell. I don't know why, but they don't. It's a different, my PhD is gonna be all about this, and how it should be done. There's a lot more about it, because there's never uniform density of light across any instrument anyway. And therefore, you would be saying something like, this device is x milli watts per centimeter squared plus or minus a percentage. Four, give it, it's never gonna be pure, particularly get up towards the edges of the device. Then, because as you know, the beams diverge and they overlap each other, but when you get to the edges, there's no overlapping beams coming from the outside of the device, therefore it drops off. And therefore, my goal is, my hypothesis going into the PhD program, when I finally get my proposal finished, is gonna be that we define a certain amount of the area will be within specifications. So it's reasonable, I think, not too hard, not too easy, but not too hard to say that 80% of the area must be within the specification you claim. So it'll be like 30 milli watts per centimeter squared plus or minus 10% for 80% of the area is going to be the right way that we'll do it. So it'll be something like that. I'm out of date with the rules and things like tires. I remember it used to be like, the tread on the tire of your car should be more than so many millimeters thick for the whole circumference for 80% of the width. And there was some, that used to, I don't quote my numbers in cars and tires, but when I used to be a bit more nerdy about these things, that was the kind of thing you'd have to do. It'd be a minimum of certain depth of tread for the whole circumference for a certain amount of width of the tire. And that was it. And I'll be doing the same thing for PBM. It must be the certain amount of intensity for 80% of the area of the light bed within, and there'll be a tolerance on that range. And ask me again in however many years it takes me to get the PhD done. I'm gonna do everything. I'm gonna cover the instruments and measurement methods and the problems of measuring light and what would you do with very small beams that need special considerations. And given that light intensity, it's not as simple as even just measuring the light intensity. There are measuring the density of light of a beam where the beam's much brighter in the middle than it is on the outside.

James Carroll 01:05:07 
What is the density of that light? Well, it's a certain amount in the middle and a certain amount on the outside. I mean, well, which one is it? Okay, and that has to be defined and there's at least four methods of determining that full width half maximum, one over E, one over E squared, and D four sigma of the four different measurement methods. And most people, 99.9% of people in the PBM medical research don't know that.

Andy Smith 01:05:36 
Just before I wrap this up, I want to just talk about the wavelength side of things, because I know we've touched on it, but the Nova 4 kind of harnesses two main wavelengths, the 660NM and the 850. Yeah. So, you know, why don't you go for more in that range? Why is it specifically those two that, you know, stuck to that are, you know, what you guys want to really, really harness?

James Carroll 01:06:03 
When I look at the absorption spectra of oxidized cyclocrimacy oxidase, which is what we're trying to exit that and get our light absorbed, the spectrum in the infrared spectrum is really wide. Basically, round numbers, pretty much anything from 800 and close to 900, it's a very similar absorption curve for all of it. If you were to have an 810, an 820, an 830, an 840, 50 nanometers in there, it wouldn't make any difference because it's the same part of cyclocrimacy oxidase absorbing that one wavelength through all four of them. It wouldn't make any difference to that. It's more narrow in the red spectrum. There is a greater amount of absorption when you start getting into the yellows and greens. And the blues have a big effect, except they just don't get past the skin. So they're kind of pointless. And the blues, as I said, are potentially toxic, so you've got to watch out for that. But yeah, there's yellow and green, but they just don't get through the skin. So they're not really providing much use.

Andy Smith 01:07:15 
And just breaking that down, the two wavelengths, you've got a red wavelength and you got a near infrared. So essentially, you know, just to explain this to the audience, are they doing something similar or are they completely different? Why have you got red and near infrared on the systems?

James Carroll 01:07:34 
To answer when I when I knew less it's easy with the less you know the easier it is to kind of count I think the more you know the more you realize you don't know

Andy Smith 01:07:43 
I find that now, you take people down a rabbit hole, don't you? Because your knowledge has taken over. Is that a normal account?

James Carroll 01:07:49 
arguments as well. So there's four centers, so there's 13 subunits of cytochromosheoxys, four of which are metal metals. There's two heme and there's two, which is iron effectively, and two copper, one's copper A and copper B, and the copper metals absorb, the copper absorbs the near-infrared and the heme absorbs the red, though I'm beginning to learn now that even the heme that seems to absorb some near-infrared as well. Let's try and get this right. I've got a graph in my mind and I'm trying to remember how it's labeled, and I think maybe the near-infrared is actually having a bit of an effect on the heme as well. So looking at the absorption spectrum of oxidized cytochromosheoxidase, then that's, if I remember rightly now, but certainly there's maybe more reds working on heme and near-infrared's working more on the copper, except that's my out-of-date information. I remember the most recent information I've seen is it looks like the heme's absorbing some near-infrared as well. So shorter wavelengths work, but they don't get past the skin. I mean, I think yellow is going to be good for the skin, but that's it. That's all you want to do. If you want to get it in to pass there and start infecting blood flow and deeper structures in the body, then you want the both. And by the way, the evidence in terms of some of the effects, so I do quite a bit of work with the U.S. Air Force, and when you use two wavelengths, I'm going to use the word stack, when you use dual wavelengths together, they get bigger effects on the release of nitric oxide from cytochromosheoxidase. So it's one or they've tried one wavelength, the other wavelength. You try them both one after the other, and or you try them stacked one on top of the other, and the top of the two together are better than either one alone or used independently.

Andy Smith 01:10:21 
And one thing I want to know because the panel behind me does this and, you know, there's ways of pulsing the light and it's becoming, you know, more frequent to get devices that will pulse the light at different Hertz, different frequencies. If you put it on a low pulse rate, it's almost unbearable to look at because it's like...

James Carroll 01:10:43 
I think it's cool. It's like psychedelic when you when you can use a low frequency pulse in there. You've got to try it if you have an option to use a device with a different pulse. If you were to close the rise in this and it's quite interesting if you were to then move the pulse rate up and you begin to get more interesting patterns the faster you go as long as it's a visible one and it just goes up a little to 10 hertz now and now it gets a little bit more psychedelic and there's a device you can get, it's a light device, it just pulses white light in your face but you can get the most extraordinary psychedelic patterns inside your brain from when you're increasing patterns of light and they do two different pulses and they combine and they do, I've called them, ROCSIVA I think it's called, ROCSIVA are pulse like device and you just do it, you know, stop spending money on LSD and buy other, spend on a ROCSIVA and you can

Andy Smith 01:11:48 
I'm going to have a party after this podcast on the, on the panel behind me. But is there any, is there any therapeutic benefits to the skin?

James Carroll 01:12:00 
So, at a low frequency pulse, a study comparing wound healing with no light, with a continuous beam, with a 100 Hz pulse beam and a 10 Hz pulse beam, and looking at the amount of wound healing in four days, there was no doubt that four days later, the slower the pulse, the better the effect in that study. And so, 10 Hz was definitely better than 100 Hz, which was definitely better than continuous, which was definitely better than no light at all. At day eight, though, the wound healing had slowed down on all of the, let's say the wound's not treated. So, if I can get this right, ultimately, the wounds started, the non-pulsed wounds, everything was beginning to catch up with the 10 Hz pulsed wounds. So, it seemed to be a thing about, something about acute inflammation that responded well to it. So, if you deliberately do some experimental wounds and so on, unlucky animals, and they get acute inflammation, then the pulses made a great difference over the first four days. By eight days, the benefits were beginning to disappear, as the early acceleration wasn't really there.

Andy Smith 01:13:28 
Okay. No, that's really interesting. Um, where do you think voter by modulation market is going in the next five years? You know, we'll just close this out with a, with a big open ended question. Um, do you see any big changes or do you see any exciting things happening in the next five years? What's, you know, what's in the future for you?

James Carroll 01:13:52 
Well, there's two answers. There's the medical answer, and there's the Canada more health and longevity side of things. I think in the medical world, I mean, they're just getting started, even though I've been doing this for, as we know, it will soon be 40 years. It's just catching on. So I suppose we've crossed. We're in more than 20 cancer hospitals in Britain. So we're now probably better than a third of cancer hospitals in Great Britain are now using this. And we know that it's moving sideways in oncology. So incology, we're not just treating mucositis now, we're treating radiation dermatitis, we're treating xerostomia, hypersalivation, lymphedema, all these nasty side effects. And that's spilling over into wound healing. So we see it kind of moving sideways across hospitals. So that's an area. We've got the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence are actively chasing me to say, James, we want to prove this treatment for oral neuropathic pain, so dentists can use it. So there's demand now coming from the authorities that tell the NHS what you should be using to treat diseases. That's exciting. I'm working with brain injury with the NHS. Well, it's not NHS yet. It's still in academia. It's still in the university. But I think it'll get there. So and we will find our way. And of course, it's now available in the UK for macular degeneration from luma thera product. It's, it's going to go into it's, it's beginning to, to move in medicine. And so your your creaky grandparents and parents and things like that, going to see doctors and nurses in over the next couple of decades, really, will see more and more of it. As for what is going to be for health and longevity, I hope there's a revolution around some on this is sees more skepticism around what's what's effective, and brands that earn a reputation somehow. I hope that in the that it doesn't end up with people being disappointed in saying, Oh, I've just bought a mask and it didn't do anything. It's a piece of paper that I've done. And they say, therefore, red light therapy, photoviral modulation doesn't work. And that would be my concern that it fails due to for those reasons. Otherwise, you see it being in news not in just in every corner of every department of every hospital in the whole world, but in it's gonna be in every medicine cabinets. It's going to be it's going to be in every gym. It's the money in the space. It's going to be in their home. I think as more people become aware of the benefits of exercise for their health and longevity, it's if you if you haven't got if you haven't got zone two training and resistance exercise as part of your routine, then you are missing out the critical part of your health and longevity routines. It means you want to get that into your system, you know, long before you worry about which little molecule you're also taking as well. It goes from from when there's so many shoes from yes, I mean, use it in combination with exercise because it really makes exercise easier.  And you'll have fewer injuries. You're if you have injuries, you'll ever cover quicker. You will find exercise easier and exercise is really good for you and for so much to do with health and longevity. I think the more that people understand that, the more they will be racing it and using it as part of their health and longevity journey. And yes, it might keep you looking younger as well. So that's a bonus really. But I'm more interested in my heart and my brain. So yeah, work on your get your exercise routines figured out and use PBM as part of it. And you might look younger as a side effect.

Andy Smith 01:18:06 
Yeah. And it's, you know, it was a great point that you brought up there about the worry about red light and PEMF becoming a bit of a trend and actually so many bad products hitting the market that people just don't get the results they want to get. And actually, you know, the industry fails because of there's more bad feedback coming through now than the good because there is less and less good devices out there. You know, we've been contacted by a number of different manufacturers to take on masks, take on blankets, to take on anything. Yeah. We won't do it through our brand, you know, we won't take on product as ineffective. And the PEMF devices we manufacture, you know, it's a lot of testing that goes in to make sure that they're all up to standard. So it's a good point you bring in. And, you know, anyway, I can see it asking you way more questions. I've got a lot more questions to ask you, but we're going to have to kind of draw a line and we'll have to get you back probably for a part two of this because, you know, say there's a lot of areas we can still drill into. But where can people find you, James, if people want to contact you or the company or talk about photo modulation?

James Carroll 01:19:11 
thortlaser.com is a website to come to. We have training courses. I mean, they're really intended for professional medical people, but if you'd like to really nerd out, we have eight hour training courses. We start, it's all done in slow motion. It's intended for people who already know their anatomy, their pathology, and so if you're medical or just an enthusiast, nerdy enough, then you might enjoy that. So go to thoughtlaser.com and click on training to see what's available. We have, we charge for the eight hour training and the webinars are free there so you can see them. There's one hour shows on all sorts of topics and which includes, we've got one of them, I don't know what it's called, it might be called health and wellness or something. That's one, but we've got one for sport as well for injuries and for performance and many others. We've got pain ones, wound healing ones, we've got the brain. So there's some podcasts, web, sorry, webinars which are free to attend. So thorlaser.com and there's forms in there. If you want to get in touch with me, then you can just fill in one of the forms and mention my name and then somebody will pass it through to me.

Andy Smith 01:20:25 
good stuff and we'll leave a lot of those links at the bottom of this episode for the listeners to find so that they can contact you through those but for the listeners thanks again for listening to today's episode if you've enjoyed it please subscribe leave us a five-star review on whatever stream platform you're listening to it really helps us encourage more great guests like James Carroll to share their knowledge with you but thanks again for your time today.

James Carroll 01:20:45 
You're welcome any time