Does Heat Reduce the Benefits of Red-Light Therapy? PubMed Explains

Earlier this week I talked about why red light therapy inside a sauna is not the same as using it when your body is cool and dry. This video expands on that and digs into what the PubMed research actually shows about Photobiomodulation (PBM) when core body temperature is elevated.

Most red light therapy studies assume normal physiological conditions. Normal core temperature, stable membranes, and predictable mitochondrial response. When you superheat the body in a sauna, those conditions change, and multiple PubMed papers show that the biological response to PBM can be downregulated rather than enhanced.

This isn’t about saying red light therapy in a sauna does nothing. It’s about effectiveness and time investment. If you’re busy and you want the maximum return from your sessions, the research suggests heat may be working against the very mitochondrial benefits people are chasing with red light therapy.

I also share personal experience from my own recovery and why none of the protocols that actually helped involved doing red light therapy while overheated. This perspective is based on both hands-on use and a deep dive into the published research. I always encourage you to read the studies yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Read the transcript >

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Transcript

Earlier this week we talked about red light therapy and why using it inside a sauna and outside the sauna is not identical like a lot of people think. Today we’re gonna expand on that and we’re gonna talk about what are the differences in the body that the experience of PBM, photobiomodulation, all the PubMed studies, all the research papers. What do they actually show? Let’s dive in.

So I’m not saying that red light therapy in a sauna does absolutely nothing. What I am saying is for your time investment, it’s like it would be the equivalent of using a sauna that doesn’t make you sweat. Why would you be sitting in there for a long time? Would you sit in there for an hour just to like look at the woodgrain and feel a little warmth? Probably not. So why would you want to use red light therapy in a way where you’re not getting maximum benefits for the time investment that you’re putting in.

Now, this is my opinion and this is how I personally look at doing my sessions. I’m busy. I have a lot of stuff to do. I have a lot of obligations, a lot of responsibilities. I’m not a person that’s gonna sit in front of some type of a therapy and only get 60% of the results. When we look at the actual research and the changes inside the body when you heat it up, you’re basically in a nutshell down-regulating the benefit of photobiomodulation aka red light therapy.

So we’ve got different videos that talk about why full-spectrum saunas don’t always produce red light therapy. They’re actually adding to the heat accumulation in the sauna. That compounds this problem even further because now your body is even more superheated like you’re in a sauna state, you’re in hyperthermic state. So your core temperature is elevated. When we look at some of the research here in a second, I think you’ll understand why I vote do red light therapy either while a sauna is heating up or do it outside the sauna while your skin and temperature is cool and dry.

Anytime you look at a red light therapy study, a PBM study for some particular condition on PubMed like for brain injuries TBI, they apply light emitting diodes LEDs or some type of a laser directly to the target area most of the time. In some cases, they will use what I would consider a distance room treatment which is where they’re saturating the body in an irregular pattern not targeting a particular problematic zone. However you want to do it is fine. There’s pros and cons to both.

In a minute, I’m gonna summarize some points that I picked out of some studies. But I would encourage you to go look at some PubMed research yourself on red light therapy photobiomodulation. So anytime we use the words PBM or PBMT, it’s short for photobiomodulation and then some people say therapy, some people don’t so sometimes they say PBM. Sometimes I say PBMT. If you go on PubMed, you just type in red light therapy or PBM, it’s gonna pull up a gazillion resources for you.

Now before you get too deep in the weeds with this, there’s one key thing that is driving my opinion on all this and it’s that heat changes the way tissues and membranes respond to things. So the mere fact that you’re accounting for red light therapy, trying to initiate a mitochondrial change, all the studies are assuming normal core temperature except for a few and I would definitely recommend you check those out because it does show that when you increase core temperature, your physiology has changed enough to where the result of PBM photobiomodulation red light therapy is either down regulated or the effect has a slight modulation to it and it’s not in a beneficial way, right?

What I pull from that is that if we’re looking for maximum benefit for time invested, doing it while superheated is not it, right? And so I would encourage you to go check out those studies. Let me know what you know when you summarize for yourself when you take a look at the research. Do you see the same thing because there’s a couple of papers that it’s I mean, it’s pretty irrefutable. You know heat is the enemy when it comes to getting this mitochondrial gain or this benefit or this modulating effect that we are looking for.

And when you compare the studies that have direct treatments for things like I mentioned like TBI’s, they’re counting on the conditionals being the same conditionals meaning, you know core temperature, milliwatts a centimeter squared basically like the intensity of the output right or the actual wavelengths sighted. You have some people that are kind of skewing the lines on that. I don’t think it’s a huge deal to have a study that says they use 630 and then somebody uses 650. Like 650 nanometers yet. It was 630 in the study. But if you start going from like 600 nanometers or 660 to all of a sudden 850 now we’re into a totally different ballpark and I would suggest mirroring what’s getting the.

Excuse this interruption for gunner and ghost as they are making it difficult to concentrate and I am stumbling over my words today. Whatever the hell I was saying. So at the end of the day, this is your choice, right? I would recommend you take a look at the research. I can lead you in the right direction. I can summarize but I’m not like some doctor, but I do have personal experience with this. So I’ll tell you a quick story about when I had drug-induced neuropathy in my feet and hands post leukemia treatment, right?

I basically broke all the rules here. So I would do things that I would not advise you to do but I was in dire straits. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t drive. I was released to the hospital after a 34-day stay. Life was in shambles. I was willing to do anything to try and like get some of my life quality back. So I did stuff like in none of this included using red light therapy in sauna because I didn’t want to do anything that would downregulate the benefit. If anything, I overdid it, right? It was overexposed to red light therapy.

But I would put panels out on the floor like you’re not supposed to use them and I would literally lay my feet on them, right? I was doing direct skin contact. Half the time I would also I would get like a twin memory foam mattress and just stick it in the middle of the floor and then put panels around me to also do systemic body treatments at low low intensity. All that to say basically, I’ve broken the rules and done stuff that you’re not supposed to do is what I’m trying to say. But it was on the other side of the fence. It wasn’t hey, let’s see how hot we can get the body and then do some red light therapy that’s far away that has low penetration.

I’m doing stuff like extreme penetration very close distance body cool and dry. Then I’m also doing systemic surrounding the room with low milliwatts a centimeter squared and basically doing like saturation treatments with non-target zone application. So there’s a huge difference between those. None of them that gave me good results involved my core temperature being elevated, right? We’ll also do a follow-up to this video. Let’s do a part two or another day when I’m not distracted when the dogs aren’t here filming with us and I’ll go over like some more technical data. Me being distracted is not helping stay on track with citing actual figures from the study.

But we’ll do like a technical overview and we’ll do it in the studio with zero distractions as a follow-up.