August 9, 2014
Podcast from: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/recovery-podcasts/how-you-can-use-lasers-to-heal-injuries/
[00:00] Introduction/About Dr. Phil Harrington
[05:50] The Difference About Laser Light and Other Kinds of Light
[09:19] The Safety of These Laser Devices
[12:00] How Effective the Device Is
[18:28] Investing an a Laser Device
[21:10] Where to Get Laser Treatments Done
[22:49] How Treatments Go
[26:21] Getting Your Own K-Laser Device
[27:47] The K-Laser And Other Laser Devices
[30:33] The Software of the K-Laser
[34:32] End of Podcast
Ben: Hey, folks. It's Ben Greenfield, and I want to tell you a quick story. A couple of years ago, my wife and I were in Spain, up in the Vitoria region of Spain, and I was there competing in the Long Distance World Championships. I was actually there to defend my gold medal in Long Distance World Championships, and my wife was just there to eat pintxos, and drink good wine, and watch me compete. But she loves to run, and while we were there, she sprained her ankle pretty badly on some cobble stones. And I went to our hotel concierge and asked if there was anyone in the area who was really good in the field of sports medicine who could help her out. He wound up directing us to this tiny little kind of back alley where this apparently well-renowned physician and sports medicine expert lived. And we went there, we knocked on his door, we went up about three stories to this tiny little room, and this guy basically had a massage table more or less and this laser device which you really don't see all that often over here in the States, but apparently is a little bit more popular in Europe, and he did a laser treatment on my wife's ankle, which was pretty bad. Like she was hobbling when we were walking around trying to find this guy's place. And it was literally within about an hour that her ankle was almost completely pain-free and she was walking. And the next day she ran.
Now lasers are something that are kind of hard to understand. It's difficult to see how something like that could actually have an effect like this and it's something that I personally don't completely understand. But I have somebody on the call today to talk about lasers, how these things work, and how you can use them to do things like enhance healing from injury, recovery, and a lot more.
So my guest today is Dr. Harrington. He has a degree in physics from Iowa State University, he's got 10 years of clinical experience in chiropractic medicine, and he's actually a national and international author and lecturer on laser therapy. And he's a fellow at the American Society for lasers medicine and surgery, a certified medical laser safety officer, which is something I did not know existed until I started to read up on Dr. Harrington, and he's pretty much one of the world's leading experts in the use of lasers for health and performance. So Dr. Harrington, thanks for coming on the call today.
Dr. Harrington: Hey, Ben. It's great to be with you. Thanks for the opportunity to visit some about laser therapy today and share some information with your podcast subscribers and with everyone who follows you. I've been keeping up with you on Facebook and Twitter and looking at all the amazing information that you share with your people, the people that follow you. And yes, I want to share some information about later therapy and its potential healing ability for injuries. We can talk more specifically about that. But basically with the laser, we're looking at, it could be an acute injury, it could be a chronic injury. It could be something superficial, it could be deep. But let's back up just a minute. For someone who is skeptical of “can light have an influence”, and it's laser light that we're shining, can light have an influence on biological tissue, or can light have an influence on a living thing at all, let's first of all remember in third grade we all learned that plants can absorb sunlight, and through the process of photosynthesis, create energy for the plant. We all know that our eyeballs, inside of our eyeballs we have the retina, which will absorb light. It undergoes a photochemical reaction and it gives us this beautiful gift of sight.
It's been a relatively recent discovery in the scientific knowledge base that different components inside our body, in the tissues in our body, can absorb this laser light and have a beneficial healing effect. And basically, what we're talking about with the laser is applying relatively low dosages. It's a non-invasive treatment, we are not cutting the skin, we're not overheating it. We are applying these low dosages of laser light to the tissue and getting beneficial effects and helping injuries to heal more quickly and also more efficiently.
Ben: So what exactly is happening? ‘Cause I can go out and stand in the sunlight, and obviously there's light hitting my skin and light hitting my muscles, but what is unique about a laser that will cause that form of light to have any type of different effect than, say, just like sunlight or the light from a lightbulb?
Dr. Harrington: Right. Yeah. Excellent question. Laser light is special for three main reasons. Number one, the term that we use is monochromatic, which means one color. When a laser diode produces laser light, you see one specific color. So if you have seen a lecturer use a laser pointer in a class, typically that lecturer is using either a red or a green laser to point out to objects on the screen. So laser light is monochromatic. It's being held to one type and specific color or wavelength of light. A second is that laser light is coherent. And if any of us, in the past life, Ben, I was a middle school and high school science and physics teacher. So if you stayed awake in your science classes at all, and hopefully you did, Ben, you remember that those light waves from a laser are coherent. And what coherent means is that the peaks and the troughs, all of those light waves match up with each other in space and in time, and that is a special quality of laser light. Ordinary light from a light bulb or from sunlight does not have that quality. So what that allows the laser to do, when we shine a therapeutic laser light on the body, it creates what we call microscopic thermal gradients. That's a real mouthful, but what it means is that one effect of laser light is we get, some areas are a little bit warmer, some areas are a little bit cooler. The net effect of that is that we are increasing microcirculation in the tissues.
Ben: But what do you mean some areas are a little bit cooler? Wouldn't a laser just heat up everything?
Dr. Harrington: Well, it's a quantum effect. We get one water molecule absorbs one photon of light and heats it up just a little bit. Whereas if we would compare that to using a hot pad or a cold pad, if you laid that hot or cold pack on the body, that heating or cooling is uniform. Everyone should know that if you're wanting to get the best effects from a hot pack or a cold pack, you don't put it on and just leave it there for six hours. You put it on for 10 minutes, you take it off for 10 minutes. And it's that process of putting out hot or cold pack on and off the body that is giving you the increase in circulation. Now with the therapeutic laser, number one, we're getting that effect happening instantaneously. Strangely enough, laser light travels at the speed of light. So as soon as we start the treatment, we are increasing microcirculation in that area of the treatment. And what's interesting is that once we stop the treatment, the benefit doesn't stop there. The beneficial effects of increasing microcirculation in the tissues can last for up to 48 hours after the treatment. So it is something that, the treatment may last from three to five minutes, but the benefits that we're getting are ongoing inside the body.
Ben: Now are there side effects from getting something like a laser treatment? I mean could you burn yourself if you don't know what you're doing? Is this something that people, well kind of related to that, I mean if you go to Amazon, there's like infrared lasers and these handheld laser devices all over the place. Is this this stuff safe and is it even effective if you go and use one of these handheld devices?
Dr. Harrington: Yeah. So a couple of different avenues to answer that question. Number one, the type of laser therapy that I'm talking about is extremely safe. One joke that I make is that maybe if Hannibal Lecter was your laser technician, then maybe you'll might want to worry a little bit. But these devices, number one, they're using infrared light. Infrared light is non-ionizing. So you could argue that actually walking outside on a sunny day, if you walk outside on a sunny day, you're getting exposed to ultraviolet light, which is ionizing. Whereas with the laser therapy treatments, we are using either red or infrared light.
Ben: Yeah. I shine an infrared light bulb on my body before I go to sleep at night, like I just have one plugged in for the therapeutic effect. And then I also have a mat, like a sleep mat that I sleep on that produces infrared waves. With the laser, you're basically taking that same concept and just concentrating it into it an ultra-fine spectrum?
Dr. Harrington: It's concentrated, but then also going back to the coherency of it. Yes, the pad that you lay on is emitting infrared energy. But with the laser, we're getting the coherency of the light and applying it to specific tissues in the body. A second component that comes into play here, whether it is the infrared mat that you lay on or the devices that you can find on Amazon or over-the-counter lasers, they are extremely low in power. Now power is measured in watts. I mean we all know that a 100 watt lightbulb is brighter than a 60 watt light bulb. Same way with therapeutic lasers. The therapy lasers that you can find on Amazon are going to be measured in milliwatts of power, thousandths of a watt. Whereas the type of therapeutic laser that I'm talking about will go up to 15 watts of power, which would be 15,000 milliwatts. It may sound like that's an extremely powerful laser, but once again, it's an extremely safe treatment. But then also that high power is necessary for two reasons in doing an effective therapeutic laser treatment. Number one, by shining brighter light at the skin, at the surface of the tissue, we are able to get light penetrating deeper inside of the body. So if you're dealing with a lumbar disc issue, a hip-joint capsule issue, something deep inside of the body, you simply have to shine brighter light at the surface so that that light can get deeper into the body.
Ben: So you could get as deep or something like that, like a hip capsule?
Dr. Harrington: Oh, absolutely! Yeah. There's really… you mentioned that I practiced chiropractics for 10 years. I would have you know 300, 350 pound patients come in suffering from back pain, and yes, I was confident that my laser was powerful enough that I could get deep inside of the body to have a positive effect on those things. Another benefit that we're getting is, with those lower powered lasers, with the treatment, you're holding it in one spot. So you hold it in one spot, and you hum the Jeopardy theme song, and then you hold it in another spot, and you hum the theme song to Gilligan's Island, and so on and so forth. With this high-powered therapy laser, we're keeping the wand moving, or sweeping over the whole area that we want to treat so that we can apply this therapeutic dosage of laser light to all of that tissue and not just isolated specific points.
An example that I use, and we do have a real world example of this, let's say that we have a sprinter who suffers a hamstring injury. Now imagine the damage to that hamstring muscle. Could you point at that damage to the muscle with your fingertip? Could you cover it with the palm of your hand? Or is it potentially all of that muscle tissue that is affected by that hamstring strain? And I think everyone would agree that it's the last one. You could potentially have damaged muscle tissue all throughout that entire hamstring muscle. So the type of therapy laser that I'm talking about is that we can apply therapeutic doses to that entire affected tissue, that entire hamstring muscle, and have a positive healing effect on all of it.
Ben: You mean by moving a laser all around the different areas of the muscle? It's not like a laser recover the muscle at once, right?
Dr. Harrington: Right. We're moving it. One analogy that we make is that we're painting. We're painting all of that tissue. Yeah. And so I want to back up just a little bit. We mentioned that laser therapy helps to increase the microcirculation in the tissues. Another thing that happens with laser is that it gets absorbed by the hemoglobin molecule. Now hemoglobin is inside of the red blood cells. It carries oxygen from our heart out to the various body parts, the oxygen that we breathe in through our lungs. When that hemoglobin molecule absorbs a photon of light, it slightly changes the shape of that hemoglobin, some call it a hemoglobin claw. It changes the shape of that claw which dumps oxygen off at the treatment site. So in the area that we are applying the laser, we are getting increased oxygenation of the tissues, which that alone is going to help that tissue to be healthier. But then also that oxygen gets processed by the various respiratory enzymes in the mitochondria.
So inside every cell of our body, we've got hundreds of mitochondria. And the mitochondria to our cell is like the engine in our car, it's what is producing the energy to make the thing go, and the oxygen is the fuel. Just like gasoline is fuel for our car, oxygen is the fuel for the cell. And so when we get absorption by a specific enzyme inside of the mitochondria, it produces more, it's called ATP, adenosine triphosphate, is the energy for the cell. So to summarize the effects of laser therapy, increased microcirculation, increased delivery of oxygen to tissues, and increased utilization of that oxygen to produce ATP, which is the energy currency for the cell.
Ben: Okay. So you don't get this from, the impression I'm getting is you actually need to go to some kind of a practitioner who actually has these more high powered lasers in order to get these kind of effects.
Dr. Harrington: The device is a prescription medical device, yes. Regulated by the FDA.
Ben: So if you don't know what you're doing, you could actually burn yourself with one of these?
Dr. Harrington: There again, you'd have to be, well number one, are you familiar with effects of therapeutic ultrasound? Have you had therapy ultrasound on you, Ben?
Ben: Yeah. And I actually used to work at a physical therapy clinic. I was a personal trainer upstairs and would go downstairs, and when I would be injured they'd give me the ultrasound one. And once I actually did make that mistake, I forgot to keep moving it around and all of a sudden that muscle area started to burn and throb and I was literally just burning the tissue underneath my arm.
Dr. Harrington: Yeah. And so that's obviously being negligent in the delivery. This application…
Ben: I was being an idiot.
Dr. Harrington: Your words, not mine, my friend. But with therapeutic laser, the heating is going from the outside, in. If you do start to get negligent in your delivery, they'll feel it get a little bit warm. But really, honestly in the hands of a qualified practitioner, it's an extremely safe treatment. And so, yes. Since it is a prescription medical device we're looking at, most of our providers in the human field are chiropractors. We're getting an increased number of physical therapists, medical doctors, and other health care practitioners that are using it. But something else that we're seeing, and this is just the last couple of years, is that individual, very elite athletes that are extremely dedicated to their sports, there is a way that they can purchase a unit for themselves. And one example is, I've got a picture of him going through the airport security, is tennis star Rafa Nadal, and you can see the case of his laser are going through airport security.
Ben: Rafael Nadal uses a laser?
Dr. Harrington: Yes. He uses this specific laser that I'm talking about, yes. And I think he's looking at the more knee complaints is primarily what was bothering him. But really for any sports injury, acute injuries, and whether it's a soft tissue, muscle, tendon, or it could even get into some of the bone and joint issues, laser has the potential to help all of those conditions heal faster and with better quality.
Ben: So a guy like Nadal is obviously making millions of dollars, and from what I understand, to get a good laser, if you wanted to buy one for yourself, lasers are pretty expensive right?
Dr. Harrington: And it's an investment in yourself. And it's all about at what level do you want to compete, how quickly do you want to recover. Let me tell you a recovery story, it still gives me chills to this day. The US women's soccer team, in their run-up to winning the gold medal at the London Olympic Games in 2012, they used this laser. A number of the players on that women's team use this laser. So they go up, they win the gold. The following year at an athletic training conference, I'm standing there in our exhibit booth and I see this guy across the room, he's making a beeline towards me. And of course I'm thinking, the first thing is, “Oh my gosh. What did I do?” And he comes up and he holds his hands out, and he shakes my hand and he says, well it turns out that he was the head trainer for the women's soccer team. And he told me, “Phil, I know that that laser treatment got players back on the field more quickly and I want to thank you.” So that's something, it still grabs me every day when I think about that, that something that I was associated with was able to get those elite athletes back on the field so that they can win an Olympic gold medal. That's powerful.
Ben: Yeah. Obviously, like you mentioned, this is something like a sports medicine doctor or a chiropractic physician would normally have. Like in a typical scenario, people wouldn't really be buying these fancier laser units for their homes, right?
Dr. Harrington: Right. Yeah. So we're looking at the more elite athletes. We have a number of different other, I mentioned Rafa Nadal, but we do have other from various sports, Major League Baseball, the National Football League, that have purchased their own units and then either we train them to use it themselves or they purchase it and give it to their trainer to use on them.
Ben: Okay. So walk me through this. This is actually kind of a relevant question for me because I actually threw out my neck yesterday while I was doing sandbag training workout.
Dr. Harrington: I read that on your Facebook page.
Ben: So, I'm curious. Like let's say I want to go, and I have no clue if this would be a situation appropriate for something like a laser. But let's say that I wanted to go hunt down an actual laser treatment session using this type of laser treatment that you're talking about. Where do I start? How do I how to actually make sure (a) I'm not going to hook up with somebody who is going to burn a hole through my skin, and (b) where do I actually find somebody? How do you start into this process of hooking up with somebody who can use a laser treatment on an injury that you have?
Dr. Harrington: Yeah. So we have that information. We have a “find a provider” locator on our website. And can I go and give out our website?
Ben: Yeah. What's the website?
Dr. Harrington: K-Laser is the name of our company, just the letter K. And our website is k-laserusa.com. So K-LASERUSA.com.
Ben: We've got a bunch of people who listen internationally too. Is this something that people can do internationally? Like if you're in Australia, or New Zealand, or something like that?
Dr. Harrington: Yeah. So if you go to that website, in the upper left or the upper right-hand corner, there's a link for “find a provider” and you can look either for the US or internationally. For the US, we put in our zip code. For international installations, we have a map that pops up. But yes, for you with your neck, and I'm hoping that you found someone to take care of you and get an adjustment yesterday, Ben.
Ben: No. But I'm actually going to chiropractor after this.
Dr. Harrington: Okay! With the laser, it works well by itself, but it works even better when used in conjunction with spinal adjustment, soft tissue techniques, and specifically we have the various soft tissue techniques such as Graston or active release technique. If you're using specific techniques like that, what I'm trying to say is that laser plus manual techniques, it's like one plus one equals three. Laser is good by itself…
Ben: So what do you do first in a situation like that? Do you typically go in and get the manual technique done and follow that up with a laser or is it the other way around?
Dr. Harrington: Actually, we pretty much exclusively want to do the laser first. Let's use you as an example. I imagine that you have pain, you probably have certain ranges of motion that give you discomfort, you may have some muscles that are tight or muscle splinting. So that if we apply the laser to your neck, Ben, and then we would just simply apply the laser and then have you do a range of motion within your level of comfort. So we would be applying the laser, we would have you tip your head forward and backward, and you turn your nose left and right. One thing to remember is that it takes, we talked about that ATP, it takes a molecule of ATP to make a muscle cell contract. But it also takes a molecule of ATP to make that muscle cell relax. And what quite often happens, and I've seen this happen a number of times in a case such as yours, Ben, I have the patient just sitting on the table, and we're applying the laser, and they start to do the range of motion, and before I even go in there and do anything with my hands, they are getting better range of motion already because we're helping those muscles to loosen up, we are getting some decrease of inflammation in the area, and we're making those muscle fibers fire more efficiently. So then when I come in afterwards with my hands in and deliver the adjustment, it's going to be a more effective treatment than just the adjustment alone.
Ben: Interesting. So this is different than electrical muscle stimulation, or you were talking about ultrasound in that there are there actually is like this photochemical reaction in the muscle cell itself.
Dr. Harrington: Absolutely. Yeah. So there are a few comparable, if you look at a chart of physiological effects, there are some that are comparable to muscle stim and ultrasound, but my own experience in my own practice, and I'm sure dozens or hundreds of chiropractors have the same experience, once I started to use therapeutic laser, I never ever used therapy ultrasound again. Because one thing with ultrasound, you have that messy gel, that sloppy gel that you have to put on the skin. With laser, we’re shining light. You don't have to worry about that. Another thing with comparing laser to ultrasound is if there's any metal in that area, you cannot use ultrasound. You cannot use ultrasound over metal. However, we can use laser. So if we're looking at an athlete who's had a broken bone and has plates or screws installed, it's okay to use the laser over that area. And then thinking back to my own practice, if I'm working on the geriatric patients with a knee replacement, I can use the laser over that area. So there again, once I started using laser, no ultrasound at all, and just a little bit of muscle stim, the effects that we get with the laser are so much better.
Ben: Okay. Got it. Now we have a lot of chiropractic docs that listen and I know some sports medicine physicians and people who might want to use laser therapy in their offices who maybe aren't using it yet. I'd like to hear a little bit about this particular device, this K-Laser device and just kind of fill us in. Like if somebody wanted to use this in their office, is it different than other lasers? How much does it cost? And I'm fine with you just being straight up, and giving us an approximation of cost, and how would a practitioner introduce this. Or if one of our listeners has a practitioner and they want to talk to them about maybe getting one of these to help them out, where do you start with something like this?
Dr. Harrington: Okay. Number one, we'll go and get a dollar figure out of the way. It is an investment in the practice. It's 20 to 30,000 dollars depending on the model that we choose, and we can get more into specifics later on that, but it is in that ballpark. It is an investment. But all this talk about my own experience, being a private chiropractic practitioner, using the unit anywhere from 5 to 10, to 12, to 15 times of day, I'm getting that return on investment. I've invested that money in that piece of equipment, I'm getting more new patients coming into my practice, I'm helping more people, conditions that I could not help before with the therapeutic laser. So yes, it is a solid return on investment. Then if we are looking at elite athletes, what is it worth to you to be able to compete in that Ironman competition next month? What is it worth to you to be able to get back on the field more quickly, like the trainer from the women's soccer team said. So you have to weigh investment.
Ben: By the way, while you were talking, I found two K-Laser practitioners literally within like three miles of my house.
Dr. Harrington: Nice.
Ben: So I know now what I'm going to be doing after we hang out. So how's this different than other lasers? ‘Cause I've seen other lasers out there, and honestly, I don't know if they were K-Lasers or not. But are there other forms of lasers out there and is this any different than others?
Dr. Harrington: Well first of all, a few minutes ago we talked about power and the importance of power. We need that high powered laser, that brighter therapeutic laser light at the surface so we can get light remaining when it gets deep inside of the body. The K-Laser is a powerful therapeutic laser. Secondly, we talked a little bit about the wavelength or the color of the light. The K-Laser is unique in that it is the only therapeutic laser that has four independent laser diodes inside of it producing four colors of light. And let me summarize the importance of those. We talked about increased microcirculation. 970 nanometers is where we have a peak of absorption for those water molecules. So with a 970 nanometer light, we are getting the most efficient absorption by the water molecule. We talked about the hemoglobin molecule and how it carries oxygen to the cells. There is a peak of absorption for hemoglobin at 905 nanometers. So we include a 905 diode in the machine. Then we talked about those enzymes inside of the mitochondria. There is a peak of absorption for that enzyme at 800 nanometers. Thus we use that wavelength so that we are most efficiently getting production of ATP from the cells.
Now you can look at there are other therapy lasers out there that will use one or maybe two wavelengths, and yeah, they're helping some, but they're not doing it most efficiently. By including all of these wavelengths, we're doing that job most efficiently and getting the most effective clinical results, the quickest clinical results. The fourth wave length that I didn't mention is a visible red 660 nanometers. That is ideal for superficial complaints so whether we're talking about skin abrasions, turf bruises, things that are superficial, that red wavelength is going to help those things to heal up more quickly and more efficiently.
Ben: Okay. So it's basically a different amount of wavelengths?
Dr. Harrington: Yes. And what really drives the cost of production on this type of equipment is the diode. The diode is the expensive part. It costs, or excuse me, it takes more than two months time to make one of these diodes. It's an expensive procedure. But then also the power of the diode. As a diode gets more powerful, it gets more expensive to produce. So there again, we've got these lower powered single and double wavelength lasers out there, but they're simply not going to be effective as the K-Laser is at doing these different types of treatments.
Ben: Okay. Gotcha. And it looks like, I'm looking at a picture it. It looks like it comes with kind of like, it almost looks like an iPhone or something like that that this laser plugs into. Is that like a software program that runs the treatment?
Dr. Harrington: Well, the software is all built in the machine. I'm not sure exactly which picture you're looking at, you may be looking at the laser itself. So one thing that's unique about this piece of equipment is it's lightweight and it's portable. This device, it weighs just over three pounds. Whereas any other laser that is even close to being comparable to it weighs 15 to 30 pounds and is the size of a small suitcase. So the K-Laser is extremely unique in that it is that small size, yet it is extremely powerful. And it can run on a lithium ion battery. You can get about an hour's worth of treatment with it running on the battery. And so the screen that you're looking at, what we've done is we've done all the background research. We've looked at the scientific studies, we've analyzed depth of penetration in the tissues, and we have developed the protocols and put those into the machine. So you may notice on the screen there if there's a body part or a picture of the human body, we have the settings broken down by body part, head, neck, shoulder, arm, and so on. And then by color of the skin, and then by chronicity level and pain level. And so the practitioner does not need to know any of this any of this boring stuff about nanometers, and watts, and all that boring science stuff. They just need to know what size patient am I working on, what body part, what's the color of their skin, what's the chronicity and pain level, and then they're ready to deliver the treatment. So we put the information about proper protocols into the machine, the practitioner puts in information about their patient, the marriage of those two pieces of information gives the most efficient therapeutic laser treatment for that patient.
Ben: Okay. Got it. Interesting. Well this is really cool stuff. I love high-tech things that can make you feel faster like this, and the K-Laser is definitely one of those things. So the link we'll put in the show notes, but it's basically, I think for US it's k-laserusa.com. Or you, I'm sure you could just Google K-Laser and you could probably find it. But I'll put links to all of the things that Dr. Harrington and I talked about in the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com if you want to head over there and check out the K-Laser as well and also find a K-Laser provider in your area, which is something that I have already done. And so it was pretty easy to do, but something that, if you're dealing with an injury that you want to get rid of would probably be pretty useful for it, like I mentioned in the intro. Like my wife did this and it literally was like the next hour, she was feeling better. It was pretty cool. So Dr. Harrington, this is really cool stuff thank you so much for coming on the call today and sharing this with us.
Dr. Harrington: Yeah! Thanks for the opportunity! And like I said, I've been following you on Facebook and checking out your website and I know that you wanted to highlight and showcase the best products out there. Whether it's the various nutritional products, or techniques, or whatever it is. And I know that you have a lot of dedicated followers and I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to share this information with them today.
Ben: Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on, man.
Dr. Harrington: Alright, Ben. You take care.
Ben: Alright, folks. This is Ben Greenfield and Dr. Harrington from K-Laser signing out from bengreenfieldfitness.com.
Until today’s podcast episode, I didn’t realize lasers were so darn cool, and effective for so many issues.
The laser was invented in 1960 and the biological stimulation properties of laser light were discovered shortly after than, in 1967. Even though therapy lasers have been used in Europe much longer than in the United States, in 2002, the FDA cleared therapy lasers for treating injuries and enhancing recovery.
Now, multiple researchers throughout the world are finding enormous therapeutic application of different laser infrared wavelengths like red, green, and blue wavelengths and their effects on tissues. New high-power laser therapy systems penetrate deep into tissue and deliver physiological benefits that no other modality like electrical muscle stimulation or ultrasound can deliver. By stimulating adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production and enhancing cell membrane permeability, lasers can actually helps injuries heal and speed up recovery from workouts, rather than just masking pain.
Today’s podcast guest, Dr. Phil Harrington, has over 10 years of clinical experience using lasers for healing, and is a national and international author and lecturer on laser therapy.
During our discussion you’ll discover:
How laser treatments work…
What conditions can benefit from laser treatments…
Whether those little handheld laser units you can buy online work…
Which elite athletes are currently using laser treatments…
What other modalities or treatments can be used with laser…
Why your body won’t just heal itself from injury…
The difference between laser and other things like ultrasound or electrical muscle stimulation…
How to find a K-Laser provider in your area…