This is the Transcript of Scot Faulkner's July 9, 2023, presentation to the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness in Tuscon, Arizona
Red Light Therapy: Saving Lives, Revolutionizing Healthcare - YouTube
Red-Light Therapy is revolutionizing Health Care, literally, as we sit here.
[Slide 1]
A number of you over the last day and a half have shared
some of your stories with me.
When we were together in Las Vegas last year I presented an overview and an awareness of Red-Light Therapy. Some of you have tried it out in the last year and have come up with some amazing results!
Literally, as we're sitting in this room, Red-Light Therapy is saving a life. Red-Light Therapy is improving a life somewhere in the world. Military forces are using Red-Light Therapy in their conditioning. Navy Seal units, Special Forces for the United States Army, NATO Pilots, Israeli Defense Forces - they're all incorporating Red-Light Therapy into their conditioning - building endurance, speeding recovery from their exercises, and improving their performance.
At the same time, we have young people, at places like Saint Jude, are having their lives saved with Red-Light treatments that take care of the side effects of cancer chemotherapy.
Every major sports team in the world is now using Red-Light Therapy. Every NFL team has either a handheld or a light bed. Every NBA team, every World Cup soccer team, and most Collegiate athletic teams now are using Red-Light Therapy.
It is truly the future of medicine but is actually becoming the present of Medicine.
The mechanism of action for Red-Light Therapy is Photobiomodulation.
[Slide 2]
To explain this, think of ourselves as warm-blooded plants. We turn color in the sunlight. We like sunny days. We need our Vitamin D. The mechanism of action within photosynthesis in a plant Photobiomodulation is almost the exact same mechanism within a human. We literally are absorbing the sunlight with all the ambient parts of the spectrum. Photobiomodulation in part of the light spectrum. Yesterday we heard a little bit about the Ultraviolet end of the spectrum dealing with ozone. Ultraviolet light is a cleanser. If we shift over to the Red/Near-Infrared we're into Photobiomodulation - 500 to 1200 nanometers.
Red-Light is now everywhere. If you watch Fox News you've got the Tommy Copper ads. They show little dots you can wrap around your arm. These are “consumer grade”. They are not what we call “medical grade”. It is all about focused light and intensity. Photobiomodulation is measured in joules per centimeter square. You can shrink the light spectrum and focus it on the 500 to 1200 nanometers and you amp up dosage, or the intensity, you are approaching the medical grade part of Photobiomodulation.
[Slide 3]
Since we last talked Photobiomodulation has really made it into
the mainstream of medicine.
We have 70 articles a month now being published dealing
with Photobiomodulation, clinical studies, animal studies, and human studies. We have 200 human studies currently
registered with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that are being
conducted.
[Slide 4]
So what is Photobiomodulation? What does it really do?
Think of the fact that we have 32 trillion cells in our body and within each of those cells there are literally thousands and thousands of Mitochondria. Mitochondria are the energy units within the cell. They process nutrients and take sunlight to generate the energy that drives the cell.
Within each one of these mitochondria, at the subatomic level, we have the electron transport chain. Literally it's like four different subatomic components, and there are thousands and thousands of them within each of these mitochondria. If all goes well nutrients and sunlight come into the chain. They stimulate different ions and molecules and atoms to change and swap out, driving energy forward through the chain. The final stage is like a subatomic generator that spins and drives cellular functions.
When we get a disease, when we're injured, when we get older, that four-step process closes up. That's called inflammation. When it closes up, and the atoms can no longer move, they swell at the subatomic level.
How Photobiomodulation works is if you direct enough energy
with enough dosage joules per centimeter squared, in the right part of the
light spectrum Red and Near-Infrared, it unclogs the electron transport chain. When you're dealing with that kind of
subatomic activity, multiplied thousands of times, within the electron transport
chains thousands of times, within the mitochondria trillions of times, within
the cells of our body, it doesn't take that much unclog things and reduce
inflammation.
[Slide 5]
That's what Photobiomodulation is all about. 80 percent of what ails us, what ages us, what hurts us, what gives us creaky joints, relate to some aspect of cellular function.
Therefore, Photobiomodulation does one thing really well. By unclogging the electron transport chain Photobiomodulation can literally address any number of medical conditions.
We're going to be talking about a few of those because, since Las Vegas last year, we've had some amazing progress and some amazing endorsements.
[Slide 6]
Let’s start with the tale of two patients.
In the first instance a Pope, in the second instance an amazing athletic star from the Olympics.
[Slide 7]
In the case of Pope Francis, last year he fell and really fractured his knee. I mean he literally shattered his knee. The Vatican covered up for a while, but ultimately the Pope couldn't walk. He was in a wheelchair. He was concerned about going under general anesthetic and getting some sort of surgery. Enter one of our colleagues in Europe who knew the Vatican physician. He provided a Photobiomodulation device to the Physician who started treating the Pope. After only a couple months, the different parts of the broken bone started to fuse and the muscle came back. The Pope started going through physical therapy, supported by the Italian Photobiomodulation device.
He's walking again.
A couple months ago, the Pope goes to Budapest and holds a special ceremony at one of the main churches in Budapest to honor Adam Meister, son of Andre Mester, the inventor or Discoverer Photobiomodulation.
[Slide 8]
During the ceremony and in his interviews, the pope
endorsed for PBM. So, he embraced the Bible and now he’s embraced the light. This is a big deal to have somebody of world-renowned
who can say that “the only reason I'm walking today is because Red-Light Therapy”. “Photobiomodulation healed my knee”. I mean that's huge. We've never had a world leader be able to say
that.
[Slide 9]
In that special ceremony the Pope formally endorsed PBM. He presented a special papal medal to Adam Mester. In exchange, Mester gave the Pope a Hungarian made PBM device.
So who is Andre Mester? Andre Mester was a brilliant scientist working behind the Iron Curtain. In 1967, he was concerned about whether lasers, which had only been developed since 1962, might cause cancer. So he takes a bunch of mice, shaves them, and applies the laser to see if they start to develop tumors. What he discovers is the mice that were receiving the laser started growing hair real fast. Mester called it Bio-stimulation. That's how PBM was discovered with shaved mice.
You've probably seen ads where you have these baseball helmets that you put on with lined with LED lights to grow hair. It goes back to the roots of PBM.
Andre was a brilliant scientist, but he had the misfortune of working behind the Iron Curtain. That's why even though PBM was discovered in 1967, it did not come into the West until the fall of the Berlin Wall. If you go on and go on to the like National Institutes of Health and look at their libraries, all of a sudden there's this burst of PBM-related research papers showing up in 1991. That's when his work finally made it to the West and started going into general circulation.
Since that point, we have had over 100 million patients treated with PBM. During that entire period there's been no documented side effect, because it's a natural process helping a natural process.
We are that warm-blooded plant getting this infusion of Red and Near-Infrared light. Whether it is a broken ankle, a sprain, muscles sore from working in the yard, all the way up through neurological conditions you are getting your life improved.
PBM heals. PBM helps with wellness, and therefore it's starting to finally get the traction it deserves.
[Slide 10]
Anne started out in the Winter Olympics as a single woman's luge, clocked in excess of 100 miles an hour going down that ice track. She was nicknamed “Grandma Luge” and was a pop hero. In fact, IBM, during the Nagano Games, used her as an ad spokesperson and won a CLEO award. Anne is just one of these most dynamic people - she's a cancer survivor, she's also a born-again Christian. She’s a guest speaker and performer at churches, schools, and conferences. She's an amazing multi-faceted individual.
After retiring from luge following her last Winter Olympics, she decided to pursue a “safer” sport. So she shifted over to archery. She found that the upper body muscles you use to launch and drive a luge are almost the same for pulling a bow. Remarkably Anne leapfrogged straight onto the World Cup Circuit and became World Ranked. Anne turned 70 this last April, in June she and her Mixed Team partner finished 6th at the Archery World Cup in Columbia.
Why Anne comes into our world is that last Summer she had a severe bout of COVID and she got Covid-related brain fog. Had she taken the Pharmaceuticals that were being recommended she would have been screened-out of the Olympics. Anne came Dr. Bob Bowen, one of our PBM Foundation Trustees. He was doing a proof-of-concept study saying that if we direct red light into the brain we can solve and treat brain fog he succeeded and let's talk let's look at the video:
[Slide 10 – Video]
“While the COVID-19 pandemic has ceased to be a public health emergency many patients continue to deal with post-pandemic complications known as long covid. One such complication is brain fog characterized by cognitive dysfunction and chronic fatigue systemic inflammation. Vascular damage following COVID-19 is believed to hinder cognition. Unfortunately, there are no therapeutic options available for the recovering patients. Photobiomodulation therapy (PBM) has shown promise in treating cognitive decline by boosting antimicrobial immune responses and reducing inflammatory cytokine damage. Interest has therefore shifted to using PBM for treating long COVID symptoms as it targets the underlying processes of the immune system. However, delivering precise PBM doses to targeted sites remains challenging. In a recent open label pilot human clinical study researchers from Shepherd University, University of Buffalo and West Virginia University evaluated the efficacy of transcranial PBM (tPBM) and whole body PBM (wbPBM) in treating long COVID induced brain fog.
A total of 14 patients who had experienced
brain fog for at least five months were enrolled and divided into two groups
seven patients per group. Group 1 received tPBM treatments administered using a
new radiant LED helmet emitting light at 1070 nanometers while group 2 received
wbPBM with NovoTHOR a light bed with LEDs emitting lights at 660 nanometers at
850 nanometers. The subjects were
randomly allocated to receive either PBM treatment and received a total of 12 treatments
over a four week period. They were evaluated pre and post-treatment using a
battery of neurophysiological tests and the wavy quantitative electroencephalography
(eeg) system. The researchers found that both PBM therapies improved brain
performance and resulted in significant improvements in neurophysiological test
scores following treatment. Furthermore,
the wavy data of the subjects supported these findings by revealing increased
brain processing speed and power following treatment. Additionally, the wavy
eeg system was shown to be a practical and effective biometric for evaluating PBM
treatments in real time in a clinical setting. These findings thus show that tPBM
and wbPBM could improve clinical outcomes in patients diagnosed with COVID-19
brain fog and other chronic diseases”.
[Slide 11]
When Dr. Bowen was trying to explain all this to me and he said “you know you don't have brain fog, but let me run you through the whole thing”. The brain scan on the screen is mine, and so the test results. He put the Neuronic helmet on me for 14 minutes and ran me through the Baseline tests.
You can see for even a normal brain how brain activity increased after only 14 minutes of using this kind of bicycle helmet device. He ran me through all the Baseline tests they mentioned on the video. Every one of my test scores doubled. That improvement after those 14 minutes “blew my mind” literally and figuratively. In the case of Anne, she used the light bed.
The PBM Foundation is an honest broker. We're there aggregate-curate-disseminate the most important research and applications within the PBM world and to then Advocate it being a mainstream medical treatment.
We have about two dozen industry partners that help us out Neuronics from Philadelphia is one, NovoTHOR, which is made in Vermont, is one of our other ones. That's the NovoTHOR bed she used. The photo is from the competition where she came in sixth. This was out of 291 competitors. It looks like a modern-day version of Agincourt. I just learned that in the Pan Am games down in Honduras she again came in 14th. She's on her way to Paris! As the PBM Foundation are sponsoring her seventh Olympics. It's a great honor from our standpoint to help this amazing person. If PBM had not existed, she could not have competed.
Just last week, the trial of one of the more promising
brain fog drugs was stopped, because it was revealing severe side effects with
absolutely no efficacy. Currently
there's no drug anywhere in the regulatory pipeline to treat brain fog. PBM's
the only thing out there.
[Slide 12]
In 2019 the Multinational Association for Supportive Care
in Cancer (MASCC) endorsed PBM as a pre-treatment to the throat and mouth area to
prevent the side effects of cancer chemotherapy. If you've ever had a loved one go through
heavy duty cancer chemotherapy it can create sores in the mouth. In the most severe cases, called oral
mucositis, literally one of two things happen. Either you have a feeding tube
because you can no longer eat or you stop the chemotherapy in order to recover,
at which point cancer progresses.
[Slide 13]
Oral Mucositis is a horrible condition. Using PBM as a prophylactic prevents this
condition.
[Slide 14]
PBM has become a great preventative measure. Oncology and
Endocrinology associations have endorsed this. The three main ones we work with
are:
[1] The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. UPMC was one of the first ones. They've treated almost 3 000 cancer patients
to prevent the cancer side effects.
[2] West Virginia Cancer Institute is part of WVU in
Morgantown.
[3] St. Jude is probably our Crown Jewel proving that it is safe enough for Pediatric cancer patients.
In all three cases, PBM use is now part of their Standard Order
Set. Those of you who are affiliated
with hospitals know that having a new technology become part of a Standard Order
Set is a big deal.
[Slide 15]
Another major area is wound healing. This first case used a THOR unit (made in England). This is the foot of the Dean of Dentistry at Midwestern University, here in Arizona. She had a compound fracture. She applied the light. You can see the results after only five weeks. PBM is literally rebuilding cellular function at the subatomic level. PBM consistently gets these results.
People have started to use PBM for severe burn victims. As you know, with a burn victim you have skin grafts. You worry about infection. There is scarring. We have found, time and time again, when you start to apply PBM to burn victims, they heal quickly without complications. Usually, you can't tell which hand or part of the body was burned.
[Slide 16]
This case was treated with a device developed by Tom Kerber out of Toronto. Diabetic ulcers are horrible things usually ending up with an amputation of the foot. These wounds can take months, even years, to treat. Many times, the wound won't heal, or if it heals, it's a very painful process. Here, after seven weeks, a foot that would have otherwise been amputated was saved using Kerber's device. This person now can walk on two legs.
[Slide 17]
One of the more famous studies was done several years ago tracking PBM managing pain.
When PBM unclogs the electron transport chain inflammation
goes away, and pain goes away.
This crossover study shows two very interesting things:
[1] The cumulative effect of PBM. If you look at the chart,
one group was treated Placebo, one group was treated with PBM. They switch.
Look what happens. The group that
shifts from Placebo to PBM catches up with the other group.
[2] The residual effect of PBM. For the group where PBM
treatment stopped, and a placebo is put in its place, the pain is still gone. Unlike drugs, that basically mask the
symptoms, PBM truly heals.
[Slide 18]
This chart, and the one next to it, track post-operative pain - the use of opioids versus or Placebo versus PBM treatment. PBM substantially reduces pain.
Several years ago, the PBM Foundation began working with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Pain Management Task Force to look at the fact that you're not replacing drug addiction with light addiction. You are healing and reducing treatments.
PBM heals at the subatomic level healing the body. You're weaning people off of light treatment.
[1] If it's an acute condition - eventually you can walk
away from PBM.
[2] If it's a chronic condition, or a degenerative condition, you may start treatments three times a week; and then a few months later you're being treated a couple times once a week; a few more months it may be a treatment only once a month. In other words, the cumulative effect and the residual effect of PBM allows you to scale back to a more manageable course of treatment.
[Slide 19]
Because of these major clinical breakthroughs, PBM has
received recognition.
In just the last few months:
[1] The American Dental Association (ADA) now established a
task force to incorporate PBM as a standard of care for oral conditions
[2] The Journal for America the American Medical
Association (JAMA) has formally endorsed PBM for pain management.
[3] The Center for Disease Control (CDC) issued their new Opioid
Guidelines for prescriptions. The CDC
listed PBM as part of their preferred non-pharmacological alternative to
opioids. This is the result of the PBM Foundation
testifying numerous times before the CDC’s Board of Scientific
[4] Our biggest success is the Department of Veterans
Affairs (VA) formally recommending the use of PBM for the treatment of Traumatic
Brain Injury (TBI) and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE).
[Slide 20]
The VA endorsement is huge! Vielight developed a device that goes over the head for treating neurological conditions. It's made up in Toronto. The Vielight device was used treat 214 veterans at the Boston VA Hospital. They found that it absolutely calmed patients and actually cured them of traumatic brain injury. It substantially “unscrambled” their brain. These results were echoed in similar trials at Salt Lake City VA and a Denver VA.
The Salt Lake City VA and the Boston VA are also treating NFL players for CTE.
PBM is helping veterans reclaim their lives.
Here is the VA’s endorsement.
Neurologists have found that the moment that you start putting PBM’s Red/Near-Iinfrared light into the brain cavity you're successfully treat Parkinson's. This is being embraced by the dental Community. If a person has Parkinson's you can't fill a cavity or give a Novocaine shot because the person is moving around. PBM is calming them enough where they're able to treat them for different conditions.
Anne Liebert is brilliant scientist, who's one of the world's leading Parkinson's experts out of Sydney Australia. Anne is doing breakthrough research on this and what she's also found, in coordination with the Veterans Administration, is that it's helping calm PTSD They're now using PBM at the Boston VA for pre-treating veterans with PTSD before they come further into the hospital complex (even for a checkup) because of the neurological calming that occurs.
We're all familiar with Moore's Law. It's working for PBM. Devices are getting cheaper. They're getting better and simpler to use. The result is that some “medical grade” cost under five thousand dollars. Some down to less than two thousand dollars.
Because of reduced costs, Salt City Denver and Boston are handing out PBM devices for veterans to take and use at home. Instead of veterans having to come all the way into Denver or Salt Lake City, they can take the PBM device home.
This new generation of PBM device is very easy to use. In most cases, they just turn them on/turn them off. Most of them have some sort of timing mechanism. Most treatments last only three minutes, five minutes, ten minutes tops.
Home treatments, and self-treatment, plus lower per unit cost, allows VAs to buy multiple devices.
Right now the PBM Foundation is working with the Veterans Affairs committees in the House and the Senate and with key people on the Appropriations Committee to get this into all 171 Veterans Hospitals.
PBM is only in a dozen VA Hospitals right now. We really would like to get PBM into others.
Starting next month, the U.S. Government is into “use or lose” at the end of the fiscal year. We all know that government bureaucrats love to spend money. They don't want to end the fiscal year with money left over. Here's an opportunity to knock on the door of a Veterans Hospital, knock on the door of your Congressional Delegation, and say “spend the money this way because it's getting results”.
If anyone is interested in the documentation and the
clinical trial data, I have it.
Give me your email, I will send it. I would love to get this information into everyone's hands so that we can actually make something really wonderful happen.
[Slide 22]
The PBM Foundation is based at the at Shepherd University in West Virginia.
We have a Global Center of Excellence (CoE). Within the Center of Excellence we have received substantial private and public funds to do two very important things:
[1]Testing
Because you have so many red-light devices, it's really the wild west out there. A lot of devices over promise under deliver. Many devices are from China, which means they break down and, again, they under deliver. We want to build consumer confidence, not just among individuals, but facilities and physicians. We have set up a testing protocol. We're beginning to test devices to make sure that they are delivering the right dosage, in the right part of the spectrum, with the right joules per centimeter Square. People need to know that certain devices really are what they say they are.
Last year, we began building a series of online learning modules. The first three deal are general introduction to PBM, safety, and on oral mucositis (it has the strongest clinical evidence). Additional modules will focus on wound healing, pain management and neurological conditions.
There are over 800 nursing schools around the country. Shepherd University is the first nursing school to incorporate PBM as a graduation requirement. We want to take that requirement to every other nursing school in this country. We are getting that word out. Our goal is the “seed the clouds” so the next generation of nurses are gaining PBM knowledge as an elective, a certificate, or like at Shepherd University a fundamental graduate requirement for their degree
Since last year, many pieces are falling into place. It is an exciting time for those of us who've spent so many years trying to make PBM happen.
As I began speaking here, somebody's life has been saved by PBM. Somebody's life has improved thanks to PBM. We wake up every morning knowing it is going to be a better day because of PBM.
I thank you so much.
[Applause]
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