Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Guardian.
Imagine coming home. You're expecting to see your partner or your mum or dad, but sitting in the dark is a figure you don't quite recognise. White mask over their face, an unearthly red glow coming from below. Dark holes where their mouth and eyes should be. It sounds like something from a horror movie. But it's actually the latest trend in our age-old quest to look younger for longer.
Red light therapy has been around for decades, but until recently was only available in expensive dermatology clinics.
Chapter 2: What is red light therapy and how does it work?
That's all changing thanks to an explosion in the range of devices you can use at home. So today, what's the science behind red light therapy? And do these at-home devices actually do anything? From The Guardian, I'm Ian Sample, and this is Science Weekly. Maddy, red light therapy masks have become all the rage.
I basically had to run from someone in John Lewis the other day who was attempting to get me to try one on. So, look, to start off, what is red light therapy?
So this is the idea that shining red light on yourself is going to have some kind of health or aesthetic benefit. So let's think about the electromagnetic spectrum. Starting with UV, which is short wavelengths, then you go into the visible spectrum and you're going to have the short wavelengths of visible light. That's blue and purple. And then as the wavelengths get longer...
Think of the rainbow, you go yellow, orange, red. So red has the longest wavelengths that we can see. And after that, you go into infrared. And those long wavelengths allow the light to penetrate our skin millimetres and perhaps even a few centimetres deep. And so it's getting into our bodies and it's interacting with us in supposedly a beneficial way.
And where did this idea come from that shining red light on yourself would actually have some kind of benefit?
The concept behind what is sometimes called phototherapy or now photobiomodulation has actually been around for quite a long time. This idea that shining different wavelengths of light could treat potentially different conditions. And There is some logic behind it. You know, you think about how we make vitamin D, for example.
Light shines on us, we produce vitamin D. But look, for this research on red light therapy, I got in touch with Dr Jonathan Kentley. He's a consultant dermatologist who works for the NHS and in a private practice. And I asked him the same thing. When did red light therapy begin to take off, really? And like all the very best scientific discoveries, Ian, it happened by accident.
In the late 60s, a scientist was shining lasers on mice, as they do, and it was to see if it would cause cancer. But in fact, it did something else.
As part of it, they'd shave the mouse's stomach and they basically irradiated it with a low energy ruby laser. But they observed that actually in the mice that they had treated with the laser, they actually regrew their hair much quicker than the other mice. So that's really where the concept of what at the time was called low-level laser therapy came about.
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