Red light therapy used to mitigate side effects of cancer treatment • FRANCE 24 English

Red light therapy used to mitigate side effects of cancer treatment • FRANCE 24 English

Now yesterday was World Cancer Day an opportunity to take a closer look at red light therapy for us here at France 24 it is a cosmetic treatment that uses low wavelength red light to improve skin appearance but it is also now being touted for its medical uses including for people who are undergoing

Chemotherapy and radiotherapy to tell us a bit more Julia Seager from our science desk is with me and Julia first of all just tell us what is red light therapy so it’s called red light therapy but it’s also called photobiomodulation it’s a type of light therapy that uses red

And near red infrared uh so just beyond the visible spectrum to the naked eye now what’s going to happen is the light is going to penetrate the skin penetrate the Derm and start simulating enhancing and stimulating the M the mitochondrial activity which is a protein that can

Regenerate cells now it actually uh was discovered almost by chance in the 1960s a surgeon was experimenting with laser beams and he to remove tumors from mice and he really noticed that there was faster healing and uh quicker hair growth in those areas that were exposed to a specific wavelength of red light

And the technique only then became more widespread after the development of leads now the light itself is completely painful it painless excuse me of course uh and uh it’s widely used in in the Cosmetic field to get rid of acne but also cellulite and today it’s also used

In oncology why because it helps heal damage tissues it helps improve immune response and it reduces inflammation so pretty much all of the side effects that you can have if you undergo heavy treatments such as radiotherapy and chemiotherapy if you undergo radiotherapy for instance uh you might experience what we call Rad radiation

Dermatitis which are skin burns or uh mucositis which is inflammation of oral mucus uh if you undergo um chemotherapy for instance then you can also experience tingling and numb numbness in in your hands and in your feet and that can help there too now the before and after results are pretty incredible

Let’s take a look uh together here is a patient who underwent radiotherapy and after 10 days and four sessions of red light therapy this is what happened the result is pretty remarkable uh it’s almost all gone all of the burns and that’s going to actually happen over

Time it’s going to uh stay that way over time and even protect from future burns from future um radiotherapy sessions now there’s also other clinical uh studies that are currently underway to try to expand the use of this technique uh to treat we call uh peripheral um neuropathies and and other symptoms of

Linked to radiotherapy and chemotherapy so those images are pretty impressive indeed Julia but beyond oncology could the technique be used for other medical issues it probably will and it’s starting to be uh used in in in other for other pathologies so the main thing is that IT addresses pain right so it

Could also be used for trauma but also everything having to do with autoimmune diseases that create certain pains uh everywhere in the body it also treats fatigue so it could help with depression for instance and it’s also now used for long-term effects of covid but also for pathologies that have no other

Therapeutic uh Alternatives like uh fibromyalgia which is a huge problem also it helps with hair uh growth as I said earlier so here it could actually help with alopecia uh now what’s actually interesting about this technique is that it’s opening up the Way Paving the way for a whole new

Therapeutic uh area if you will until now when it came to pain there was really an approach to medicine that was really uh you know focused on chemistry whereas here we’re more on the physics part of it so we’re treating the problem with the wavelengths directly and because of quantum physics we actually

Know that the entire human body is only made out of wavelengths and energy so this is why certain doctors today consider that this is the way forward all right really promising thank you very much indeed for telling us about it Julia Seer our science editor for us there

To mark World Cancer Day, which took place on February 4, we take a closer look at red light therapy. This technique harnesses low-wavelength red light to improve skin appearance. It’s already used by the cosmetic industry but is now touted to treat medical conditions. In France, Red Light Therapy is being tested to accelerate the healing and regeneration of tissues damaged by heavy cancer treatments such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy. FRANCE 24’s Julia Sieger tells us more.

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