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Elemental Light Week
The Magic and the Myths Behind Infrared Light
Can infrared light treat everything from arthritis to Alzheimer’s disease?
This story is a part of Elemental Light Week, a 5-day series on what light does for your body, brain, and well-being.
Humans are inundated with light waves every second of every day. There’s the light we think about — visible light pouring forth from the sun and electric light bulbs and ultraviolet (UV) light that turns our skin red, tan, and eventually wrinkled. And there’s the light we don’t think about, like the radio waves bouncing off of us and the gamma rays that shoot right through us. Given the ubiquity, diversity, and power of light, everyone from neurologists to dermatologists to wellness gurus are trying to harness light waves to enhance and heal the body. And although it sounds pretty fringe, it turns out there’s more to light than meets the eye.
In part because of the clear impact UV light has on the skin, dermatology has led the charge in using light therapeutically — harnessing red, blue, and even UV light itself to get rid of acne, eczema, and pre-cancerous skin cells. More recently, anesthesiologists started to explore whether green light can be used to dull the pain from migraines and fibromyalgia. More than any other wavelength, though, infrared light appears to have the most therapeutic potential, and advocates claim it can treat everything from arthritis to Alzheimer’s disease.
While it may seem far-fetched that light has all these effects on the body, it begins to make more sense when you think of light as a form of energy. That energy can affect the behavior of the electrons in atoms that are in, well, everything. What we experience as visible light is really just one small portion of what’s called the electromagnetic spectrum, which consists of different wavelengths of energy-carrying photons. This spectrum ranges from radio waves, which are very long, low-energy wavelengths, to gamma rays, the shortest and highest-energy wavelengths. It includes microwaves and X-rays, too.
