LED Red Light Therapy

How can you use this technology as a person with  SCI in Daily Life and how to get it and use it safely? - we try to answer those questions and hope it can help you in certain situations.

LED red light therapy in sports and medical cure is used for many different cases, such as:

• temporary relief of minor muscle and joint pain
• arthritis
• muscle spasm
• relieving stiffness
• promoting relaxation of muscle tissue
• temporarily increasing local blood circulation

Especially when it comes to helping healing tissue, which quite often is a necessary case due to developing Decubitus in early stage, or even in later stages, Red-Light-Therapy can be a useful tool to help your body to cure faster. It is antibacterial, highers your blood circulation and so on…

Very import here are the following two points:

1. Medical Approval: Still the “LED Red Light Therapy” needs to have a medical approval - because there is a lot of trash you can find online, which has no approval at all and therefore can be dangerous. → So make sure that the equipment has one of the following medical approvals when you are buying the equipment in Europe, or the United States:

• FDA Approval = Food and Drug Administration, United States of America is responsible for protecting the public health by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological products, and medical devices.
• EMA Approval = European Medicines Agency is the European Union’s equivalent to the U.S. (FDA).
• Swissmedic Approval = The Agency for medical devices in Switzerland.

2. Read the equipment manual carefully - To treat early stage Decubitus or help to heal small wounds you need to use the equipment as recommended in the manual.

Technology

There are different technologies used for different products and price classes - nevertheless as long as it is a medical approved equipment, you will somehow have a benefit from.

Ordinary Red-Light-Therapy (Handheld lamp)

Medical-grade LED, mostly around 660nm red light wavelength - the wavelength can vary depending on the product. Here it is important, independently where you get the equipment from, it has to be proved for safety (medical approval) and you have to use it as the manual of the product recommends. There are a lot of trash devices around especially online which have no medical approval and we absolutely recommend not using such devices. 

There are products starting from 120 to 150 Euro, Dollar, CHF up to a few hundred.

More advanced professional equipment used in clinics but as well in home

Water filtered Red Light Therapy - Uses Medical-grade halogen lamps with quite a bit of power (Clinic 750W Home 575W). Due to the high energy your tissue will get quite warm and that's ok, but there has always to be a certain distance between the lamp and the area to be treated. Our suggestion - don’t use it more then two times 30 min a day and always keep the recommended distance, so you don’t hurt your tissue instead of healing it.

Those Red-Light-Therapy lamps are costly. It starts around 2 '500 Euro, Dollar, CHF. If you per example treat a Decubitus at home, reach out to your insurance and ask for renting such a Device for 1-3 months so you have better chances to heal it. We hope they will support you doing so!

Equipment used in clinics:

Equipment used in home: