Red Light Therapy - Dr. Tiffany Oliver

Red Light Therapy – Dr. Tiffany Oliver

Spelman College biology professor Dr. Tiffany Oliver discusses her innovative research on red light therapy and how it can help treat wounds, promote hair growth and reduce joint pain.

I am Tiffany Oliver, and I
am an associate professor in the Department of Biology
here at Spelman College. My research looks at
the effects of red light and how it can be beneficial
for treatments for wound healing and things like hair
growth, et cetera. In layman's terms, if I
had to use broad strokes, all boils down to one molecule,
which is nitric oxide. So light is energy. And so red light has a
certain amount of energy that can displace nitric oxide. And nitric oxide is
really, really important for promoting these biological
effects that are beneficial, such as promoting blood
flow and alleviating pain and inflammation. For example, my collaborator has
tennis elbow, pain in his elbow that's caused by
either arthritis or some sort of inflammation. He has a small
little LED red light that he shines on
the area of pain. And we're talking hours. You have reductions in pain. My mother has arthritis. She has arthritis in her knees. And I actually
encouraged her to just– I bought her an LED light
bulb, red light bulb. And LED is important because
it's cool to the touch. So you can touch it to
whatever part of your body without burning yourself. And to touch it
to just her knee. And it actually prevents pain. The military is particularly
interested in red light therapy but even more specifically
in the mechanisms that underlie how red light
therapy works because it can help with reperfusion. So that's when there
are people in the field, and there's an explosion,
and you have limbs being detached from a body. And reperfusion is the process
by which you restore blood flow from limbs that have been
detached from the body back to the main body so that
you can reattach that limb. And so understanding this
pathway in this biology is important for
that process as well. For our younger ladies,
now a lot of them are wearing these
wigs and things that you have to kind
of tape to your hair, and you have to tape
them around your edges. And when they take them
off, it pulls their hair straight out of the follicles. That leaves them with bald
areas around the edges of their hairline. And also, for older women,
late 40s, early 50s, 60s, there's thinning in
the top of the head and also around the edges. And so there have
actually been studies done which have shown that
exposure to red light actually increases the number
of follicles and the length of the actual hair that grows. So you're talking about
restoring hair growth. So another important
aspect of red light therapy is its positive effects
on combating age. So with wrinkles, et cetera. So papers have also shown
that it produces or increases collagen production. The effects are not permanent. You have to do it every day. But my research, one
of my aims is actually to study how we can
actually prolong the effects, the positive
and beneficial effects of red light therapy. [MUSIC PLAYING]

#Red #Light #Therapy #Tiffany #Oliver

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