August 2018
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So a little bit about the history of photobiomodulation. We won't go through this whole thing but you see in the 60s is when laser therapy was really evolved. The first laser ever invented was the ruby laser, was in 1960. And you can see in the decade of the 60s many people were kind of experimenting with this type of laser. In 1965, Boston or actually a Harvard scholar destroyed cancerous tumors in a rat using laser therapy. And then Dr. Mester tried to reproduce the experiment, didn't have the same results, but what he noticed is that the rats that he was treating actually grew hair back on the scar tissue where they had done some incisions.
Later they found out the reason why it didn't help the tumors, but to help this skin the hair regrow is because his laser wasn't strong enough. So he discovered low-level light therapy almost by accident. Later on, we started seeing that there are some studies that are once again supported by Mester and his colleagues on human healing and hair growth. We looked at adding infrared to the photobiomodulation spectrum all the way in the mid-70s and then from there Karu identified the target of photobiomodulation that we exist today which is Cytochrome c oxidase which we'll talk about in just a minute, which is part of the mitochondrial or the electron transport chain. In the year 2009 there were some studies published about photobiomodulation for stroke. Now this began getting people thinking how can you treat stroke if light doesn't penetrate the skull. There is a feverous investigation about how light penetrates the skull. So in 2015, Jagdeo, who we are going to talk a little bit later, discovered that light can actually penetrate the skull and we're going to talk about how deep it actually can penetrate the skull. Then a little bit later in 2016, which is not so long ago, the whole terminology is beginning to evolve. Laser, low-level light therapy, we kind of started clustering them all together into photobiomodulation, because the spectrum goes from all the way from one milliwatt all the way into multiple watt lasers. So it's not necessarily low-level light therapy as a treatment modality.
