by
Andrea Alstad, Marketing & Communications Coord,
ASLMS | February 25, 2015
From the January/February 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
PBM has been used as an effective tool to accelerate post-surgical healing. Dr. Juanita J. Anders, a professor of anatomy, physiology and genetics, and neuroscience at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, expert in photobiomodulation and current president of the ASLMS, comments, “We’d really like to see a broader adoption of the or laser therapy, because now there are a number of light devices that are being used to stimulate cell and tissue processes. We feel that the name photobiomodulation better describes the underlying mechanism.”
“Unfortunately, there is not mainstream medical acceptance of the use of photobiomodulation yet,” Anders explains. However, photobiomodulation is being used successfully pre-clinically and clinically in a broad range of applications including: wound healing and tissue repair, pain treatment, alteration of inflammation, and treatment of diseases and injury of the nervous system.
“With the application of light for PBM, it is important to get the dosage right; that is, the power density that is delivered and the time that you treat,” states Anders. “When you think about light, think about it as if you are using a drug, think about the dose of application.”
When going deeper into the tissue, “the wavelength is the determiner of the depth of penetration of the light. The output power that you use will determine the number of photons that are delivered at any point along the depth of penetration for a given wavelength.”
The field of PBM is expanding from wound healing and tissue repair to work in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases. An exciting development is Transcranial Laser Therapy (TLT), which is the noninvasive delivery of near infrared laser energy to the brain for the treatment of acute brain injuries such as post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic neurological diseases, and mental illnesses.
Perhaps the most talked about recent development in PBM is in the dental field. Praveen Arany, a researcher at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research in Maryland, has discovered that laser light applied to a tooth can stimulate stem cells to produce dentin that restores the health of the tooth. This discovery is now moving into the clinical trial stage.
