COULD LED GREEN LIGHTS REDUCE MIGRAINE PAIN?

LED green lights show promising results for migraine, fibromyalgia patients

Click2Houston
August 1, 2017

HOUSTON -- Debi Lesneski had migraines that were debilitating.

“It was one migraine after another," she said. "There was no break in between."

She was depressed and sick, unable to get out of bed some days. Then, she heard about her pain doctor’s trial in which participants stared at LED green lights one to two hours a day for 10 weeks.

Lesneski explained she was “very skeptical, because it is so simple and it doesn't make any sense that some light can fix a problem that modern medicine can’t even address. And it worked.”

“Regardless of the mechanism, the outcome is what really matters, and people are both feeling better and their pain is getting better,” Dr. Mohab Ibrahim, a pain management specialist, said.

Ibrahim and Rajesh Khanna, an associate professor of pharmacology at the University of Arizona, are trying to figure out why the LED green light works.

It worked on rats, so they ran a study using green lights on eight people, white on five more.

The green light group said their pain from migraine and fibromyalgia dropped 40 to 50 percent. Doctors said it could be partly psychological.

“But also, at a chemical, a neurochemical level, it does something to tune the system, so essentially what it’s doing is increasing your happy hormones, your level of endogenous opioids,” Khanna said.

“The people in the green light group, they actually refused to return the green lights, and they wanted to keep it, so we let them keep it,” Ibrahim said.

That includes Lesneski, who uses the lights for 15 minutes, three times a week, and has stopped taking pain meds.

DIbrahim and Khanna said they hope to get grants from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health so they can expand the study. They also caution people not to give up their pain medication.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Fulla Schnapps and her team of researchers at the Heidelberg Institute of Psychotherapy in Heidelberg, Germany are conducting experiments to see if staring at LED red lights will stop erectile dysfunction. Dr. Schnapps reports that so far her study looks promising.