Hello, their podcast family. It's time for an episode about red light therapy because you've probably

seen red light devices sprinkled around in the wellness world on the internets. And I sat down with

Dr. Mike Bulkowski, who is a physical therapist and a true science nerd in the best way and started his own company

of red light devices because he was so amazed at what red light was able to do for his patients

acute pain, chronic pain, and other issues. And once he kind of opened the PubMed rabbit hole

of the actual clinical applications of photobiomodulation, aka red light therapy,

he kind of couldn't go back and wanted to dedicate his life to this. So today we're going to kind of

bust some of the myths around red light, but also just give you some of the real science around

why it works and how it's essentially mimicking the full spectrum of UV light that we get

from the sun. At the end of the day, there is no replacement for sunlight. And that is what Dr. Mike

recommends first and foremost for any of the issues that we're going to talk about today. And we're

actually going to start by diving into sunlight a little bit and how therapeutic getting full spectrum UV rays on

your skin can actually be for everything from gut health to mood to chronic pain. I think that's a

really important conversation to have because nowadays we've kind of swung the other way. And while

skin cancer is of course a real threat and you have to mind your sun

exposure and not burn because that's when the DNA damage happens. There's also a world where

small amounts of sun exposure without any barrier on the skin can be a very therapeutic tool.

And there's science that tells us why. For example, Mike is going to talk about one Swedish

study that showed that those with the least amount of sun exposure had two times the mortality rate

and showed that getting low sun exposure is on par with actually being a cigarette smoker. So

Mike is going to break down why, why our bodies need native light versus non-native light, which is what

you find in LED lights and blue light from screens and modern light bulbs versus, again, native full-spectrum sunlight, which is really energy for our mitochondria at its core and is actually a very nutritious form of light.

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