What about beam angles?
Red light therapy is considered a low energy delivery of photons. If the body gets too hot, you lose the energy.
The therapeutic beams we’ve chosen, have been inc-RED-ibly helpful in our recovery from sports injuries, diminishing chronic pain from serious car accidents, and extra helpful with on-going joint issues. They relax our muscles and also help us sleep soundly.
Most red light therapy panels on the market have 30, 60, or 90 degree beam angles. The light panels we use and sell, have 90 degree lenses on the red led’s, and 60 degree on the near-infrared led’s. It’s really, for us, just the choice of how we like to use our panels. A smaller beam angle is supposed to maintain its irradiance at a further distance away from the light because its more focused and concentrated. The distance you can be to maintain the benefits really depends on the way the panel is designed, and how close the led’s are to each other. To optimize the way the body uses the five wavelengths in our panels, we added the 90 degree lens on the red led portion and 60 degree lens on the near-infrared portion. Red light gets hotter on the skin, so if its very focused, you will get hot before you achieve any benefits of the light. 90 degree beam angles provide a wider coverage area with less intensity to eliminate too much heat on the skin. The near-infrared light penetrates a little deeper into the body. The 60 degree beam angle will focus the light more narrowly and give the near-infrared light even more depth of penetration. The idea of this combination is that this is light therapy, NOT heat therapy. You can adjust the light furthur away from the body to get the experience you are comfortable with. Our combination ensures you get wide coverage without spotty treatment areas at the proper distance. You can get a great coverage area for inside and outside the body, AT THE SAME TIME! The 90 degree lens and the 60 degree lens converge together to give you an optimal treatment area. You don’t have to be so close that you get hot, but you also don’t have to be so far away that you lose irradiance. There will always be some light loss due to reflection. With our panels you get a good dose of light on your skin while also getting penetration for joints, and still have even deeper penetration for muscles and organs. Wherever the center of the panel is positioned on the body, is where the highest intensity will be. Use that as a guideline when targeting body parts and ailments.
It’s important to remember that comfort is key to effectiveness. If you aren’t comfortable with the positioning of your light, you’ll tend to use it less. Be consistent. A panel should feel like luxury and relaxation because with these panels there’s nothing touching your skin and you don’t have to concentrate on holding a handheld device on the right area. The benefit of using larger angled lenses include covering larger areas of the body where a greater volume of photons is delivered in the tissues, which then facilitates further communication through the cells to assist going even deeper.
We need to address surface and sub-surface heating in this topic of beam angles. When heat stress proteins are activated there is an even bigger increase in reactive oxygen species. With higher doses of photo-irradiation, the heat stress proteins can shut down the mitochondrial activity. Optical scatter is part of what permits the photons to be delivered to the sub-surface areas. Again, we’ll repeat, PBM is light therapy not heat therapy. Different wavelengths have different depths of penetration. To reduce the inhibition of mitochondrial activity, RemedyLED panels use different lenses for beam angle on the red and near-infrared led’s to allow for more non-thermal cellular communication, and to reduce possible energy losses due to excessive light scatter.