The beneficial applications of low level laser therapy - Medical Journalist Report of Innovative Biologics

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, Nov, 2002 by Morton Walker

Because the amplification of light by the stimulated emission of radiation (the definition of a laser) occurs as an open system, it provokes completely new structure and sensitivity in the living tissue of an organism to which the light is beamed. The medical director of the Pain Clinic and Laser Center of Locarno, Switzerland, Zlatko Simunovic, MD, FMH, writes: "Laser therapy [LLLT] is a natural and biological therapy, because even from early ages, man has considered the light of the Sun to be responsible for his health. Humankind simply cannot live without light, a fact proved by evident lack of light in the sick cell." (4) Laser light restores health to just such an ailing cell.

How Low Level Lasers Operate

The stimulated emission of a laser is obtained by controlling the instrument's energy in its excited state and introducing the correct radiation to trigger it. The laser's excitation occurs from collisions of its atoms of light with electrons discharging from the instrument's power source. Laser beam buildup occurs and photons pass through the instrument's extraction mirror so that the laser beam gets reflected back into the laser's active medium. (5)

Numerous technical details relating to lasers could be discussed, but these individual items are issues which interest only physicists, electrical engineers, and laser specialists. Hardly ever are medical consumers or even holistic health professionals interested in laser technology. They merely want to witness the beneficial effects of LLLT.

Although one could describe monochromaticity, a laser radiation property, the technology is so complex, no meaningful purpose would be served even by defining it. Or I might relate laser radiation properties to coherence, the stimulated emission mechanism through which the laser radiation is obtained. My intention, instead, is not to burden the reader with idiomatic technical language.

Thus there is spatial coherence by which two laser beams originate from two different points producing interference fringes. And there is temporal coherence, whereby the laser radiation being emitted takes place at the same point that another beam of radiation is emitted at a later time.

Then one may come upon directivity, another property of laser radiation wherein the laser's radiation is confined within a beam which is propagating in space. Also, the laser beam will have a certain brightness derived from the laser's intensity which is affected by the number of photons emitted outside the laser optical cavity.

Most people know that a photon is a quantum of electromagnetic energy having both particle and wave properties; it has no charge or mass but possesses momentum and energy. Next there is polarization, a nonspecific property of laser light related to its electromagnetic radiation with certain spatial distributions.

These, and several dozen other aspects of physics may be integrated into the study of laser light and its associated therapeutics, but they are overly scientific for the more simplified requirements of using LLLT beneficially. (6)