Infrared Light Reduces ICU Stay

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: The Guy Foundation, Glen Jeff, MedCram, Mohab Ibrahim
2. 3:00 – 6:00: Bob Fosbury
3. 9:00 – 12:00: photobiomodulation therapy, The Guy Foundation
4. 18:00 – 19:17: MedCram, The Guy Foundation

Notable quotes from "Infrared Light Reduces ICU Stay"

• Welcome to another MedCram video. It's been a while since we've recorded one, so back in the saddle and I wanted to remind you about medcra.com where we have more continuing medical education.

  about MedCram · at 0:02

• If you want to know more about this, I highly recommend that you look at the YouTube channel, The Guy Foundation, which I will put a link to in the description below. This has…

  about The Guy Foundation · at 1:49

• And you may remember in that paper it showed this infrared light going through Bob Fosbury's hand who is an associate also an author on the paper and basically goes through the…

  about Bob Fosbury · at 3:21

• Year May in 2025 and this is a paper which we'll put a link to in the description below. photobiomodulation therapy. So, red and nir LEDs reduce length of stay in intensive…

  about photobiomodulation therapy · at 10:33

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Glen Jeff — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:37
  Remind some of the viewers today about this paper that just dropped as well this year July 2025 by Glen Jeff Group specifically because it shows that infrared light longer…
• Mohab Ibrahim — Person · 1 mention · first at 2:27
  This last lecture here that was done by Mohab Ibrahim looking at green light and its effect on pain receptors. Excellent research that he's doing there. And also, of course, the last one here was Glenn Jeffrey that was just done a.
• Bob Fosbury — Person · 1 mention · first at 3:26

Books & papers

• Nature Scientific Reports — Book · 1 mention · first at 0:51
  Actually penetrate completely through the human body. And this paper that was published in Nature Scientific Reports shows that not only does infrared light in the 850…

Companies & orgs

• The Guy Foundation — Company · 5 mentions · first at 1:53
• MedCram — Company · 3 mentions · first at 0:02

Concepts & topics

• photobiomodulation therapy — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 10:37
• DRG (Diagnosis Related Group) — Concept · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 medcra.com. Welcome to another MedCram video. It's been a while since we've recorded one, so back in the saddle and I wanted to remind you about medcra.com where we have more continuing medical education videos on there. Things such as EKG, ABGs, chest X-ray interpretation, chem 7, CBC. Join us at medcram.com for more continuing medical education videos. Today, what we're going to talk about is a new study that just dropped regarding the use of infrared light in the intensive care unit. So I want to review that and some of the literature regarding that. But also wanted to remind some of the viewers today about this paper that just dropped as well this year July 2025 by Glen Jeff Group specifically because it shows that infrared light longer wavelengths can actually penetrate completely through the human body. And this paper that was published in Nature Scientific Reports shows that not only does infrared light

0:56 in the 850 nanometer range to 880 nm range go completely through the body, it also gets absorbed and actually causes systemic impacts as it says here specifically in the mitochondria and actually improves vision because that's actually what they measured and that's a function of the retina where you have the highest concentration of mitochondria. So, this is really a groundbreaking study and it allows us to perceive exactly what it is that's going on with this infrared light and what it can do because gone are the days where we think that light is just impacting the skin in terms of making vitamin D. Yes, it does that. And the eyes in terms of circadian, but now this whole new world is opened up where infrared light actually can really touch just about every single cell in the human body. And if you want to know more about this, I highly recommend that you look at the YouTube channel, The Guy Foundation,

1:55 which I will put a link to in the description below. This has about 2 and a half thousand subscribers. If this were a stock, it would be a stock that you should definitely invest in because this is going to go up. The lectures on here are incredible and it's by the researchers who are actually doing the research. So, I would highly recommend that you go and look at the Guy Foundation. Their whole series this summer and going into the fall here is regarding light. They talk about red light and specifically also green light.

2:25 this last lecture here that was done by Mohab Ibrahim looking at green light and its effect on pain receptors. Excellent research that he's doing there. And also, of course, the last one here was Glenn Jeffrey that was just done a couple weeks ago. I will be actually on the Guy Foundation's YouTube video coming up here shortly and I will tell you more about that when we go there. But lots of excellent information here on this Guy Foundation website. highly recommend that you check out those videos if you're interested in this type of topics. So again, what this paper showed is that not only does infrared light penetrate through the entire body and cause the systemic changes, but it actually can cause changes distal to the beam of light that affect the mitochondria at a distant organ. And so that's known as the abscopal effect.

3:15 It's well known and it's actually been seen and this paper beautifully showed all three of those things. And you may remember in that paper it showed this infrared light going through Bob Fosbury's hand who is an associate also an author on the paper and basically goes through the bones and is actually absorbed by water. The picture on the right is actually light coming through the other side with a very sensitive equipment and you can actually see that light is coming through from the backside. This is light that's going through a 30cm thorax. And of course, it's a very sensitive detector and it's much less than what's going through from the other side, but it is actually going through. And we've talked about these types of studies before. You may recall we talked about this Brazilian study that looked at 30 patients admitted to a hospital with CO 19. and they randomized them to a jacket that was on both the

4:09 control group and the intervention group for 15 minutes a day for seven days a week getting 2.9 ms per square centimeter of 940 nanome. You can see that here. And the jacket or the vest that they used in this study was these 940 nanometer LED bulbs giving off infrared light. That's the only thing that they did. And they put it on all of the patients, switched it on on half of them and watched and it was blinded. There's huge differences in terms of those that got near infrared light versus the control group. And you can see here in just about every single category, there was a statistically significant difference despite the fact that there was only 30 patients in this cohort. And in fact even realizing that near infrared randomized group actually started off with sicker patients and still they found that at the end of the day at the end of the 12 days if you will or the 7 days that got the near

5:03 infrared treatment that the control group's length of stay was 11.7 days and the near infrared was 8 days. So there was a statistically significant reduction in length of stay. Now, let me explain to you why that is important. And many people don't understand the finances or the economics of hospitalization in the United States. In other countries where there's singlepayer, it's obvious that the government will be interested in finding ways of reducing costs and length of stay shortening that length of stay is going to be an obvious one to do. You may think in the United States where it is a pdeium sort of situation that you would have an incentive for hospitals to hold on to patients longer. In fact, that's not the case. There is a payment system called the DRG, a diagnosis related group where a hospital will typically get a specific amount of money for a specific diagnosis that the patient is there for. And so if the

5:58 diagnosis is streptocoal pneumonia or covid-19 or you know what have you the reason why the patient's there going to get a specific amount of money that can be adjusted based on some modifiers but generally that's all they're getting and the longer the patient stays in the hospital the more money that the hospital has to shell out. And so it's really incentivized for the patients to get out of the hospital as soon as they don't need to be there. And so you can imagine for hospitals, these kinds of numbers here would be pretty astounding.

6:30 If you could reduce your hospital stay by 4 days, that's thousands and thousands of dollars per day that the patient is there that you don't have to pay for. So it's always a puzzle to me why this would not be adopted. And this is not an outlier, right? There are numerous studies. I've actually looked through and we can look at these studies. This was a paper that was published in 1984 in 46 posttop colaccystectomy surgical patients and they found that patients with a natural view or nature view had shorter post-operative hospital stays 7.96 versus 8.7 days on average. Now that's a small difference but a difference nonetheless but there's just so many of these things and we'll just go through some of them here. This is another one that was published in 1998 titled Dying in the Dark Sunshine Gender and Outcomes in myocardial infarction. Okay, this is 628 patients in this one and they had

7:21 myocardial inffection in a cardiac intensive care unit. Patients in sunny rooms had natural light exposure had shorter length of stay and lower mortality compared to those in dim rooms. Another paper that was published in 2001. This is a 415 unipolar and 187 bipolar depressed patients in psychiatric wards. Again, east facing rooms with sunlight in the morning had a reduced length of stay by 3.67 days for bipolar patients and 2.16 days for uniolar patients. Another paper that was published in 2009. This is looking at 8,000 general inatients on the orthopedic surgical ward in Soul, Korea.

8:03 And what did it show? showed that southern wards reduced average hospitalization periods by anywhere between 8 and 19% with specific reductions up to 38% for certain conditions. Another paper published in 2010, this one was 40 patients, posttop open heart surgery patients in a cardiac surgical intensive care unit increased access to daylight had reduced length of stays. And this is not the end of it. There's a lot more. Here's another one. South facing rooms reduce length of stay by 16 to 31%. Increase of 100 lux in daylight reduced postoperative period by 7.3 hours and unrestricted views reduced it by 17 hours. Here's another one.

8:45 12,000 medical and surgical ICU patients. Natural views were associated with slightly reduced length of stay. Non-statistical significant overall but noted in subgroups. Here's another one again published in 2016. This was in depressive inpatients. Again, higher daylight reduced median length of stay by 3 days. Here's another one. This one was published in 2017. This was in a 14 bed effective disorder unit. What did they find? Southeast facing rooms reduced mean length of stay by 50%. Okay. What about this one? 2018 again.

9:19 Sepsis patients in a medical ICU. You had windowed rooms reduced ICU length of stay 4.8 days versus 5.8 days. Not done. There's more. 2018 study, window beds reduce median length of stay by 1 day, 20%. Another study showing here in 2021, rooms with daylight and views typically reduced CICU length of stay by about a day greater reductions up to 26 hours in subgroups like pallet of care patients. Another study in 2021, general surgery in patients in shared rooms, windowed beds reduced length of stay by three days for patients with the lowest education levels. Okay. And then finally, 2022 here we have the relation between a green and bright window view and length of hospital stay. We just talked about in the Guy Foundation talks how green light and blue light, if you look at those, and we'll be talking more about that later, can reduce the need for pain medication. And you know those are exactly the types of colors of light

10:20 that you would get outside. These were psychiatric patients in this particular study and it showed that greener and brighter views significantly reduced length of stay. But the most recent addition to this was just published this year May in 2025 and this is a paper which we'll put a link to in the description below. photobiomodulation therapy. So, red and nir LEDs reduce length of stay in intensive care unit and improve muscle function. A randomized triple blind and shamont controlled trial. So, this is pretty definitive type of study design here.

10:57 And again, this is a randomized control trial. So, if we see a difference, we can imply causation. It was triple blinded. So, in other words, patients were blinded to it. assessors were blinding to it and the analysts were blinded to it. This was done in Brazil, 60 ICU patients. Notice it did not matter whether this was surgical or medical. Either one would get them into the study. They got daily photobiomodulation therapy. And you can see it was about for 15 minutes and this is with a light blanket that was placed over the legs. So there was 264 LEDs.

11:31 120 of them were red in the 635 nm area and that was at 1.2 2 m and there was 144 NIR or near infrared LEDs in the 880 nanometer area not too far off from where Glen Jeffrey did his at 850. This was pulsed at 4.7 kHz. They did 10 sights arms legs forearms thighs vententral, and dorsal area. And they did about 2,000 jewels per session. Again, about 15 minutes. And this time they did it at night until ICU discharge. Now the sham in this case was an identical device that they put on the patient. They just didn't switch it on.

12:08 And again remember that this was blinded so they couldn't see it. Triple blinded. Patients were blinded. Assessors were blinded. Analysts were blinded. They had protective goggles. There was no heat generated from this because it was too low in energy. They did not notice any adverse events. So in this case, the primary outcome was ICU length of stay. That was the A priority endpoint. And what did they notice in terms of hours in the intensive care unit? it was 79 hours in the photobiomodulation treatment group and the sham was 111.7 hours and so that was about a 29 to 30% shorter stay and that was statistically significant. So people who got the red light the infrared light had a 30% reduction in their length of stay.

12:54 Again, that's important obviously because patients get better faster, but from the economics of this, it makes sense because most hospitals in the United States are paid a certain amount of money for a certain diagnosis on any particular patient. And again, if they can get the patients out of the intensive care unit faster, they can spend less money on trying to take care of those patients in the hospital. So, this is a win-win. This is where the financial incentives are aligned between the patients who don't want to be in the hospital and the hospital who doesn't want the patients to be in the hospital.

13:28 They want to get them better and then out of there. So what were the secondary outcomes? Function and strength. So mobility, global strength and hand grip and mobility. And this is really important because a lot of times patients will be in the intensive care unit. They'll get better from that standpoint, but they will not be ready to do their activities of daily living. And so they cannot go home but instead have to go to a acute rehab facility which they hate doing because they would much rather go home. And with this type of intervention you can see very clearly that there is a benefit to this therapy in that they are much stronger. So key takeaway with this study is that it's a low risk. It's bedside LED therapy showed improved mobility strength and it cut the length of stay by 30%. Now this was a single center study with 60 subjects in it yet it still met criteria for statistical significance. Obviously

14:27 if you want to know more about this we can do larger randomized control trials at multiple centers. This was done in Brazil. Be interesting to do this here in the United States. But obviously what we're seeing here and if you put this with all the other studies that we just talked about it's pretty compelling. It's something that if an upwardinking hospital wanted to implement this, they could do it very easily and they could make it part of physical therapy on all the patients the intensive care unit doing exactly the protocol that they did in this study. And if they got anywhere near the type of length of stay reduction that they got in this Brazilian study, this could mean a lot for the bottom line for that hospital because a lot of money is spent in the intensive care unit. hiring nurses, having beds packed, having to expand coverage, having nurses that are on call that you wouldn't need to do if you

15:17 could get your length of stays down. And anybody out there that's listening to this video and is in hospital administration should really take this seriously. I'm actually working with hospital administrators that I am aware of to try to get this implemented because it just makes so much sense. So why would this work? So, this is a picture of what we are living in in our current situation. This is actually a window that has low E glass. There's a number of things to talk about this picture. It's really truly worth a thousand words. First of all, you can see that it's very dark inside. And this is a photograph that is taken with a film over the lens that does an anti Stokes effect where it takes infrared light and it boosts it up in frequency so you can perceive it as red light. So everything here in this picture that is red is actually infrared light. The very same type of light that they used in

16:10 this study to reduce length of stay. And what do you notice that we're living in environments that are devoid of this infrared light inside of our homes, inside of our offices are devoid of this particular type of light. We are starving for infrared light because we don't go outside. And when we are inside with nice windows, those low E-lass windows block infrared light. And I can show you and demonstrate that for you. Cuz you can see here when you look through these windows here that are closed and you look outside, you don't see a lot of that red light. You do see some some of it, but not a lot. Here I've opened the window and you can see that the green trees out there are highly reflective of infrared light.

16:51 That's why it's important when you go outside, you really want to be around green things. So leaves, trees, grass, highly reflective of infrared light. We've known for years that people that live in green spaces actually have much lower risks of chronic diseases like diabetes have lower all-c cause mortality and lower cardiovascular mortality. So when you're out there and you open the window, look how much of this infrared light is coming through versus how much comes through a window. Now, if I were to show you the picture of this without the film on, you would see that it's a bright room with a lot of visible light coming in, but very low infrared light.

17:31 Now, as it turns out, a 100 years ago, people realized this. People who were physicians, people who were in charge of healthcare, people who ran tuberculosis sanatoriums, or even in this picture, which is actually a picture taken from the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan at the turn of the century, where all of these patients who are not as sick as the patients that we admit to the hospital today, but nevertheless, they're for health reform. And at that time they understood the importance of sunlight which contains all of these wavelengths that we're talking about. In fact it was not just at the Battle Creek Sanitarium but in fact all throughout this country and other countries specifically England, Germany, Austria, etc. where these types of hospitals were set up and they were designed specifically to get patients out into the sun. In fact, I've had people from Eastern Europe tell me that

18:26 they have an expression in their culture that says, "If you don't let the sun in through the window, soon you'll be letting the doctor in through the door." Or some sort of derivation of that type of expression. So, I would welcome your comments below. This is the paper. I will put a link to it in the description below. Don't forget to check out the Guy Foundation YouTube channel and check out our website, medcram.com. We actually do have under our course descriptions the entire course and videos that we've done on sunlight. So, if you want to have more information on that and you want to reference this or refer people to our website, highly recommend that you go to medcram.com. Thanks for joining us.

19:07 Don't forget to subscribe, turn on notifications if you want to have more of these things, and again, join us at medcram.com. Thanks so much.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Infrared Light Reduces ICU Stay"?

In order: 0:00 The Guy Foundation, Glen Jeff, MedCram, Mohab Ibrahim; 3:00 Bob Fosbury; 9:00 photobiomodulation therapy, The Guy Foundation; 18:00 MedCram, The Guy Foundation.

What is mentioned in this MedCram - Medical Lectures Explained CLEARLY episode?

8 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including The Guy Foundation, MedCram, photobiomodulation therapy, Glen Jeff, Nature Scientific Reports, Mohab Ibrahim. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Infrared Light Reduces ICU Stay"?

The episode runs 19 min; the transcript is about 3,399 words in 26 timestamped sections.

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