Long COVID Treatment using PBM Therapy
Long COVID symptoms are estimated to affect 2.8% of the UK population or 1.8 million of us. Long COVID is more than just feeling a bit tired or a bit off par after the acute phase has subsided. For some like myself who were admitted to hospital, the chronic symptoms are not intrusive – I still have a slight change in my sense of smell and I am unable to smell certain things at all, but really that is all. By comparison to others I have got off very lightly.
For some people, the symptoms are totally life altering and debilitating. Affected individuals find their bodies are changed profoundly, often with strange and seemingly unconnected symptoms such as tiredness and ‘brain fog’, sleep disturbance, mood alteration, fatigue, muscle aches/pains and even inexplicable volatility with pre-existing conditions.
Alarmingly I have recently spoken to a psychologist who is working in a mainstream long COVID health setting where the only approach is to make patients ‘come to terms’ with and accept their symptoms.
Clearly when you have been very ill and dealing with long term health issues you potentially have complex psychological needs, needing a psychological approach but this seems like a one size fits all symptoms approach.
PBM Therapy has been scientifically proven to treat your cells at the biochemical level and new early case study evidence is being published (see below) showing PBM Therapy helping complex symptoms not just psychologically you coming to terms and enduring them.
Long COVID Treatment Evidence
It’s still very early days with the scientific evidence for effective treatments – no gold standard triple blind cross over trials with hundreds of patients involved have been published yet. BUT clinical evidence and published case study evidence is gradually emerging showing PBM Therapy to be a promising method to actually treat/help the symptoms of Long COVID. Researchers have already published case data about how PBM Therapy can treat the symptoms in acute COVID patients and help with their breathing in Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) but now we are starting to see published case data for PBM Therapy in the treatment of Long COVID. The most recent published Long COVID case study can be found in this medical data base.
Whole Body Long COVID Treatment
Our PBM Therapy Clinic has the enviable position of having one of the few whole body NovoTHOR PBM Therapy light beds in the UK. There are only a few hundred of these globally and less than 10 in the UK.
The unique advantage of a whole body NovoTHOR light bed is that your whole body receives the PBM Therapy from head to toe at the same time! Helping to make poorly functioning unhealthy cells healthier and healthy cells even more healthy and more resistant to cell death in a process scientists call pre conditioning.
How does PBM Therapy work?
Watch this video how does PBM Therapy work? Read more about preconditioning on this page – don’t forget to scroll to the bottom to see all the posts!
The NovoTHOR PBM Therapy light bed pod surrounds your whole body thus bathing you head to toe with Red and Near Infra Red (NIR) penetrating light.
In simple terms PBM Therapy can recharge the ‘batteries’ (mitochondria) inside each of your cells. Mitochondria are found in abundance in each and every one of the 200 types of cells in your body. With PBM Therapy your dormant or malfunctioning mitochondria are them able to produce more energy, enabling the cells to do the job they are programmed to do and at the same time harmful inflammatory chemicals are reduced. So this can explain why Full body PBM Therapy has the potential to help an array of seemingly unconnected symptoms such as those that occur in Long COVID.
It’s been recently discovered that these Mitochondria can also migrate in your blood stream travelling around your body reaching potentially all parts of the body, even where the PBM Therapy light cannot reach. This might explain some of the systemic effects PBM Therapy has on parts of the body or the brain tPBM affects that occur too deep for the light to reach.
To read more just search the site and watch the videos on our PBM Therapy You Tube channel. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call us on 01332 224829
Authors note: My clinical experience using PBM Therapy for chronic conditions makes me suspect that with Long COVID’s complex array of symptoms, improvements made with PBM Therapy may not last ‘forever’. For example research has established that PBM Therapy directly on the brain via the skull – tPBM Therapy – in Alzheimer’s patients can have a profound effect in improving these patients symptoms. However 6-weeks after the treatment was stopped patients had regressed. To prevent this, regular treatment is required to help maintain the improvements. I suspect this is likely to be the case with Long COVID patients. It’s also likely some symptoms may well respond better than others and others just not respond at all and similarly, responses may vary from patient to patient e.g. one patient’s ‘brain fog’ may be improved with treatment, while another patient’s may not.