The Ultimate Guide to Red Light Therapy: How to Use Red and Near-Infrared Light Therapy for Anti-Aging, Fat Loss, Muscle Gain, Performance Enhancement, and Brain Optimization

by Ari Whitten

it’s important to get the dose right and to be in the range I’m recommending. You aren’t doing yourself any favors by dosing higher than my guidelines suggest. The principle of the biphasic dose response is often explained as the Arndt-Schulz law, which dates back to the end of the nineteenth century, when H. Schulz analyzed the activity of various kinds of poisons like bromine, iodine, mercury, arsenic, etc. on yeast, where he showed that in very low doses, all of these poisons actually had a slightly stimulatory effect on the yeast metabolism. With the help of psychiatrist R. Arndt, they developed the concept (that later became the Arndt-Schulz law) which states that weak stimuli slightly increase metabolic activity, stronger stimuli increase it even more until a peak is reached, and from there, increasing the dose further suppresses the effect until a negative/harmful effect is eventually reached. Later, this concept became known as “hormesis” (which I discussed earlier.) The term “biphasic dose response” is also used. In the context of light therapy, Hamblin et al. describe it this way: “Simply put, it suggests that if insufficient energy is applied, there will be no response (because the minimum threshold has not been met), and if more energy is applied, then a threshold is crossed and biostimulation is achieved. However, when too much energy is applied, then the stimulation disappears and is replaced by bioinhibition.”368