Recently I interviewed Dr. Kirk Gair, and we talked about the laser therapy and relating it to thyroid health. If you would prefer to listen the interview you can access it by Clicking Here.
Dr. Eric Osansky:
I am very excited to chat with today’s guest, Dr. Kirk Gair, as we are going to be chatting about laser therapy and relating it to thyroid health. Let me go ahead and give a bit of Dr. Gair’s background: He is an international laser expert who has been using lasers for 19 years and teaching laser therapy to doctors since 2017. His research recently led to the first FDA clearance for a green and violet laser for chronic neck and shoulder pain. He has been trained in functional medicine and neurology by his long-time friend, Dr. Datis Kharrazian and has been featured in Dr. Izabella Wentz’s The Thyroid Pharmacist documentary, The Thyroid Secret, and her New York Times best-selling book The Thyroid Protocol. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Gair.
Dr. Kirk Gair:
Thank you, Dr. Osansky. It’s great to be here. I’m happy to share this information with people because I know a lot of people don’t know what lasers can do to help them. It’s great to spread this out there. You said I’ve been using them for 19 years. It’s just now popping into people’s consciousness, so it’s cool to see this awareness happening.
Dr. Eric:
I’m a big fan of lasers. As we were chatting before I pressed record, I haven’t used a laser, especially when it comes to the thyroid. I’m sure a lot of people are tuning in and wondering how can laser therapy benefit thyroid? Very excited to talk to you about that and dive into the research because there is research behind that as well, which I know you’ll get into.
If you could expand a little bit on your background. How did you actually get into lasers?
Dr. Kirk:
Sure. I graduated in 1999 with Dr. Kharrazian. We were classmates. He was so far ahead of his time that he was already doing functional medicine. He did a functional medicine workup on me in 1996, which is great stuff. We were all kind of looking toward the future of things.
About five years after I graduated, what I noticed was that as my skills were getting better, it seemed like patients were taking longer to get better. They needed more interventions, more things to be done.
I started looking at what was working to get top tier athletes back into their game as quickly as possible. I found this doctor, Dr. Jeff Spencer, who was working with at the time the top athlete in the world, Lance Armstrong. Lance did whatever he could to win, both legal and illegal. Dr. Spencer was part of the legal side of it, where he was using these Erchonia lasers on Lance every day before he would participate in the Tour de France. Lance said they helped to enhance his performance, helped him to recover quicker. That’s what got me into it at first, to work with athletes to enhance sport performance and recover from concussions and injuries faster. That’s what I was doing at first, starting in 2004.
Things took a change with a couple of things happening to family members. The first thing was with my cat, Poopsie, in 2008. We came home from a great evening out; we live in Southern California wine country in Temecula. We went to the local Indian casino, Pechanga, and we come back home and find Poopsie on the floor unresponsive. I don’t know about you, if you have pets, but my pets always manage to get sick during not vet business hours but after hours when you have to go to the emergency vet.
It was a Saturday night, like 1am, and Poopsie is unresponsive. We rush him to the emergency vet. They check him out. They tell us he has acute necrotizing pancreatitis. His immune system started an autoimmune attack, just like Hashimoto’s or Graves’, on the pancreas and started destroying the tissue. They don’t have a treatment for this; he has destroyed 90% of his pancreas. He is 11 years old. They recommended putting him to sleep.
Poopsie was our fur baby. He helped my wife and me get through the stress of me going through chiropractic school and her getting her master’s in clinical psychology. I wasn’t willing to give up. “Hey, listen, I want to take my cat home and use my lasers on him.” At this time, I was using this violet and red laser. The vet rolled his eyes at me and said, “You’re not going to be able to do anything with a laser. You have to put him to sleep.” I told him, “What do I have to lose? Let me take him home and try.” He said, “Fine. Today is Sunday. By Wednesday, he will probably be yowling and in a lot of pain. You’re going to need to do the humane thing at that point and bring him back in and put him to sleep.” Fair enough.
I took him home and started using the laser. I placed it over his kitty pancreas, right here near the abdomen. I did that twice a day for five minutes at a time. By Wednesday, instead of yowling and being in a lot of pain, Poopsie was doing really well. He was more energetic. He was eating. Each day, he got better.
Saturday, I take him back to the vet and set him down. The vet says, “Wow, your cat looks surprisingly good. Don’t get your hopes up. He’s probably going to be worse. We’ll do another ultrasound of his pancreas. He had 90% destruction. If it’s worse, you have to put him to sleep. This autoimmune attack on the pancreas is destroying things. We don’t have a treatment for it.” I said, “All right, fair enough.”
He does the ultrasound on Poopsie. He is scratching his head, calls over another vet. They are both looking at the ultrasound. They are both scratching their head. They call me into the back of the office and ask me, “What the hell did you do?” I said, “Why? What’s wrong?” They said, “No, nothing’s wrong. We have never seen this before. Here’s his pancreas last week. It was 90% destruction. Here it is this week. We had to make sure we had the right film to make sure it was the right cat. You just regenerated 80% of his pancreas in a week. He now has a 90% normal pancreas,” which he said for an 11-year-old cat is normal for this age. “What did you do?”
I told him I used lasers. The interesting thing about veterinarians is they jump on technology. They are not slow to adopt, like human doctors are. The vets jumped into it and started doing all the treatments with lasers. “Listen, I have never seen this before. You just halted this pancreatitis that is necrotizing and regenerated the pancreas.” This sparked my curiosity here of how does this happen?
It got even better that he said Poopsie was going to be diabetic from then on. Insulin would work for one or two years. Then it wouldn’t work anymore, and he would need to be put to sleep. He’s going to need four units, twice a day. I kept doing the laser over his pancreas, and he got better with that, too. Instead of four units, twice a day, it was three units, then two units, then one, then ¾ of a unit, then ¾ of a unit every other day. He lived not just one or two years, but he lived six more years. The vet was always amazed. He’d never seen a cat get better from pancreatitis and more improved with their diabetes as well because it was the autoimmune one.
That’s when the lightbulb went off for me. What’s going on here? I looked at the research. The Russians were already doing this back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. They were so far ahead of us. That was what kicked me off with the lasers.
Then the second thing that happened was my wife got really sick when she was given an iodine contrast with some imaging. That created her whole thyroid storm. She almost died from it. She was bedridden. No one could help. She was seeing doctors at Harvard UCLA and Loma Linda, just as the thyroid was going crazy.
It was going to see Dr. Kharrazian. I went to Dr. Kharrazian, and he did a long exam on her. He said, “You have this massive amount of iodine contrast.” She would have had underlying Hashimoto’s hypothyroid antibodies. The iodine kicked it off, and it started an attack not against the thyroid but also against the cerebellum, which affects the autonomic nervous system pathways.
As he is talking to me about this and telling me about how these things, especially once it starts the attack on the brain, how it gets really ramped up, you have to calm it down, a light bulb went off. I was thinking about Poopsie. I asked him about using the lasers—this was 2011—on her brain and her thyroid. He said, “I don’t know. Let me do some research.” He also has a Ph. D in clinical research from Harvard.
That night, he gets back to me and sends me these studies on lasers in the brain and neurodegeneration and autoimmunity. He says, “Dude, laser the crap out of her brain. I didn’t realize this was out here.” It was showing how the lasers can reverse neurodegeneration and affect autoimmune pathways within the brain. That’s where everything kicked off, necessity being the mode of invention here. I took a deep dive into the research 12 years ago, and it hasn’t stopped since then.
Dr. Eric:
Some pretty cool stories. Amazing with your cat. It sounds like your wife was your first thyroid patient, the first person you used cold laser on.
Dr. Kirk:
Yeah. It went from her being bedridden to a year later, we were playing tennis together. Dr. Kharrazian said you don’t really see that with just nutrition and supplements alone. To have that huge of a change, the coordination of your brain in these different neurological pathways.
Dr. Eric:
With your cat, I think you said you used laser every single day until she passed away, correct?
Dr. Kirk:
I used them in that first week every day twice a day. When he was first acutely diabetic, I used it about daily or every other day basis. Ongoing, it was once a week or a few times a month that we used it for the next six years. It wasn’t daily. It was initially more intense.
Often, what we do with my human patients is laser rentals in the office. The patient can rent one of these handheld devices when they are in an acute crisis and take it home. They can laser the gut, the thyroid, the brain, these different pathways, to work on it at your home a few times a day to try to stabilize the condition. For maintenance things, they can do it on a less frequent basis. Patients can even buy these things to use at home, too.
Dr. Eric:
That’s what I was getting at. I wasn’t sure if your wife was still using it on her thyroid every single day. It sounds like she’s not. If anything, maybe doing it once a month or a few times a month.
Dr. Kirk:
Probably more frequently than that. She likes to do it two or three times a week. When we travel, we’ll take it with us. It fits in her purse or luggage. With autoimmunity, there is stress in travel, and it can ramp you up. You might get exposed to different foods or other things. You can use this to dampen the inflammation and calm things down. It’s really handy with that.
Dr. Eric:
Can you talk about the research? There is research behind this. It’s not just you have this experience with your wife.
Dr. Kirk:
After these two things with family members, I did a deep dive. Patients can look it up themselves on PubMed. By 1974, in the former USSR, low level laser was used as state sponsored standard medical care for everything, not just autoimmune things, but for neurology and even oncology, cancer patients. They have been doing that.
There is a study that Izabella Wentz and I have discussed a lot called the Höfling study out of Brazil. Höfling and his colleagues took patients and followed up with them for six years. They were lasering with low level, non-thermal lasers.
This is a key thing. This does not include high-powered Class 4 lasers that are thermal. You don’t want to use those over the thyroid. Those thermal lasers, you can’t use them on heat-sensitive tissues. Even though some doctors try to use them on the brain, research shows a high power, high dose could be problematic for those with brain fog.
Höfling was using low-powered, low-level lasers. In the groups he followed, 47% of the people in the study didn’t need any additional medication at all. They were able to go off of their thyroid meds. All of the patients in the study showed a decrease in the TPO antibodies. We know that’s significant because that’s how you can set up the thyroid for destruction. These cross-reacting with the cerebellum can cause destruction, too.
Similar to my cat. He showed in the study when they did an ultrasound of the thyroid, the thyroid gland appeared healthier, and blood flow to the thyroid gland was also healthier. That was one of the big research studies specific to the thyroid.
When we look at autoimmunity in general with low powered lasers, non-thermal lasers especially, they can provide support to autoimmune conditions. When I take let’s say this laser here, and put it on the body, be it the brain, this is a green laser and a violet laser. This one is a red and violet laser. As you can see, it’s hard to see the violet because it’s so low on the body.
As we get that on there, it will trigger you to make some things that are beneficial for autoimmune patients, like glutathione and nitric oxide. You will stimulate the production of interleukin 10, which helps to regulate inflammatory cytokines. It will help to downregulate inflammatory ones, like interleukin 6. You will also stimulate stem cell production and favorably modulate inflammation and immune markers in the body. It’s really cool what we’re doing on a cellular level to support the body.
The violet lasers also provide immune support against microorganisms, like viruses and bacteria. A lot of patients with autoimmunity have chronic infections. The wavelength particularly supports the immune system against those. There is also research showing that the laser can help, even though it doesn’t directly penetrate to the gut, repair a leaky gut barrier, a leaky brain barrier, and also help to support the microbiome.
It starts to sound like snake oil when you say all of these things. There are actual research studies that supports what the laser does for all of these conditions. It’s not specific to Hashimoto’s, MS, or Graves’. We’re looking at it supporting all those pathways that are involved with immunomodulation and immunoregulation.
When we get the laser on the body, it supports your T regulatory cells, which helps to downregulate autoimmunity. When you have those T reg cells being supported, you can help tame the fires of an autoimmune reaction.
Dr. Eric:
One of the questions I was going to ask you, and still will ask you, is the potential benefits for hyperthyroidism, including Graves’. With Hashimoto’s, you get the damage to the thyroid gland, so that could help regenerate the thyroid tissue potentially. With Graves’, it’s a little bit different. From what you just said, it’s also modulating the immune system and helping with regulatory T cells. It sounds like it could help people with Graves’, as well as other autoimmune conditions. You mentioned MS as well.
Dr. Kirk:
The first thing I will say is no laser is FDA cleared to treat those conditions. This is being used just like you would nutrition and supplementation; these are supplementary things. If you are looking at any autoimmune condition, whether it’s Graves’ or Hashimoto’s or MS or rheumatoid arthritis, you try to remove the offending foods and triggers from the environment. You work on supporting anti-inflammation. That’s how laser works in supporting these different pathways.
When we get the laser on the body, it even helps with TH1, TH2, and TH3 balance. The body is going to absorb the energy from the laser and use it as it needs it. That’s one of the cool things. When you get the laser on the sick cell, it will respond to the laser differently than a healthy cell. The cells have that innate wisdom in a sense, of saying, “Hey, this energy is coming in. This is how we’re going to use this.”
A key thing I want to point out here is when we are looking at these autoimmunities, we know there is commonly problems with mitochondrial dysfunction. When I have these red, violet, and green lasers, these actually support the entire mitochondrial respiratory chain, the electron transport chain. They support all the phases of it. You might have an autoimmunity problem with complex 4, 3, 2, or 1. Historically, red lasers and infrared lasers will only impact complex 4 for making the end product of ATP, which is the energy the patient needs. Complex 3 is affected by green lasers, and complex 1 and 2 by violet lasers. That’s why on all my autoimmune patients, and all my patients really, I use all three wavelengths. We are getting entire support for the electron transport chain, which is generating the energy needed for everything in the body. That’s where you can still help a patient with Graves’ or other conditions.
Dr. Eric:
You’re answering questions before I ask them. Another question I have, which I know the answer: Are all lasers created the same? Someone could just go online and purchase their own laser. You just mentioned that there are different types of lasers: the violet, the green, the red. They have different types of effects, it sounds like.
Dr. Kirk:
They do. Some people will say an LED is just as effective as a laser. They will even try to- There is one study by Hamlin that tried to say LED and lasers were shown to be the same. In head-to-head research, it’s not the same. Erchonia, the company I use, has the most FDA clearances of any laser that’s out there. We do rigorous level 1 testing.
When we do our studies, we compare them head-to-head with LED devices that have the identical wavelength, power, and parameters. When we compare them head-to-head, LED are great for patients to use at home, but you get roughly about a 10-17% effectiveness compared to a laser.
In the studies that are out there where they try to say LEDs are just as effective as a laser, many times, they are poorly designed studies where they will use a laser of one particular wavelength that is not as effective or of a power or a dose that is not as effective versus an LED that is on a more effective setting. They might compare a red versus an infrared. They set it up for failure in a sense. Sometimes, they will use one that specifically doesn’t work at all.
Those LEDs are good for use at home. Not so great to use in the clinic. The problem is right now, a lot of these devices are coming in from China that are very cheaply made. Some of the LED bulbs cost as little as six cents a bulb on there. You are not getting the same kind of effect that you do with a laser.
When it comes to different wavelengths, the easiest way to get people to understand the difference, whether it’s violet, green, red, or infrared, is let’s give the example of let’s put a person in an ultraviolet tanning bed, and let’s put someone under an infrared heat lamp. In the tanning bed, that particular wavelength of ultraviolet light is going to trigger things like melanin production for a suntan. You will also stimulate Vitamin D production that is not going to just be in the skin, but it will go throughout the whole body to strengthen the bones and support the immune system.
When you are under an infrared bed, you won’t get those impacts, but you will get thermal heating, relief from pain, improved blood flow. We get different effects with different wavelengths.
Devices that are on there each have their different uses. When we have an infrared device, they are lower energy devices that work through mechanical activity on the tissues by causing vibrations, oscillations, and a thermal impact. When we are doing things on the brain and thyroid, we have to be careful about how powerful they are in watts.
Some people think that more power is better. As we know with autoimmunity, you have to be careful about how much you load a person up, whether that’s exercise or a dose of a supplement. You have to do the same thing with the energy coming in from lasers. Upping the power can overload an autoimmune patient.
In the visible wavelength, we do have higher energy per photon in there, but we use lower power on there, so there is not a thermal impact. That way, the dose comes in slower. This way, we can not overstimulate an autoimmune patient. That is particularly important for the brain. If a patient is getting a very high wattage laser on the brain, in a matter of a few seconds, it can potentially overstimulate an autoimmune patient or someone who has been concussed, which could flare them up.
The lower power of lasers and lower wattage, we have slower time, so we can start to see how the patient is responding to it. If they start to feel like they are getting overstimulated, it’s easier to stop before you pass what’s called the hermetic threshold.
Dr. Eric:
It sounds like more is not better. You are not saying anything bad about red light therapy, but if someone has their own red light therapy unit, it won’t have the same impact as a cold laser, like the one you have from Erchonia.
Dr. Kirk:
It will be different. You will have a lot of well-known influencers online who will say that’s completely wrong. I challenge anyone to look at the studies. Don’t listen to me or the influencer or the salesperson. Go and read the actual studies. Look at if it was head-to-head. Did they use the same parameters or not?
I got into a discussion with a doctor on this the other day. He said, “Everybody knows you have to ramp up the power way higher with the LEDs to get the same effect as a laser.” I said, “That tells you they’re not equal. They’re different.” If you ramp up power, you will also have more of a thermal impact, which can cause problems. The head-to-head studies are not showing quite as much.
I’ll give you an example. We did a study on autistic kids in Cuba. We used a true laser, green waves, and we used an LED device with identical parameters. Laser had fantastic results. The LEDs showed no changes in behavior or mood. On the functional MRIs, the laser showed that it changed blood flow and the neural activity to the frontal lobe and the cerebellum, whereas the LED showed no changes. Then we took those kids who were in the LED group and crossed them over, and they became their own control. They received the laser. They got the same benefits, the same changes on the functional MRI and in behavior that they didn’t get with the LED. Those are the kinds of studies I am talking about when I say I can cite specific research showing the differences in head-to-head studies.
Again, good for use at home. If I am going to race a car, I am not going to bring my old V6 Mustang. I love that car. It’s a sports car technically. But if I am going to try to race in a race against actual sports cars on it, there will be a difference in the effects.
Dr. Eric:
After someone goes in for treatment with the laser, and if they want to do wellness treatments at home and get their own laser, is there still a difference between the portable lasers and the red-light therapy, the LED?
Dr. Kirk:
Yes. When we look at these handheld devices, when we got the FDA clearances for these devices for chronic neck and shoulder pain, chronic low back pain, chronic foot and heel pain, post-operative and preoperative supports, body contouring, etc., these have the same effect.
I actually use these in my office. These are the devices I use. These will still outperform a red-light therapy device or LED therapy device. Patients can use these at home. When I have a patient in a family with a lot of autoimmune patients, neurodegenerative patients, I actually encourage them to buy their own device, so they can all use it on each other at home. This is something you’re going to need for life. The more frequently you can use it, the better it will be.
These are Class 2 lasers, so they are the safest ones out there. They won’t damage the eyes if you flash it. They are not going to damage the thyroid or the brain because they don’t have that high power to them. Patients can use these and have the same kind of effectiveness in their home than they would in a clinic.
The difference is when I am in the clinic, I am doing some different brain-based therapies. Hashimoto’s, we see brain fog, different kinds of issues neurologically. Graves’, the same kind of things happen. With any of the autoimmunities, we tend to see some brain involvement. I tend to stack brain therapies, gut support, and adrenal support as well.
Dr. Eric:
When it comes to the actual procedure, are you taking the laser and putting it directly on the thyroid?
Dr. Kirk:
When I have it in the office, this is a non-thermal device. We can safely do this. When it’s a thermal device, the manufacturers even say it’s contra-indicated there because these are heat-sensitive tissues. We will go on there for a few minutes, and that will stimulate stem cell production, nitric oxide, and glutathione, which Dr. Kharrazian says helps to take the bullet in the autoimmune attack and tame it. It modulates TH1, TH2, and TH3. We will help to stimulate the production of ATP. I use all three waves together, the green, the violet, and the red, because we get this synergistic effect of each wavelength doing some different kinds of stimulation on there. There are wavelength-specific reactions in the body.
With Hashimoto’s patients, I will get it up there on the brain as well. With an autoimmune thyroid patient who is having issues with dysautonomia, we can laser the brain stem and do vagal nerve exercises at the same time, like gargling, gagging, or using a little vagus nerve stimulation device near the ear, so we get that vagus nerve activation while we have the laser going on at the same time. We activate those neural networks, which helps to drive the laser energy toward the particular regions involved with it and help to repair those neural networks. We create some neurogenesis, some new nerve tissue and new synapses. That helps with the overall functioning of the patient.
Dr. Eric:
Here’s a question you might not be able to answer. A lot of patients with Graves’ have thyroid eye disease, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with. It’s more of an immune system condition.
Dr. Kirk:
Correct.
Dr. Eric:
From an immune system standpoint, it sounds like it could help. Also, a number of people have cosmetic changes like proptosis, bulging of the eyes. You mentioned that at least the home laser is safe for the eyes. As far as treating the actual eyes, is that an option, or is that something you would say don’t do on your own? Even if someone wants to see you in person, is that something you’d feel comfortable doing? I know it’s not FDA cleared for that. Do you have any experience with eye conditions?
Dr. Kirk:
We do. One of my patients has Graves’, and he came in with what his endocrinologist said was eye conditions related to it. He was having some different issues with some irritation and blurry vision. What we do with him is as he was getting issues with focusing, and with the blurry eyes, we put the laser first on the brain stem. Then we did eye exercises. We did cardinal fields of gaze stimulation, so he is activating those neural networks and having him focus in on a finger coming in close here. When we are getting a laser on them, it’s improving their focus on there.
Then what we did was had him close his eyes and do the laser right along here. This is completely safe to do. Let’s say if I’m flashing it, that’s considered safe because the blink reflex with a visible laser will protect the eye. Also, as you see how the beam diverges there, how it’s spread out. That spreads the energy over a larger area, so it’s not focused enough to create damage. If you’re doing a laser pointer, that’s pin light. All of the energy is focused on one spot, so that could be damaging. As this is spread out here, we can do these wisping techniques.
What I do is have him close the eyes. We do the laser like this. Then the energy gets spread out over the eyelids but still will trickle down to the eye and help with inflammation. Patients with chromosomal conditions we have done this on, who were losing their vision. We comanaged them with their ophthalmologist and optometrist, and it’s been really wonderful.
I had these patients who were getting steroid injections in their eyes once a month. We started doing laser on a weekly basis, and they didn’t need steroid injections anymore. The ophthalmologist was pretty supportive of what we were doing. In the case of my Graves’ patient, the endocrinologist supported what we were doing, and we saw improvements in that eye condition.
Yes, we have seen it. It’s in the research. The crazy Russians have been doing this since the 1970s. Why don’t Europe and the U.S. do these things? One of the problems in Europe and the U.S. is we think Tim the Toolman Taylor, “Oh, this thing needs more power.” They said that when you ramp those things up, you can’t really do that here on the eyes or the thyroid. When you do that, it changes the way that the laser works. It can limit some of the conditions you can treat. It can be great for musculoskeletal conditions, but for some sensitive ones, it doesn’t quite work as well.
Dr. Eric:
How about thyroid nodules and larger goiters? Have you seen success with those?
Dr. Kirk:
Yeah. It’s interesting. I had one patient who scared the crap out of me. She came in and was one of these patients, who come in and are not fans of chiropractic. They don’t like the adjustments, but they use the laser. She said, “I don’t want you to adjust me. I don’t like being cracked. I heard great things about your laser for neck pain, so I want to do this.”
I have this device called the FX635 that has three lasers that rotate. We are using this on her neck. We get great results. She works as a court translator, so she is always looking down and typing. A lot of neck pain. We have been doing this on her once a week for six months. She is getting great results.
Six months later, she tells me, “By the way, I didn’t tell you that I have thyroid cancer. I was scheduled for a complete thyroidectomy.” Great. I was using a laser literally right around her thyroid. I had asked her if she had any issues, and she said no. I said, “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” She said, “I didn’t think you needed to know because it’s not in your scope or specialties. I was handling it with my endocrinologist and my oncologist, and I didn’t think it was a big deal.” I said, “All right. What’s going on?”
She said, “I have to tell you. Six months ago, before I started, the cancerous nodule was 2.5 centimeters in size, and I was scheduled to have it taken out next month.” I said, “Okay. What’s going on now?” I’m thinking it’s worse, or it’s spread. She said, “Six months later, it’s shrunk to 7mm.” She had a 74% reduction in the size of a cancerous nodule in that time.
She said, “I know it’s the laser. This thing has been slowly growing for years. Now I add in a laser, and it shrinks. My oncologist was shocked. He said he had never seen a change like that, where it reversed. He has now cancelled my surgery, and he is just going to monitor it at this point.” I am not saying to treat cancer with lasers. A caveat in there. This is what we saw with this patient with the worst kind of nodule you can think of, that we saw this improvement.
I got curious again about the research. Again, the Russians by the 1970s were doing things with lasers with cancer. Here in the U.S., we still consider it taboo to do that. If you take cancer cells and put them in a Petri dish and laser them, they grow like crazy. If you put them in a Petri dish and put immune cells around them, there are a lot of studies out of Kyoto, Japan showing this: The immune cells will surround the cancer cells and kill them, destroy them. One of the things the Russians were saying is if you support the immune system, it can fight off the cancer cells.
I have some patients who have come in and are undergoing chemo. We will use it on another area of the body because these lasers have what’s called an abscopal effect or global effect. If I laser a person’s legs, they are going to get a global benefit of increased energy, immune support, stem cell production, etc. We have seen that in cases like this. We have seen that in patients with benign nodules as well, too. I haven’t seen any studies on nodules and the thyroid, but these are the small ones I’ve had in my office, which is pretty darn cool.
Dr. Eric:
That is cool. From what I understand, a cold laser can potentially regenerate thyroid tissue. It can help modulate the immune system. it can help with thyroid nodules, thyroid eye disease. Everybody is different. You are not claiming every single person can be helped. Still, a lot of people will just be on thyroid hormone for the rest of their lives and not do anything.
Dr. Kirk:
No dietary changes, nothing at all.
Dr. Eric:
Exactly. Same thing with these other health conditions. They will just follow the recommendation of their doctor. It’s great to hear there are other options. Like you said earlier, it’s not just about the cold laser. You also recommend dietary changes, stress management, doing things to remove triggers and correct underlying imbalances.
Dr. Kirk:
Stress is an important one. I know Dr. Kharrazian teaches in his functional medicine courses that stress is a dealbreaker for autoimmunity. He used the example of he had this patient, who I believe was a Hashimoto’s patient. He was a Wall Street broker. He did everything perfectly. He ate a perfect diet. He removed all the offending materials in his house, like the carpet, and put in tile. He changed all the furniture. But he still was a mess because of the stress of being on Wall Street.
Dr. Kharrazian said, “Nothing’s going to change unless you deal with your stress.” The guy actually quit his job as a Wall Street broker, moved to Mexico, and now tends bar at a resort. Everything went into remission because he dealt with his stress. It completely changed things. Not to say that everybody has the ability to leave a job and go tend bar in Mexico.
Another cool thing about the lasers is the lasers help with stress management. Especially when we can put these on a setting of a specific pulse frequency. I use these delta frequencies that are 1hz per second. This has a calming impact on the brain.
We will have patients coming in who might be ramped up from Graves’ or Hashimoto’s when they get into that hyper phase, when they have that anxiety and are going through that storm. We put on these delta settings, and we also use a vagus nerve stimulator, and have them do some breathing exercises. That can have a calming impact on them to tame the brain, calm down the nervous system, and help them manage their stress levels better. We will do that sometimes.
Or we will stack laser with the Muse headband. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Muse headband at all. It does EEG scanning. It’s a couple hundred bucks. Patients can buy it with their own. It interfaces with an app on their phone, and it will give them biofeedback as to what their frontal lobe is doing, if they’re controlling their brain waves. If they’re controlling it, it will sound calm with little birds coming out. If it’s scattered and all over the place, they will hear wind and rain and loud sounds on there. We’ll stack the laser with the Muse headband or the vagus nerve exercises, so we can help the autoimmune patients to deal with their stress.
Dr. Eric:
That is pretty cool. I know we spoke a lot about lasers, which that was the purpose of this chat. Is there anything I should have asked you about lasers that I didn’t ask you that you’d like to chat about?
Dr. Kirk:
Yeah. A big component on here is that sometimes, patients will have autoimmunity. They will think things will get worse, or they can just maintain. Lasers can really help to enhance a person’s performance. If they are already starting to do well, you can improve their overall performances.
Let’s say I have this patient coming in with Hashimoto’s, and their brain is not functioning very well. As we get a laser on the brain, we will stimulate things that will enhance them to function better than they did in the past. Some of these autoimmune patients will have things like motion sickness, which is one of the most common things I see. They have a history of being ticklish when they were a kid. They can’t watch an IMAX movie. We will get the laser on the brain and do balance exercises or eye exercises with them. We see some of these old symptoms disappear. That’s part of the brain rewiring itself and improving longevity.
We get the lasers here. We will stimulate those stem cells to make new, healthy tissue. We will generate brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which I call the MIracleGro for brain cells, so you can make new neurons and synapses. You are also stimulating lymphatic drainage to drain the inflammation off of the brain.
I am mentioning this because as you may know, and as your listeners may not know, once there is one autoimmunity, many times, others pop up, too. There is a lot of autoimmunity in the brain. We are looking at Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia have autoimmune components and related to diabetes type 3 as well. If you have a patient with these things going on, we can tame those things in the brain. If they have these proteins folding in the brain, as has been shown in Alzheimer’s, dementia, or Parkinson’s, 40hz has been shown to be able to stimulate these resonant waves in the brain to break apart the protein foldings that are occurring in there. Current research is showing you can not just prevent further neurodegeneration, but you can actually reverse it if you catch these things early enough.
Patients should pay attention to this. What’s going on with them? What are these symptoms happening? You can reverse a lot of these things when you combine diet, meditation, stress management, and lasers. If you have a patient with RA, where they are just on immunosuppressant drugs, and your joints are going to degenerate over time, you put the lasers on there and stimulate regeneration of the joints. New bone formation, new cartilage formation. That is the exciting thing about that.
These are the way of the future. This is the Star Trek of the future. While most of the medical model is 20th century, we’re looking into the future of how you use these different wavelengths and light frequencies to signal the body to repair and direct what’s going on there. That’s where the current research is. We talked about things that were just released on PubMed, using targeted biophotons to stimulate your body to communicate via biophotons to make these changes, which is really exciting stuff.
Dr. Eric:
That does sound really cool. You’re right about how people with one autoimmune condition are more likely to develop other autoimmune conditions in the future. With the RA, it serves a few different benefits. A) It can help with the immune system since RA is autoimmune, and B) it could directly help with regeneration of the joints, which won’t happen if someone just goes to rheumatologists.
Dr. Kirk:
No, won’t happen. I think this is particularly important now. We look at this post-COVID world. I encourage your listeners to go on PubMed, type in “Kharrazian COVID study.” Have you checked out his study on COVID and its impact on autoimmunity, Eric?
Dr. Eric:
I have not. I have done some research though. I have had a lot of patients with thyroid autoimmunity that apparently was triggered by COVID. There is a lot in the research, especially with Graves’, studies showing a correlation although a correlation doesn’t always mean causation. It seems pretty obvious that getting a dose of COVID led to their Graves’ condition.
Dr. Kirk:
You have to read this study. Anybody who is listening needs to check this out. I have seen an explosion in autoimmunity in general since COVID hit. I started seeing it in May 2020. At that point, I interviewed another speaker for Erchonia, Dr. Trevor Berry, who is in Arizona and is a neurological expert. He was already seeing neuro autoimmunities popping up, things like MS. I interviewed him on my YouTube channel about that.
By the fall of 2020, Kharrazian and Vojdani, who is a world-renowned immunologist, they were doing research on the spike protein’s impact on the immune system. They released a preliminary study in fall 2020. In January 2021, the journal Frontiers in Immunology released this study on COVID spike protein impacts on autoimmunity. The spike protein can trigger autoimmune reactions in 26 human proteins in the body. They said this can be spike protein either from infection or from mRNA vaccination. They weren’t pro or anti vax. They are just doing the data.
If a patient with the right genetics is exposed to this spike protein, it can turn on autoimmunity against the thyroid, either Hashimoto’s or Graves’. It can turn on neurological autoimmunity, gut autoimmunity. Once we know that gut barrier breaks down, that opens the Pandora’s box for all other forms of autoimmunity. It can trigger and break down the brain barrier. It can trigger rheumatoid autoimmunities, diabetic ones, a whole host of them. That’s what we’re seeing now.
I’m seeing patients who didn’t have autoimmunity beforehand who said, “It was only my 90-year-old grandmother who had autoimmunity. No regular adults had it. I’m now 35, and I have it. My 12-year-old kid also has it.” This is important information for everybody to know.
It’s great that you’re talking about this stuff. It’s making people aware of they may feel completely different from then on after having had COVID or an mRNA vaccination. They might have had autoimmune activation. They have to learn these steps of what to do with your nutrition, your stress, and what we can do with technology to assist that.
We have people coming in who already had something, and then they got COVID or the mRNA vaccination, and now they have gone haywire. They can’t control their heart rate or blood pressure. They are seeing these dysautonomias as being common. As well as a loss of smell and taste.
We will use lasers on these patients. We will hit the brain stem. If they have lost their smell and taste, we will do smell stimulation and taste stimulation to try to regenerate those neurons. If they are having issues with heart rate and blood pressure, we will have them use the pulse ox and heart rate monitor while they are doing breathing exercises and vagus nerve exercises while under the laser. If it’s attacking the gut, we will hit the laser over the gut to try to stimulate zonulin to be more balanced to try to heal up the gut. We will try to do it over the brain as well, too.
People will see this and learn more, especially young kids, who are already being impacted from their different diets compared to previous generations. COVID has been a gamechanger in ramping up these autoimmune processes in the body.
Dr. Eric:
I agree. I will need to check out Dr. K’s study. You said it was released this past fall?
Dr. Kirk:
No, 2020. He is always ahead of the curve. He put out preliminary research about COVID in fall 2020. They did the release of the study in Frontiers in Immunology in January 2021. That shows you how far ahead. He is talking about COVID and spike proteins in the vaccine triggering autoimmunity.
In their conclusion, they said they were concerned that a vaccine could trigger autoimmunity. What do we say now in the news two years later? Finally, they are saying it looks like long COVID is autoimmune. Oh yeah, we do see some patients who get the mRNA vaccinations and now have autoimmunity. This is not anti-vaccine. The reality is some people are going to have an impact from either the vaccine or an infection that will generate long COVID. It looks like it’s autoimmune. He and Vojdani were already saying that in 2020 when COVID had only been around for less than a year.
Dr. Eric:
There are other studies not just with COVID. But yes, there are studies- I don’t know if I have seen Hashimoto’s in PubMed. With Graves’, there are studies that show that not only COVID can be a trigger, but also the mRNA vaccine as well. I haven’t done much research with other autoimmune conditions, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the research was out there for other ones as well.
Dr. Kirk:
What he showed in there was that the spike proteins shared similarity in its protein structure with these 26 different proteins in the body. You get that molecular mimicry. The immune system gets confused. Now, it starts to think that the thyroid or the brain tissue or cartilage or the pancreas looks like spike protein. It starts to mistakenly attack it. That’s what they were able to show in that study. They had tested it in the lab showing these reactions.
On these patients, when they come in like that, I use the laser because I am trying to support T reg cells and interleukin 10 and dampen the inflammatory cytokines. There are studies that show that violet lasers benefit even against active COVID infection. They are showing the COVID virus can set up shop and be smoldering in the brain, even in the ovaries or the testes, throughout the tissues. This helps to support the immune system against it.
This is where we can tie in all things together, along with the person’s diet and supplementation. Now they do stress management.
Dr. Eric:
Thank you for sharing all this. Where can people learn more about laser? Where can they find out about you, your practice, if they want to work with you directly?
Dr. Kirk:
They can go to LaserChiropractic.net. If they Google me, they will see I have been on so many podcasts and summits. They can hear all kinds of lectures I have done. I also have a Facebook group, Dr. Gair’s Health Performance Secrets. They are welcome to join that even if they are not a patient of mine. That’s where I talk about all things laser, nutrition, things to try to enhance a person to have them be better and have some hope.
If they are looking for a practitioner near them, they can go to Erchonia.com. They can click on the Find a Provider link and put in their zip code. Or they could message me. I have a group of almost 1,000 doctors I have trained. I do between 18-40 seminars a year, teaching other doctors, both in the U.S. and internationally. In Spanish as well in Latin America. They can message me, and I can see if I can put them in contact with someone.
Not all the doctors will know how to support autoimmune patients. They may have a laser, but they may not be well versed in it. You do want to be careful with that. Whatever laser you use, you want to make sure the doctor has an idea of what they are doing. Ideally, they have some training in functional medicine and functional neurology as well, so they know how to handle autoimmune patients as well.
We were not taught that in school. I’m just gonna say it. When we were in chiropractic school, we were not taught how to manage these kinds of things. At least in mine, we weren’t.
Dr. Eric:
Without question. I definitely wasn’t taught in chiropractic school. I don’t know anybody else who learned this.
Dr. Kirk:
Our education started when we graduated.
Dr. Eric:
Exactly. You’re right. Thanks, Dr. Kirk. Appreciate your time. Definitely visit Dr. Gair’s website. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat about lasers.
Dr. Kirk:
Thanks for having me on. I’m happy to share this information. This is my 20th year of using lasers. I remember when I got started, I thought I was late in the game because the doc who trained me had been using them since the ‘90s. I saw the Russians had been using them since the ‘60s and ‘70s. I thought we were going to get to this point a lot sooner. It’s just now, people are getting their awareness, like it’s a brand new thing. It’s kind of cool to say it. I feel like the old veteran in the laser world because I have been fighting down in the trenches for the last 20 years.
Dr. Eric:
Thanks for everything you do. Now, there are other practitioners, chiropractors included, who are doing what you do because of you. Appreciate the time and research you have put into this.
Dr. Kirk:
Thank you. Thanks for that.
