Red Light Therapy Benefits: What the Bed's Maker Told Mike

Your back is stiff when you get out of bed. Your shoulder has ached for a month and you are training around it. Somewhere between the gym and your phone, someone told you a red light would help, and now you are looking at masks, panels, and beds that cost more than a car.

The claims are the hard part. Search for red light therapy benefits and you get a list that runs from wrinkles to illnesses no lamp should be promising to fix. Sorting out what a maker says, what a user felt, and what nobody can honestly claim takes more patience than most people have.

On the March 25, 2024 episode of Live Well and Thrive, Mike Torchia sat down with Dr. Carl Rothschild, a chiropractor who says he has practiced for 46 years and worked with light therapy for about 25 of them. He builds the full-body bed Mike uses. This post takes the practical material from that conversation, adds Mike’s own account of his first weeks in the bed, and marks the line between the two.

What red light therapy is, and what it is not

Rothschild’s first correction is about the name. When he says red light therapy, he means two kinds of light used together: visible red, and near infrared, which you cannot see. The combination is the therapy, in his telling, not either one alone.

When you talk about red light therapy, you’re talking about the combination of red and near infrared together.

He separates that from the infrared sauna. A sauna that advertises infrared is, he says, using far infrared, which he calls “a fancy way of having heat.” Near infrared sits in a different part of the spectrum, and the session is not about sweating. If you have been treating the two as the same purchase, he would tell you that you are comparing different things.

Where does the light come from? His answer is the sun. The devices take the parts of sunlight he considers useful, concentrate them, and deliver them at close range. He pointed out that people were told to sit in the sun to heal hundreds of years before anyone built a lamp for it. The modern equipment, by his account, is the same idea at far higher power: the pads and lasers he started with a quarter century ago were thousands of times weaker than the bed he makes now.

How red light therapy works, in the maker’s words

Rothschild knows how the pitch lands. He raised the objection before Mike could.

It sounds like snake oil. I’ve heard people say that.

His explanation for why one light could matter to so many tissues is a single word: mitochondria. These are the structures inside your cells that take what you eat and the oxygen you breathe and turn them into the fuel the cell runs on. “It converts those items to energy called ATP,” he told Mike, “and it gives you the energy to live.”

His claim is that red and near infrared light stimulate the mitochondria, and that a cell with more energy does its own job better. Because every cell has them, he argues, a light that reaches the whole body could affect the whole body. He also admits that this is exactly why it sounds too good.

Read that for what it is. This is a maker explaining his own product on a podcast, with a mechanism he believes after decades of use. It tells you how he thinks the light works. It is not a clinical finding this post can vouch for.

The red light therapy benefits Mike noticed, session by session

Mike came to the bed as a skeptic, by his own description, and he had been in it 15 or 16 times when this episode was recorded. Each session is 12 minutes.

What he reports is physical and specific. Mike has said on the show that his spine is compressed and that he has had a hip replacement, with scar tissue around both. The first time he lay in the bed, he says, he had to wiggle his way out of it. By the sixteenth session he could swing his legs over and sit up.

I go into this meditative state. And all of a sudden, the 12 minutes are over.

He books a deep tissue session straight after the bed, and says the therapist asked what he had changed: his muscles were more pliable and his spine was moving more freely. He noticed his skin too, which he says used to get dry and no longer did.

A month earlier, on the first episode of the show, he had described his first two weeks to Dr. Har Hari, whose Beverly Hills center houses the bed. The routine was 12 minutes, Monday through Friday. A shoulder that had ached since a heavy day of dumbbell presses let him press through the full range again, and he kept training while it settled. There was a softer effect as well. Mike drives, in his words, like he stole the car. After a session he leaves the sport mode off and keeps to the speed limit.

This is one man’s account, and Mike is not a neutral test subject. He trains daily, eats carefully, and was using other therapies at the same center in the same months. On a later episode he said he could not judge one change he had noticed because he was doing so many other things at once. What his account is good for is a picture of what a consistent user notices, and how soon.

Why a full-body red light therapy bed instead of a spot treatment

Rothschild used spot devices for years: lasers pointed at an elbow, pads, panels on a wall. He does not dismiss them. He says he simply never heard the kind of feedback he hears now until he built a bed that covers a person head to toe. In his words, bathing the entire body at the same time is when the results changed.

He says he has been manufacturing for 12 years, that the model Mike uses is the Pro 450, and that at the time of recording there were probably 100 of them in the country. His stated goal is at least one in every city.

Har Hari, who chose the bed for his own center, gave Mike his reasons on that first episode. It was designed by a practitioner instead of a marketing company. The lights sit close to the body. And it is powerful: over 15,000 watts, by his count. He put the retail price at about $65,000 in early 2024 and said comparable beds ran past $100,000. What Operation Fitness can tell you about the bed today, including financing, is on the Trifecta bed page.

Most people will never own one, and they do not need to. Har Hari’s center lets a client book a session online, walk in, and walk out. Smaller devices exist for home use, and the biohacks page lays out where a mask, a pad, a panel, and a bed each fit.

Where the maker stops, and how to check the research yourself

Early in the episode Rothschild said something worth keeping in view.

I’m limited to what I can say.

He then said a great deal, about conditions this post does not name. That is deliberate. A manufacturer describing what patients told him is not evidence that a bed treats an illness, and you should not choose or delay medical care on the strength of a podcast. Operation Fitness does not repeat those claims.

The red light therapy benefits worth trusting are the ones you can check, and his more useful advice was a research habit. Go to Google Scholar, type red light therapy and the issue you care about, and see what has been published. Then read the studies, not the sales page, and take what you find to your physician.

On safety, his position is that the worst outcome is that nothing happens. That is his view as the man who builds the equipment. Your physician knows your history, so ask before you start.

How this fits the way Operation Fitness works

Operation Fitness draws a line between a shortcut and a hack. A shortcut is what you do instead of the work. A hack is what you do around it. Red light belongs on the hack side, and Rothschild put it there himself. His instruction to listeners was to do the smart things they already know about exercise and eating right, and then get in the bed. The bed came third on his own list.

Mike’s experience follows the same order. The red light therapy benefits he describes did not arrive alone. He showed up five days a week, for months, on top of the training and the food. The bed did not replace a single workout; by his account it let him keep doing them. Every Operation Fitness program is designed by Mike and delivered by his team, it starts with testing, and a recovery tool gets added only where it serves the plan.

Where to go from here

Watch the full episode with Dr. Carl Rothschild on YouTube. See how red light, PEMF, and hyperbaric oxygen fit together on the biohacks page. If stiffness or a joint that will not settle is what brought you here, book a consultation and start with where your body is now.