Research finds that green light—through LEDs or tinted glasses—may help painful conditions like fibromyalgia and migraines
Researchers are now exploring another potential alternative that is safe, affordable, and comes with few or no side effects and no risk of addiction: green light exposure.
“There are neural pathways that start from the eyes and can be traced back to several brain regions,” says Ibrahim, who also works as medical director of the Comprehensive Pain and Addiction Center at the Banner-University Medical Center. “Some of these regions are heavily involved in pain modulation.” Through a mechanism that’s not yet fully understood, the green light appears to interrupt this connection, providing relief without medication, or at least not as much.
, and eventually required surgery to fuse two disks in her neck. Her pain turned chronic, and she took powerful pain relievers for years.. And multiple times, I ended up back with the prescription in my hand.”Finally, in 2020, she showed up at the Comprehensive Pain and Addiction Center just as Ibrahim was beginning one of his trials with green light therapy. “He said, ‘Would you be interested in this study?’’’ she recalls. “I said, ‘I will do anything.
For now, this is just a theory. But Gulur is currently developing a new study in which the brains of pain patients wearing green glasses will be scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging to see if the inhibitory pathway indeed exists.