Film Noir, Red Lights, and Rotator Cuffs

PART ONE    Cue the saxophone music.

‘When a potential shoulder injury is detected, the rotator cuff muscles tighten up to "guard" against further damage by stabilizing the shoulder joint, essentially acting as a protective mechanism to prevent the head of the humerus from dislocating or moving too freely within the socket; this is because the primary function of the rotator cuff is to provide stability to the shoulder joint.’

That’s probably the single most interesting thing on the rotator cuff I’ve found on the internet.  It’s a Google Artificial Intelligence summary that cites a similarly worded piece from the National Library of Medicine.  Pretty much everything else that turns up in a search on the rotator cuff focuses on injuries, along with treatments and surgeries, and so on.

Rotator cuff pain is hideous, be it its intensity or duration - or both, but today I want to consider a different perspective: what if all that misery is NOT an injury?  What if it’s a natural mechanism, an intentional tightening up, the rotator cuff doing its job as a front line defense against greater damage?

This was going to be a compelling article on the benefits of red light therapy.  Afterward, it could have branched into the pathology of injury, or probably the nature of pain.  When does an apparent injury indicate real damage, and when does a troubled spot mean that some-thing else is happening some-where else entirely?  It’s turning into a mystery.

The saxophone fades.  The scene opens late at night on a dark and lonesome city street, wet from rain.  A shoulder injury is a detective story, and if I’m going to be my own private eye, I’ll have learn at the knee of one of those no-nonsense, best in the business types, whose insight and depth of experience can crack any case.  We’ll start with another medical mystery and the gumshoe work that turned up a great many clues.

IN PART ONE, To get our heads around rotator cuffs, we’re going back a few years, into the empty city streets of the coronavirus pandemic - and into the red light district.

Five years ago, as coronavirus fatalities mounted and quarantines took effect, I was lucky enough to discover the MedCram YouTube blog cofounded by Dr. Roger Seheult, an Associate Clinical Professor at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine, and an Assistant Clinical Professor at the School of Medicine and Allied Health at Loma Linda University.  Seheult (‘sh-welt’) helped quell the fears and maintain the sanity of thousands of viewers as he kept us up to date on scientific developments and explained the pathology of the virus.

The SARS CoV-2 virus enters the body by way of the ACE-2 receptor, which lies on the surface of respiratory and blood vessel cells (and a great many others).  The ACE-2 is a vascular signaling pathway, and as the virus disturbs its enzyme activity, it creates vasoconstriction, increased blood pressure, and oxidative stress.

This is my metaphor, not Seheult’s, but that oxidative stress is tantamount to chucking a lit cigarette into the scrap bin at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.  Folks already suffering from oxidative damage (those with heart disease, diabetes, and obesity) risked conflagration, a cascade of blood clotting reactions, and this is what killed them, cardiovascular damage as opposed to gasping for breath on a ventilator.

As scientists raced to understand the disease, one of their discoveries was that, according to the journal CLINICAL MEDICINE in 2020, ‘Low vitamin D levels have been associated with an increase in inflammatory cytokines and a significantly increased risk of pneumonia and viral upper respiratory tract infections. Vitamin D deficiency is associated with an increase in thrombotic episodes, which are frequently observed in COVID-19.’

They went on to say, ‘If vitamin D does in fact reduce the severity of COVID-19 . . .  it is our opinion that supplements would offer a relatively easy option to decrease the impact of the pandemic.’

It didn’t work.  Seheult was among those who discussed this Vitamin D paradox.  Vitamin D by itself didn’t cure patients, and it didn’t seem to prevent infection, though both Vitamin D and the coronavirus were associated with seasonal trends - one of them being sunlight.  COVID would surge in the Fall, like the flu.  Statistical analysis showed that this was not a function of temperature.  Among nations reporting disease figures, Finland, high in the north, would be first with a COVID surge.  Greece, near the equator, would be last.

The more sun, the less COVID, was the only thing scientists had to go on - but it wasn’t Vitamin D saving the day.

From Google AI:  ‘The solar radiation spectrum refers to the range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation emitted by the sun, encompassing ultraviolet (UV), visible light, and infrared (IR) regions, with the majority of the energy concentrated within the visible light spectrum; essentially, it's the distribution of solar energy across different wavelengths, including the light we can see and the invisible portions like UV and IR radiation. 

• Ultraviolet (UV): Shortest wavelengths, responsible for sunburn and can be harmful to living organisms. UV light produces Vitamin D in the skin.
  

• Visible light: The range of wavelengths humans can see, including colors like red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. 
  

• Infrared (IR): Longer wavelengths, often associated with heat.’
  

Seheult’s approach is to cite as many scientific journal pieces as he can find.  Researchers already knew

a fair bit about the electromagnetic spectrum.   In fact, it was kind of old news that Near Infrared Radiation,

not Ultraviolet Light, ‘stimulates an excess of anti-oxidants in each of our healthy cells, and that cumulative

effect of this antioxidant reservoir is to enhance the body’s ability to rapidly and locally deal with changing

conditions throughout the day.’

It was only a hypothesis at first: Sunlight, but not Vitamin D . . .  not UV . . .  but wait a minute:  COVID-19 is

a disease of oxidative damage.  That’s how people are dying - but near-infrared amps up antioxidants . . . .

It’s the other end of the spectrum.  Game on.

On January 2, 2023, Seheult was practically giddy as he began his lecture: ‘ . . . I think if there’s a video that

you want to share and watch to the end, this is the video. . . ‘  He was ready to tie together all of the leads in

the great COVID mystery he had been documenting for three years, all the way back to the ACE-2 receptors

under attack.

THE JOURNAL OF PHOTOCHEMISTRY AND PHOTOBIOLOGY, he announced, had presented the

findings of a study conducted with near infrared radiation transmitted from light vests wrapped around the

chests of hospitalized COVID patients.  That wavelength of light penetrates deep into the human body,

through skin and fat.

Suffice it to say, it CRUSHED the disease.  On some 20 indices, such as Oxygen Flow Intake, Inspiratory

and Expiratory Pressures, Heart Rate, Blood Pressure, and a number of blood chemistry markers like

White Blood Cells and Lymphocytes, the patients showed tremendous improvement.  The sheer statistical

power of these results, at over 80%, sent Seheult over the moon.

Vests wired with tiny light bulbs: we’d come a long way from the belief that we’d need ventilators by the

thousands.  Not only did near infrared radiation save patients in advanced stages of the disease, it reversed

- without side effects and at low cost - the disease pathology at every stage of the process.

Additionally, Seheult marveled, we knew this, during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.  Doctors didn’t

understand how exactly, but they knew that sunlight provided tremendous therapeutic benefit.  Hospital

rooms were built with balconies in those days, and the patients that fared best were the ones who were

wheeled outside to catch some rays.

Seheult went on in the months that followed, outlining additional findings on the value of

photobiomodulation, which is therapy from both visible red light and invisible near infrared.  Its baseline

function, which is increasing mitochondrial respiration and subsequently the amount of ATP powering

cellular processes, has applications far and wide.  Most exciting was the news that stem cells in the brain,

which normally remain in their hypoxic little niches, head out in search of oxygen when their mitochondria

are stimulated.  Out and about, they are ‘influenced by cues’ in damaged areas of the brain, and they

become progenitor cells in effecting repair.

This has huge implications for treatment in

- traumatic brain diseases

- psychiatric diseases

- neurodevelopmental disorders, and

- neurodegenerative diseases.

This is getting good.  The private eyes, Seheult and the world’s medical researchers, have uncovered a

thousand truths in the murderous wake of SARS-CoV-2.

At Christmas 2024, upon hearing a podcast about athletes treating injuries with home red-light therapy units,

I wasted no time in buying one.  In a week’s time, the shoulder that had been agonizing me for months was

pain free.

I’m not the only one I know with shoulder pain, and despite the great red-light miracle, mine comes and goes

once in a while - though it responds to lat stretches and rolling out the teres muscles, so I think there’s more

going on here than a damage and healing cycle.  I’m beginning to think that rotator cuff muscles are wired

to behave like this.   I’ll have to think like a detective to sort that out.