Swelling And Dry Skin After Red Light?

[Mellow]

Intrigued by this so wanted to ask the collective wisdom of the forum for thoughts.

Early last year I had a strange incident. Home after work I fell my right eye begin to water, and very shortly thereafter start to swell. I didn't think anything much of it - I suffer mild hay fever and it felt like that - but the swelling didn't stop and soon I was taking it VERY seriously as my eye was really swollen and couldn't see. Rushing around the house I found my nasal anti-histamine, took a couple of blasts on that, and within a minute or two the swelling began to abate. Fifteen minutes later I could see to drive, and the swelling went down over the rest of the evening.

Last October I had a severe cycling accident with a fair amount of facial scrapes and cuts. To help cuts healing I have been using red light (redlightman) on my face. I noticed that I was getting really swollen under my right eye, and the skin was really dry, flaky, itchy. I had been trying to correlate that with what I was eating (histamine driven food reaction?), but only recently I've noticed it's related to red-light. If I don't use the red light the swelling under my eye goes and the skin goes back to the same as my left eye - normal looking. When I use the red light it swells up, dry, cracked, itchy.

Any thoughts? Struggling to see what the mechanism for that would be, and why my right and left eyes respond differently?! Any advice or suggestions appreciated.

 

[LoryEl]

Sorry to hear about your accident.

I red somewhere Ray Peat fell asleep under bright light and woke up with acnea and that bright light is accelerating vit A metabolism in the body.

Are u using red light or clear infrared?

I would suspect some combination of vitamin A, aspirin and vitamin e or some progrst e diluted in olive oil applied topically would heal and calm down a lot of these symptoms but i am not an expert, i just have some problems myself with a very sensitive skinn and have experimented a but. Whatever i put on my skinn works tones better than anythin i aould ingest for flaky itchy issues. If progest e does not work try another progesterone cream and liquid vit e initialy until the skinn calms down than go back to progest e and coconut amd olive oil.

Maybe other people in the forum may provide more qualified advice? Mine are some wiled guesses. Ask someone if topical k may help. I am not sure but it works for some people on the forum that apply it on tbe face.

Have u tested your prolactine cortisol etc?

Hope u get well!

 

[Mellow]

Thanks for the reply and good wishes!
The light I am using is Redlightman, has both infra-red and red. I have been trying vit-E applied to it, and tried using niacinamide in a spray, but neither of those make any difference.
For sure there seems some histamine reaction - the dryness under that eye gets worse if I drink red wine regularly for example - but I NEVER had anything like that prior to that very severe incident where my eye was swelling up.

Curious what caused that, but even more curious what I can now do about it.

 

[mosaic01]

I have similar issues, and I thought about maybe there are some low-level inflammation processes which are only activated when a certain amount of energy is present in the cells.

In that way using red light made your body go into repair mode again. Your cells finally have enough energy to clean up some stuff. Originally you suppressed the reaction with an anti-histamine.

I think Red Light is one of the most powerful signals for cells to get that necessary energy again. Maybe you just need to push through it and trust your body with this. Even though swelling is a kind of primitive repair mechanism, it's still beneficial in most contexts.

What you could experiment with, and what's working for me, is taking powerful anti-inflammatories alongside Red Light - Ibuprofen (works best for me), Progesteron, Cypro, Aspirin, Vitamin A to prevent a systemic inflammatory response, while still allowing the local inflammatory site to heal.