Marketing Gimmicks 2: Gilding the lily, or pulling the wool?
By Peter A. Jenkins
MultiRadiance Medical promotes their FDA-cleared devices as ‘super-pulsed lasers’, with optical output powers of up to “50,000 mW”. This is quite misleading, to say the least, especially for relative newcomers to the field, because this impressively-large number represents only the maximum (peak) power of a very, very, short duration pulse of energy that, according to the solid understanding we currently have of the mechanisms of photobiomodulation, has no significant bearing whatsoever on the clinical effects and benefits of the modality.
It is actually the average power of a pulse train, and the resulting energy delivered over time, that determines the potentially-therapeutic effects of light in living tissue. In the case of devices supplied by Multi-Radiance, the average power (which you’ll never see shown in their marketing literature) of the laser or lasers contained in their devices ranges from a maximum of just 12.5 mW down to 0.0025 mW (2.5 μW!) mW, depending upon the preset program/frequency of pulsation selected by the operator (range 1-5000 Hz).
Contrast this with the average optical powers of the visible red and near-infrared LED emitters (15 mW & 17.5 mW average, respectively), and consider also the additional contribution to in-vivo effects of the electrical-stimulation (and, possibly, the static magnet) element of the device: The useable laser emission constitutes less than 10% at most, and as little as 0.002%, to the overall ‘working’ emissions of the devices.
Consider the following parameters reported in a study using the ‘MR4 LaserShower’. In this case (and even with the corrected average power of each laser diode) the total output of the four laser diodes is 1.25 mW, which is barely 1.25% of the devices total optical output.
In my opinion, marketing these devices as ‘super-pulsed lasers’ is disingenuous, at best, since the laser output is such as small, and largely insignificant, component of the total output. That they also add a static magnet and, to some devices, e-stim, further removes the credibility of calling them lasers.
Perhaps a more accurate way to describe these MultiRadiance devices would be to call them ‘multi-wavelength LED arrays’; because, from the perspective of what’s actually capable of having beneficial effects in the tissue, the LEDs provide the ‘working beam’ of the device.