The Inventor of Laser Hair Therapy

Have you ever asked yourself how on Earth doctors thought of treating hair loss with lasers, out of all things? Doesn’t quite sound right– if anything, lasers carry a sort of “zapping” connotation, which goes completely against the goal of hair restoration.

 

So who invented laser hair therapy? The answer is kind of subjective.

 

The term LASER is an acronym for Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation. The process of “stimulated emission” was actually theorized in 1917 by none other than Albert Einstein. Ahead of his time as usual, it took several more decades for Einstein’s theory to morph into the first working laser in 1958, and another decade for the concept of LLLT (Low-Level Laser Therapy) to surface.

 

The positive biological applications of LLLT are credited to a Hungarian physicist named Endre Mester. In 1967, when conducting medical experiments at Semmelweis University in Budapest, he began researching a theorized correlation between cold laser light, which had a wavelength similar to ultraviolet radiation, and cancer. He tested his medical theories on two groups of shaved mice– one was left alone for control purposes while the other was exposed to constant cold laser light. Much to his surprise, none of this test subjects developed cancer, but he realized the hair of the exposed group had grown back much more quickly than the control group. Dr. Endre Mester theorized the laser had stimulated the hair cells and accelerated fur growth. He coined his discovery “photo-biostimulation”.

 

Low-level laser therapy was then born. Its applications have since spread from physical therapy to veterinary treatment, but it took another fourteen years for research to begin in the field of LLLT for hair growth. At the time, high-powered laser hair removal treatments were in their early stages of development. Early patients would come in for their sessions, zap any unwanted hair off, but many of them would come back with complaints of new hair growth. Not unlike Dr. Mester’s mice, once again cold laser light was the culprit: it was discovered the high-powered laser was reflecting around the target treatment areas, thus stimulating the hair to grow.

 

A patent for the use of clinical LLLT to treat hair loss was first filed in 2003 by Laser Hair Therapy of North America, a leader in the commercialization of medical and cosmetic lasers. The patent was titled “Method and Device Stimulating the Activity of Hair Follicles”, and used low-power lasers as a solution for alopecia. Since Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs) were used, however, the device had very limited capabilities since LEDs cannot penetrate the base of hair follicles like lasers. The invention was additionally cleared by the Food and Drug Administration for cosmetic use and “making hair thicker and healthier”.  

 

Compared to the devices that followed, this particular invention wasn’t that practical. It consisted of a hooded fiberglass unit equipped with rotating cool lasers, under which a patient sat, possibly resembling an R2D2 unit from Star Wars sitting under a commercial dryer at a hair salon. Even more inconvenient was the bulk and complexity of the machine, which meant sessions had to be scheduled and monitored at a physician’s office rather than letting a patient enjoy the privacy and comfort of his own home.

 

True to technology, as time passed, apparatuses and devices grew smaller and more practical. A particular invention to note is the Laser Hair Brush patented in 2007 by Sunetics, as it was first recognized by the FDA as having real hair restoration capabilities going beyond cosmetic applications. More patents were subsequently filed for laser combs and various laser helmets that aimed to stimulate microcirculation to a patient’s hair follicles, including Theradome’s own LH80 PRO with its eighty lasers generating an optimal amount of power per treatment.

 

Dr. Endre Mester, the Hungarian physicist, passed away in 1984 before knowing how far his research on mice would really go– and before collecting any of his due royalties.