08/26/2026
In 1903, light therapy won the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Niels Ryberg Finsen was recognized for treating lupus vulgaris, a tuberculosis of the skin, using concentrated light. Within a few years, 40 Finsen Institutes had opened across Europe and the United States. Before antibiotics, light was mainstream medicine.
Worth being precise about one thing, because it matters.
Finsen’s prize was for ultraviolet light, not red. Modern red light therapy came later, and mostly by accident. We’d rather tell you that than let the story sound tidier than it is.
What hasn’t changed is the underlying fact. Roughly half the sunlight reaching the earth’s surface is infrared. Not the part you see. The part you feel. Human skin spent every one of its evolutionary years receiving that full spectrum, daily.
Then we moved indoors and put glass in front of everything. Windows, windshields, screens. Most of us now get a filtered fraction of what our physiology was built around.
We didn’t stop needing light. We stopped standing in it.
Red light therapy isn’t a replacement for going outside. It’s a way to get some of what an Idaho winter stops providing. Available in the wellness lounge at both locations.
Third in a four part series on the practices that came long before the wellness industry did.
Meridian: 208.519.7070
Eagle: 208.906.2444
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