Would you allow someone to draw your blood out, expose it to ultraviolet light, and pump it back into your body, even if I told you it wouldn鈥檛 turn you into the Incredible Hulk?
There are many arguments in favour of this procedure, which you will find mainly offered by questionable clinics, and these arguments would fill up a logical fallacy bingo card. Logical fallacies are errors in logic, arguments that sound good on their surface but that are shown, upon closer examination, to be faulty. When I looked up 鈥淯V blood irradiation鈥� on Google, the calls it 鈥渁 safe and natural way.鈥� This is the appeal to nature: making us believe that whatever is deemed 鈥渘atural鈥� must be good for us. I hope we can agree that extracting blood from the body and exposing it to a UV lamp is not natural in the slightest. By that token, so is chemotherapy, because chemicals, like UV rays, exist in nature.
UV blood irradiation is also sold by using this common combination of the appeal to antiquity (鈥渋t鈥檚 been used for a while, so it must work鈥�) and the appeal to novelty (鈥渋t鈥檚 cutting-edge, so it must be good鈥�). We鈥檙e told the technique has been used for a hundred years, but that the machines that are employed now are recent improvements on the original design, with some using , each with its own health benefit.
And if you鈥檙e still not convinced, there鈥檚 the appeal to authority, Nobel edition. 鈥淚t is based on the research of Niels Ryberg Finsen,鈥� the of a Vancouver-based integrative medicine clinic states, 鈥渁 Nobel Prize winner in the field of [sic] Physiology of Medicine.鈥�
UV blood irradiation is claimed to cure just about any health condition鈥攆rom HIV to temporomandibular jaw pain, from asthma to chronic fatigue syndrome鈥攂ut is there any merit to this fallacious fanfare?
鈥淭he cure that time forgot鈥�
The idea of shining UV light on human blood did not appear out of nowhere; rather, it was part of a chain of discoveries going back to , when a Polish physicist discovered invisible rays of light, which he called 鈥渄e-oxidizing rays鈥� based on the chemical experiments he did with them. After a few temporary name changes鈥�"chemical rays鈥� and 鈥渢ithonic rays鈥濃�攖his light, which was just beyond the violet, became known as ultraviolet or UV.
Nearly 50 years after its discovery, sunlight itself, which contains UV rays, became popular as a healer of all things, with thermal stations offering it as heliotherapy, literally 鈥渢herapy from the sun.鈥� Scientists also discovered that UV light could kill microbes. We finally arrive at the beginning of the 1900s, when Danish physician Niels Ryberg Finsen wins a Nobel prize for his work on treating .
What was the mechanism of action? Scientist Emmett K. Knott went a bit more than skin deep. If you look at your hand, you can probably see blood vessels underneath the skin. Knott鈥檚 hypothesis was that this healing UV light was not just interacting with the skin; it was reaching the blood underneath it. What if he exposed the blood directly? Knott helped build a chamber that would receive the blood being drawn out of a patient. Inside it, the blood would move in this labyrinth and it would be exposed to UV light before being pumped back inside the patient. Thus, UV blood irradiation was born, and some of its first applications in humans were for cases of severe bacterial infection causing sepsis.
Early studies seemed to show that you did not need to irradiate all five or so litres of blood in the human body; only of it sufficed to allegedly confer all sorts of medical benefits. But given that multiple sessions are currently being recommended by the people selling this procedure, I have to wonder if you don鈥檛 end up having most of your blood irradiated anyway.
This technique, which goes by different names but is commonly called UV blood irradiation (UVBI or UBI, not to be confused with universal basic income), is often poetically described by its proponents as 鈥渢he cure that time forgot.鈥� If we are to believe these advocates, patients afflicted with all manners of health dispossessions were, in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, being routinely cured of their maladies by having their blood absorb a bit of UV light. This miraculous era came to an end with the sweeping adoption of penicillin and other antibiotics, as well as the polio vaccine. Infections, which had been the main but not unique remit of this UV therapy, could now be treated with a pill or even prevented with a vaccine. No complicated blood pump required.
But what time forgot, wellness merchants remembered, and UVBI is now commonly offered in wellness clinics. Did we learn anything concrete about its benefits before it left the mainstream in favour of antibiotics?
Laboratory findings do not always translate to patients
There is a constellation of studies often brought up to show that UV light is doing something to the blood. Indeed, taking blood samples from volunteers and exposing them to UV light in the lab does lead to a number of changes. It 鈥渕odulates鈥� many properties of red blood cells, platelets, and white blood cells, meaning that it increases or decreases certain activities of these cells. This has become the current hypothesis behind how UV blood irradiation would work: it鈥檚 not that it kills bacteria and viruses in the blood, the way that a UV germicidal lamp in a hospital does to the ambient air, but that it changes our blood cells for the better鈥攕ome go as far as trotting out that popular claim that it 鈥渂oosts your immune system.鈥�
The real question, though, is how clinically relevant are these changes? Play with blood in the lab and measure enough things, and you will see changes. Do they improve a patient鈥檚 health? Given the data I have seen so far, I鈥檓 not convinced but remain somewhat open-minded.
Most of the often-quoted evidence for its benefits in people comes from either studies done in the first half of the 1900s or from work conducted subsequently in Russia and published in the Russian language. As mainstream North American medicine abandoned the technique, it migrated eastward.
While studies done in the 1940s and 1950s should not casually be dismissed, it鈥檚 important to mention that scientific standards in how research is done and reported have greatly increased since then. And even though this period is pegged as the golden age of UV blood irradiation, not every study showed benefits. In quaintly titled 鈥淯ltraviolet Irradiation of Blood in Man,鈥� a team of American doctors tested 68 patients鈥攎any with an infection of the liver鈥攁nd wrote that not one of them derived benefit from having their blood irradiated. Tellingly, they commented that 鈥渕any patients stated that they felt better, regardless of whether the drawn blood was irradiated.鈥� Having an elaborate procedure done on you when you are sick can indeed make you think you are getting better, even if your infection shows no sign of relenting.
There are modern clinical trials of the technique for infections, but a prominent pair left me scratching my head. An American team (that includes shareholders of a company that makes a device for the UV irradiation of blood) conducted of the technique in nine patients with hepatitis C. There was no separate control group and the number of patients was very small. They observed that the viral load in these patients on average decreased significantly after their blood had been irradiated. But instead of moving forward with a phase III trial鈥攚ith more participants and a placebo procedure done to the control group鈥攖hey somehow went back and did in 10 patients, again with no real control group, and just changed the details of how they conducted the trial. Instead of waiting for months after the last blood irradiation to measure viral load, they waited a few days.
None of this evidence is particularly convincing to me. For UV blood irradiation to escape from the clutches of the wellness entrepreneurs, researchers need to demonstrate in large enough groups of participants with a specific disease that this technique confers benefits that have nothing to do with the natural course of the illness. Because here鈥檚 the problem: if you don鈥檛 have a control group, you don鈥檛 know what would naturally happen to a patient irrespective of the procedure. A flu doesn鈥檛 last forever, regardless of how you treat it. Rigour is needed to separate genuine benefits from illusions.
The only application that I am aware of that has been in the United States is for people who have a form of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, where cancerous cells in the blood attack the skin. The official name for the technique here is extracorporeal photopheresis, but the twist is that white blood cells鈥攊ncluding the cancerous T-cells鈥攁re separated from the rest of the blood and they, not the whole blood, get irradiated with UV light. A drug is either given by mouth to the patient or is directly added to the white blood cells during the procedure, and this drug makes the cells more sensitive to the UV light. In the United States and in Canada, this version of UVBI is also used for a few off-label applications like graft-versus-host disease, a reaction that can happen after receiving a bone marrow transplant from a donor other than yourself. UVBI for allergies and chronic fatigue syndrome? Not so much.
Putting aside these few legitimate applications, any patient curious enough (or desperate enough) will likely have to pay out of pocket for multiple instances of the procedure at questionable clinics that offer functional medicine, wellness IVs, or that unduly extrapolate from early laboratory findings. It鈥檚 not cheap. I鈥檝e seen prices oscillating between 100 and 350$ per treatment, with multiple sessions being recommended and most clinics not accepting health insurance. I鈥檝e even seen it offered for .
If all of this sounds a lot like photobiomodulation鈥攖he use of light, often red or infrared light, to help the body heal itself鈥攊t鈥檚 because it kind of is. In fact, in the medical literature was authored by Michael R. Hamblin, Ph.D., a proponent of photobiomodulation. The major difference is the wavelength that is being used here. My take on photobiomodulation is that more and better studies are needed, and the same goes for UVBI, especially in light of the surge in antibiotic resistance. Having better weapons in our fight against infections is not a bad idea.
Before these studies materialize, though, I worry that UV blood irradiation will be mostly relegated to dodgy corners of the health industry that will claim it鈥檚 100% safe. But removing blood from the body and putting it back in requires sterility, and I don鈥檛 think I would trust a clinic offering hyperbaric oxygen chambers for wellness and unproven stem cell therapies to know what they are doing.
Keep in mind that as your blood drains out of your body, so does your money out of your wallet.
Take-home message:
- UV blood irradiation, which goes by a long list of other names, is the process of removing blood from the body, passing it in front of a UV lamp, and putting it back in the body, in order to treat illness
- There are very few legitimate medical applications of this procedure, mainly the treatment of a form of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (where cancer cells in the blood attack the skin)
- The technique is commonly offered by wellness clinics for every symptom or illness out there, with virtually no scientific evidence behind it
