Why Pulsing is Counterproductive for Red Light Therapy
A lot of the pulsing hype derives from a 2010 study showing the positive effects of pulsing light, however this was done with lasers not LEDs. Lasers operate fundamentally differently to LEDs and produce far more heat which can even burn patients, with the authors saying “because there are “quench periods” (pulse OFF times) following the pulse ON times, pulsed lasers can generate less tissue heating. This increased power can cause tissue heating at the surface layers and in this instance pulsed light could be very useful". Therefore the benefit of pulsed light refers to laser safety safety because you could treat a patient with "potentially much higher peak power densities than those that could be safely used in CW [continuous wave i.e. non-pulsed light]". But this is irrelevant to LEDs because they do not produce nearly the same heat as lasers and studies indicate that red light therapy is safe³. There's simply no need to have an "OFF time" with modern LED red light therapy panels like the Hero300.
Further, were you to use pulsing in your red light therapy sessions, you would be unnecessarily halving the amount of light received in any given treatment period because half the time the lights would be off. This means you would need to treat yourself for twice as long to get the same total exposure time, wasting time and electricity.
Finally, if you look through the photobiomodulation literature you will see most studies on red light therapy used continuous wave light.
This is why we opted to omit pulsing from the Hero60 and Hero300, passing on the savings to you. Pulsing is simply not necessary and, in our view, is even counterproductive.
As an aside, pulsing light can also entrain the brain into alpha, delta and theta states visually, similarly to how binaural beats can do so through the auditory system. However this does not require any particular wavelength of light nor much power, you could even just use your phone screen for neural entrainment (certainly not worth upping the cost of the Hero300!). And in case you're curious, here are some free pure binaural beats for auditory entrainment (we find this a relaxing alternative to visual entrainment, just put it on headphones in the background at super low volume so you forget it's even playing).