Peak LiLT, LLC is owned by Melinda Couch, PT and the laser therapy business is now housed inside her other business, Westside PT, LLC on the westside of Colorado Springs.
Melinda discovered the benefits of Low Intensity Light/Laser Therapy and specifically the work of Dr. Fred Kahn of Meditech International in Toronto, Canada back in 2015. At that time she co-jointly opened Peak LiLT, LLC with Jeff Bickford, GCFP to offer laser therapy for healing soft tissue injuries and other conditions to the Colorado Springs region. She now owns and operates Peak LiLT, LLC independently with the help of clinic manager, Bryce Martin, LMT. We describe in the paragraphs below the work and research of Dr. Kahn, and you can also learn more in Dr. Norman Doidge’s 2015 book, The Brain’s Way of Healing in Chapter 4 of the book: “Rewiring a Brain with Light.”
One of the leading researchers of low intensity light therapy is Fred Kahn, MD of Toronto, Canada. Dr. Kahn’s medical training is as a general and vascular surgeon. He studied vascular surgery at Massachusetts General Surgery and at Baylor Hospital in Houston, Texas with one of the finest heart transplant surgeons in the world. He stumbled upon laser therapy in 1986 when he had been convinced by a colleague to try the treatment for his torn rotator cuff tendon. The laser treatments worked and he avoided surgery! He began focusing all of his attention on studying and applying light therapy to his patients in wound healing. He obtained remarkable success and eventually had a light therapy system built for his research and use with his patients. This was the Bioflex Low Intensity Light System and is what Dr. Kahn utilizes today at his three clinics across Canada (Meditech International with two locations in Toronto and one in Vancouver). Meditech treats 1,500 patients per week with over an 80% success rate in promoting healing to various conditions such as sprained ligaments, muscle strains, bulging and herniated discs, degenerative joint conditions, wound-healing and brain injury.
This is NOT JUST Cold Laser. It is a 3-Step Process:
Red light SLED’s are utilized first to prepare the tissues for deeper healing and to help improve circulation. This is followed by a near-infrared band of SLED’s. This light penetrates about 5 centimeters into the body spreading the healing light deeper still. Finally a Class 3b cold laser probe of concentrated infrared light is utilized.
A probe can deliver much more power than SLED’s, in a focused beam that goes very deep. Dr. Kahn found via research and clinical use that if only cold laser is applied it is not able to penetrate as deeply into the tissues (to be able to reach disc tissue or cartilage in a hip joint for example). It is much more effective if red then near-infrared light are applied first.
This is what makes the Bioflex System so unique compared to other laser therapy systems on the market today. Most other units are either cold laser alone, infrared and red light mixed together (without cold laser), or red light and infrared LED’s and cold laser diodes in one head that come on simultaneously rather than in a specific sequence.
In addition to this, Dr. Kahn has found that TIME is a very important parameter for light to be able to heal tissues. Treatments with the Bioflex take 30 minutes to over an hour depending on what area of the body is being treated. Therefore if only a cold laser is applied to an arthritic knee joint or a herniated disc in the lumbar spine for just 5-10 minutes (which is the common application used in many clinics), it is highly unlikely that very much tissue healing will occur.