Let me tell you a story of discovery. For years, I wondered why some people responded quickly to laser and others slowly. I asked the people who responded quickly questions like, “Do you eat healthy?” “Do you eat a lot of vegetables?” I never got a good answer that could tell me anything useful. 

I treat a woman around 65 years old; an athlete, in my opinion. She would bike for miles and miles, sweating up a storm, out there in the hot heat and loving every minute of it. She drank water all the time and always came in with a bottle of water and drank regularly. She had high blood pressure and was quite nervous about it. So she avoided salt, yet she craved it at times and would put a little in her palm and then eat it straight.

I worked on her for several years. We made changes in her pains, but they were slow. Oh, so slow. It drove me a little crazy and her as well. She would hear others come up after treatment and rave about how much better they felt. She was happy for them, but she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t seeing changes like that.

Then, one day she started having muscle pain all over her body. She had been convinced that she needed statins for high cholesterol. She had been on a low dose statin for a few months without any issues, but then a few months later they switched her medication and gave a strong dose. About a month later, she developed this muscle pain all over, and the athlete that I once knew now could hardly walk half a block. 

She was now scared and angry. The doctors told her to take a two-week ‘vacation’ from the medication, but after the two weeks, she didn’t feel any better, so she went to urgent care. 

Not sure what was going through the doctor’s mind at the urgent care, but the only thing they did for her was give her an IV bag of fluid. 

The next day at my office, she actually felt some better from the IV bag of fluid. But I noticed that she responded to the laser much faster than she usually did. What I mean is that when I would shine the laser on a spot, I could actually tell the muscle was letting go as the minutes went by.

Then it dawned on me, IT’S THE SALT.

Those IV bags have a lot of salt. It is salt that rehydrates you by allowing you to retain water, which is true hydration.

Now I knew what question to ask of the people who responded fast and those who responded slowly.

With the fast responders, when I asked if they ate a lot of salt, they would respond with statements like, “Oh, my family gives me such a hard time about how much salt I eat.” 

The slow responders restricted their salt, drank a lot of water, or both. 

Now I knew the extra component to helping people get out of pain, and it was SALT.

How important is it? Very important. Can I still help people out of pain without salt? Yes, but it seems to take longer and doesn’t work as well. 

Now you’re probably asking: how much salt? Which kind of salt? How often do I have to eat it? Let’s first cover the lies about salt and water: 

Lie #1: If you feel thirsty, you’re already dehydrated. What a lie! True dehydration is dangerous. Being thirsty is not dangerous. It’s your body’s way of telling you to drink some fluid. 

Lie #2: You need to drink a lot of water every day. What a lie! What you don’t realize is that every time you urinate, you lose salt (sodium, potassium, and trace minerals). Our kidneys act ‘like’ filters, but they are not filters like those in a car engine. The more you urinate, the more salts you lose in your urine. 

Lie #3: Your urine should be clear. What a lie! If your urine is clear, you’re drinking way too much and losing a lot of good nutrients.

Lie #4: To stay hydrated, you need to drink a lot of water. What a lie! Salt keeps you hydrated by holding fluid in your body. Salt attracts water. Yes, if you have too much, you can get a little swollen.

People are drinking all this water thinking they’re hydrating themselves. Yes, they’re putting water in, but they’re urinating it all out, along with the salts needed to keep the fluid in you.

What about high blood pressure? Let me tell you a story I heard from other doctors, and see if it makes sense to you. Then you can do with it what you and your doctor decide. Here’s the story. When a person doesn’t have enough salt, they cannot maintain their blood pressure. So the body has to do things. One of the things it does is release a chemical called aldosterone, which creates a hypertensive state to help maintain blood pressure so you don’t die. But your blood pressure can get too high with this method, so when you go to your doctor and they take your blood pressure, they freak out and put you on blood pressure medications, most likely, for the rest of your life. Then they tell you to eat less salt, and you hear everywhere to drink more water, which aggravates the salt deficiency. 

What if, someday, they find out that we’ve all been lied to and that salt is the answer for high blood pressure? Sounds crazy, right? Let’s see.

As for the type of salt you should eat, choose a complete salt like sea salt, Himalayan salt, or any salt that isn’t just sodium chloride, like in Morton’s Salt.

In my office, I have the LMNT product packs. These are one-serving powder packets with sodium, potassium, and a little magnesium, and are flavored quite nicely. I keep them there for people who need extra salt before I laser them. It seems to help, but what I really prefer is that they start salting their meals. One dose of salt a few times a week won’t do much for you. It has to be consistent and long-term. 

For example, I just had a 25-year-old woman in my office with a lot of right shoulder pain. It had been developing for a year and a half and had gotten quite bad. As I was lasering her, we both felt things just letting go. I worked on her for over an hour and had her doing pushups with her knees on the ground –> No pain. She and her husband were freaking out. He said, “There’s no way she could have done that before.” BUT, she loved salt. Probably most of her life. She had a lot of salt in her body (bones, muscles, etc) so she responded really quickly to laser. Plus, she was young and fit. 

So what’s the answer? SALT and LIGHT. But a special type of laser is needed to get deep into the tissues.

Why does salt help?

I wondered why salt helped. I knew sodium and potassium were +1 charged ions, just like lithium. In fact, in the first column of the periodic table are hydrogen, lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, and cesium.

Have you heard of lithium-ion batteries? Of course you have. They’re in your cellphone and almost all electronic devices. If you have a Tesla vehicle, you have lithium-ion batteries powering it.

Have you heard of sodium ion batteries? Probably not, but this is the new technology that’s replacing lithium-ion batteries. And this isn’t in a lab; it’s being used commercially right now.

Have you heard of potassium ion batteries? Probably not, but this is a newer technology too.

We are more like batteries than we care to admit. So why, oh why, are we depriving ourselves of lithium, sodium, and potassium? It’s the dumbest thing.

Did you know that lithium, sodium, and potassium are metals? Yes. You can get a sample on Amazon, but the sample comes in a little glass container filled with oil so it doesn’t react with water or oxygen or whatever it reacts with. 

You don’t think of salt as being metal, but it is. These salts are a form of metal we can, and do, use in our bodies.

What do you think of when I say lithium in health care? You probably think of major psychiatric problems because they use lithium drugs to help these people.

Because of this, people are scared to take natural forms of lithium. This is too bad, because Lithium Orotate (the natural form of lithium) is incredible for a number of things. In this context, I’m thinking energy production, but it helps with a whole host of other things. I’ve seen articles on depression and dementia being helped with lithium orotate. I personally saw my mom’s memory and function improve dramatically just by taking 1 pill (10mg of lithium orotate) one time per day. But because it’s a natural product, it cannot be patented, so you never hear about it. Then, if you talk to your doctor about it, they say it could interact with your medications. Maybe it can in some cases, but they probably don’t know much about it and just say, “don’t do it.”

Sodium and potassium are vital for energy production, nerve function, healthy water retention, and keeping water where it should be in the body. Yet people deprive themselves of these critical elements.

I don’t fully understand why salt helps with energy production, but I can say this in one sentence. Salt increases the voltage along the inner mitochondrial membrane in the mitochondria of all our cells. All this means is that we can make more cellular energy with adequate quantities of salt than with insufficient quantities. This is a branch of BioPhysics which I didn’t even realize existed until recently.

I’ve gone way overboard talking about salt, but I don’t hear anyone talking about this… Anywhere!!! Yet it is a missing component that other laser providers most likely are completely unaware of. This page will hopefully help other healthcare providers, and you have a different perspective on salt.