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Light therapy is one of the first methods of medical intervention that doctors use for people having SAD symptoms. SAD or Seasonal Affective Depression is something that affects a certain portion of the population during l-tryptophan effects. Mostly this is during winter, although there have been cases where people have displayed SAD symptoms even in summer.
SAD Information
Nobody knows exactly why people get SAD during winter. Yet the fact that people do seem to get depressed in winter is well documented and has been known as the winter blues, or winter depression for generations.
Research into SAD information shows that most doctors are of the consensus that sunlight plays a vital role in the incidence of SAD. This is borne out by the fact that it is only in countries that have very little sunlight in winter that SAD is found.
Light Therapy Effectiveness
For over 20 years now, light therapy has been found to be effective as a SAD medication. Although nowadays people prefer do I need a prescription to take tryptophan to ward off this feeling, light therapy, where the person displaying SAD symptoms are made to sit in front of fluorescent lights for at least half an hour has been found to be the most effective.
This is not to say that natural antidepressant pills or SSID medication is not effective. On the contrary SAD information shows that they have been found to be very effective. The only problem is that these medicines do not seem to have any long term effect and most people who are on SAD medication tend to keep getting SAD on a recurring basis.
Light Therapy Possible Side Effects
Light therapy on the other hand seems to have a very positive effect and most people tend to start showing improvement after only 20 minutes of sitting in front of artificial light.
Fluorescent lights are used simply because they tend to give out a wider bandwidth in light spectrum than incandescent bulbs. The lights used are special ones that can emit up to 10,000 lux in a wide spectrum band, although recent research seems to suggest that green light is better at reducing SAD symptoms than blue light.
The only problem with light therapy as SAD medication is that a person will have to sit between 1 and 2 feet distance from the light source, without looking at it directly, but glancing at it occasionally. This is very boring, and sitting in one position, staring into nothing for an hour a day is not something that many people want to do.
With the effectiveness of natural antidepressant supplements and other SSIDs more and more people are preferring to go with them even though SAD information categorically states that light therapy is the best form of treatment.
Although light therapy has been used for such a long time in the treatment of SAD, most of the SAD information that we have is from research that has been conducted in the recent past. With more research going into finding out what exactly causes SAD, it is possible that other, better treatment is possible in future.
