The evidence
The evidence
This is the research behind the method RELUXA uses, and what it does and doesn't say about this wrap in particular. There is no trial on the RELUXA Recovery Wrap. Nobody in this category has one on their own device, and anybody implying they do is describing someone else's work.
So rather than list papers, we've gone through it the way you'd actually use the thing — by where you'd put it.
The only claim we make
Pain. That's it, and it's the only claim on our ARTG entry.
Some of the research below was done in people with osteoarthritis, because that's who gets recruited into knee trials. We are not claiming RELUXA treats osteoarthritis, or any other condition. What those trials measured was pain, and pain is what we're talking about. Nothing on this page is evidence about hormones, hot flushes, sleep or mood, and we don't cite it as though it were.
Why 660 and 850, and not some other number
The wrap runs two wavelengths: 660nm visible red, and 850nm near-infrared.
The most useful thing in the research isn't that light works — it's that dose and wavelength decide whether it works. The knee review below found effects clustered at 4–8 joules per treatment spot in the 785–860nm band, and much weaker effects outside the recommended doses. 850nm sits inside that band. That's why it's the number.
Here's the part most brands would leave out. We have not published our own measured output at the skin. So while we can tell you our wavelength sits in the effective range, we cannot yet tell you we deliver the effective dose. Until we've had that measured and published, we're not going to claim it. If and when we do, it goes on this page.
The knee — the strongest evidence we have
Stausholm et al., BMJ Open, 2019. Twenty-two randomised placebo-controlled trials, 1,063 people.
Pain fell by 14.2mm on a 100mm scale compared with placebo at the end of treatment. At the recommended doses that rose to 18.7mm, and to 31.9mm two to four weeks after treatment finished — which is worth noting, because it's the opposite of how a painkiller behaves. Disability improved too.
This is the best paper we can point you at, for three reasons: the knee is somewhere you'd actually wrap this, the effective wavelength band covers ours, and it's open access — you can read the entire thing for free rather than an abstract behind a paywall.
Musculoskeletal pain generally
Clijsen et al., European Journal of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, 2017. Eighteen studies, 21 comparisons, 1,462 people, across musculoskeletal disorders rather than one joint.
Pain fell by an average of 0.85 points more than in the control groups — and by roughly twice that, 1.52 points, in the studies that followed the dosage guidance. The same dose-response, in a broader population.
The authors also report high and statistically significant variation between studies. That's a technical way of saying the trials don't all agree with each other, and you should know that.
The lower back — where the evidence is weakest
This is the one we'd rather you heard from us.
The lower back is the site most people will use this wrap on. It is also the site with the least supportive review in the literature. Cochrane — the most demanding name in evidence synthesis — looked at low-level laser therapy for nonspecific low back pain and concluded there were “insufficient data to either support or refute” its effectiveness.
Two things are true about that. It's from 2008, and it predates the dose-response work that has since become the most important finding in this field — several of the trials it assessed used doses now understood to be too low. And nobody has repeated it to that standard since, which means the honest position on the lower back specifically is: unresolved.
We sell a wrap that goes round a lower back. We're telling you the best review of that exact question couldn't call it. Make of that what you will — but you now know it, and you'd have struggled to find a competitor who'd tell you.
The neck — which this wrap isn't for
The most cited paper in this field is Chow et al., The Lancet, 2009: sixteen randomised trials, 820 people. It concluded that low-level laser therapy “reduced pain immediately after treatment in acute neck pain, and for up to 22 weeks after completion of treatment, in patients with chronic neck pain.”
We're including it because it's the reason this method is taken seriously at all, not because it applies to you. RELUXA doesn't go on a neck.
And it has been criticised. The Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at the University of York assessed it independently and noted the trials were small, that the quality scale used didn't check allocation concealment, that there was considerable variation between trials in settings, sites and diagnoses, and that half the trials didn't report side effects at all. Their verdict: the conclusions “should be interpreted with a degree of caution.”
We link that on purpose. A company that shows you a review but not the appraisal of the review is managing you.
Read the review · Read the independent appraisal
One more gap: those trials used lasers. This is LED.
Almost all of the research above used laser. RELUXA uses LEDs. That's a real difference and it deserves a real answer rather than a shrug.
The most direct treatment of the question is Heiskanen and Hamblin, Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences, 2018, which reviewed the comparison and concluded the two produce comparable effects when wavelength and dose are matched — with LEDs better suited to treating large areas, to wearable devices, and to use at home.
Our caveat, so you're not relying on ours alone: that paper is a narrative review rather than a meta-analysis, and Hamblin is the field's most prominent advocate. It's the best answer available to the question. It isn't a trial.
What all of that adds up to
Four things, honestly.
The method has real work behind it. Thousands of people across randomised placebo-controlled trials, in The Lancet, in BMJ Open, in Cochrane. That is more than almost anything else sold in this category can say.
Dose decides it. Every review that split its trials by dose found the same thing: at the right dose it works better, and at the wrong dose it barely works at all. That's the single most important line on this page, and it's why a cheap belt with unspecified output is not the same purchase.
The effects are modest. Under a point on a ten-point scale in the broader review. This is not a painkiller and we've never described it as one. If you're expecting the arithmetic of a tablet, this is the wrong thing to buy.
And it's strongest where you might not expect. The evidence is best at the knee, decent across musculoskeletal pain generally, and genuinely unresolved at the lower back — which is where most people will put it.
What we'd have to see before we said more
Our own measured output at the skin, published, with the test house named. And a randomised controlled trial on this wrap, in this population, at this dose.
We have neither. When we have the first, it goes here. If we ever have the second, it goes here too — including if it doesn't say what we hoped.
The bit you can check in a minute
RELUXA is included in the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods as a Class IIa medical device, ARTG 452667. That's a regulatory file, not a marketing badge, and most of what's sold in this category in Australia isn't on that register.
The intended purpose on our entry, copied out in full:
The Red Light Therapy Device is intended to provide Red and Infrared light to relieve pain in the body of adults. Red light is used to relieve skin surface pain; Infrared light is used to relieve muscle pain; Red + infrared light is used to relieve both skin surface pain and muscle pain.
That is the whole of what we're permitted to claim, and the whole of what we do claim.