I Scanned My Skin Before and After Using Shark's CryoGlow for 8 Weeks. I Was Surprised
Youth is wasted on the young, as the saying goes, and certainly my collagen reserves were wasted on me in my twenties. With no skin care routine in sight and a (now-alien) belief that sunscreen was merely optional, I just assumed that plump, glowy, fine-line-free skin would always stick around. Spoiler alert: It didn't, and now I'm trying everything to put things right.
Red light therapy is one of the most discussed skin care hacks right now, in what is becoming an increasingly scientific, research-led space. It's not new, exactly—I was reading about its benefits five or more years ago, but it has crept slowly out of doctors' offices and into at-home devices. The Shark CryoGlow is one of the more recent launches in this space.
As a US Food and Drug Administration–cleared mask, it has been developed with dermatologists and comes with its fair share of bold claims from clinical trials. It uses Shark's iQLED technology, which combines red, blue, and deep infrared light into two modes focused on blemish clearing and fine-line reduction. The quoted stats are certainly impressive—under daily use, Shark says, the mask has been clinically tested to improve acne, redness, and skin smoothness in four weeks, while wrinkles and skin luminosity were improved in eight weeks.
Photograph: Shark
The CryoGlow also has a little extra party trick up its sleeve, in the form of the under-eye cooling pads, which have three levels of chill to help tackle tired and puffy eyes.
I decided to put all these claims to the test by stopping all active skin care and strapping the mask to my face every day for over eight weeks. While I planned to document the changes myself, I also thought it might be helpful to dig a little deeper into the condition of my skin, so I could better assess the changes (if any) that the CryoGlow delivered in the timeframe.
I spoke to Sally Wheeler, who runs an aesthetics business and is a lead aesthetics nurse for the British Association of Medical Aesthetic Nurses. She recommended I try a device called the Observ 520x, an in-clinic skin-analyzing device that takes photos to assess skin health, both on the surface and below. I would do this before and after my review period of at least eight weeks to see how my results compare.
My main skin concerns I was keen to tackle with the mask were fine lines, skin dullness, and puffy eyes, but as it turns out, the impact of the mask went deeper than that. Skin Deep
Photograph: Verity Burns
There are two main modes on the Shark CryoGlow—Better Aging (six minutes; red and infrared LED) and Blemish Repair (eight minutes; blue, red, and infrared). You can use either of these with or without the under-eye cooling on, plus there is also just a mode for the under-eye pads if you need a boost. The Skin Sustain mode, which also uses all three lights, is a shorter, four-minute program that Shark encourages you to use after completing one of the longer programs for at least eight weeks.
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Gizmodo
31 minutes ago
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RFK Jr. Is Opening the Alternative Medicine Floodgates
Snake oil salesmen will be eating good during the Trump presidency. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently declared that he will greatly expand people's access to experimental and alternative medical treatments, even while acknowledging that a 'lot of charlatans' are likely to take advantage of suffering people as a result. RFK Jr. made the announcement during a recent interview on the Ultimate Human Podcast hosted by Gary Brecka, a self-proclaimed biologist, biohacker, and longevity expert (Brecka appears to possess two bachelors' degrees in biology, but is not a licensed medical doctor). Kennedy stated that, under his reign as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Americans will more easily be able to get their hands on treatments not currently approved by health regulators. 'If you want to take an experimental drug—you can do that, you ought to be able to do that,' Kennedy told Brecka. While many patient advocates in general have pushed for looser regulations surrounding experimental or off-label treatments, other experts have cautioned that it's important to strike a balance between improved access and safety. And it's unlikely Kennedy's approach will meet that threshold. For starters, Kennedy has long spread misinformation about vaccines (one of the most effective medical interventions ever created), nutrition, and other health topics. And he's no stranger to backing alternative treatments that have next to no evidence supporting their use. During this latest interview, for instance, he referenced chelation and stem cells as unproven therapies that people should have easier access to. Stem cell medicine is a legitimate and growing field of research. But direct-to-consumer stem cell clinics often exaggerate their benefits, claiming stem cells can treat everything from cancer to long covid. In recent years, this cottage industry has exploded in the U.S. and overseas, and some patients have been severely injured from buying into the hype. People have experienced pulmonary embolisms, bacterial infections, and other serious complications, including blindness, from visiting these clinics. The risk-balance equation is arguably even worse with chelation therapy. Chelation involves using drugs that bind to heavy metals in the body, allowing them to be excreted out through urine. It's an effective treatment for certain kinds of acute poisoning or toxic exposures. But in alternative medicine circles, chelation is regularly used to 'cleanse' people of supposed toxins dubiously blamed for a bevy of chronic illnesses, including autism. As with stem cells, people have gotten hurt or died after taking chelation for unapproved uses. RFK seems to be fully aware of the potential danger that would come with making these treatments easier to access, yet brushed that off as inevitable during his interview. 'And of course you're going to get a lot of charlatans, and you're going to get people who have bad results,' he said. 'And ultimately, you can't prevent that either way. Leaving the whole thing in the hands of pharma is not working for us.' The Food and Drug Administration has previously warned the public to stay away from chelation therapy for autism and from unregulated stem cell treatments, but who knows if these warnings will stay up for much longer. Kennedy and the Trump Administration have repeatedly undermined approved medical treatments like vaccines. Now he's set to open the floodgates for unlicensed drugs that may not work or will harm people desperate enough to use them.
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41 minutes ago
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Despite Kennedy's claims, vaccines have been tested in placebo-controlled studies – nearly 260 of them
Vaccines New in medicine Children's health Federal agenciesFacebookTweetLink Follow US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly claimed in public statements that most vaccines recommended for children in the US have not been tested against placebos, and particularly inert placebos such as saline solution or water. 'The only vaccine that has been tested in a full-blown placebo trial against an inert placebo was the Covid vaccine,' Kennedy said May 14 in testimony before the US Senate's Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee. 'The other 76 shots that children in this country received between birth and 18 years old, none of them have been safety tested in prelicensing studies against the placebo, which means we don't understand the risk profile for those products, and that's something I intend to remedy,' he told Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut. In 2023, Kennedy told Fox News host Jesse Watters: 'Vaccines are exempt from prelicensing placebo-controlled trials, so that there's no way that anybody can tell the risk profile of those products or even the relative benefits of those products before they're mandated. And we should have that kind of testing.' HHS is acting on Kennedy's claims, too. The department recently announced it will require all new vaccines be tested in placebo-controlled trials before they're licensed for use, a change it called 'a radical departure from past practices.' These claims made Dr. Jake Scott's ears perk up. Scott, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University, knew that the assertions couldn't be true, and now he says he has the proof. Scott launched a project in April to round up every randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial of vaccines in the medical literature, including studies run in other countries, since some vaccines used in the US are tested overseas. It took five weeks to arrive at a number: There have been 258 placebo-controlled clinical trials of vaccines, according to Scott and a team of volunteers who scoured databases of medical literature. More than half of those studies tested vaccines against inert placebos. Based on Scott's research, at least nine of the 16 vaccines that are routinely recommended by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for children have been tested against inert placebos, while several more have been tested against active placebos. In scientific research, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials are considered to generate the highest-quality evidence. That's because they split their study participants into equal groups; some get the study intervention or treatment, while others get a placebo or dummy remedy. Placebos are often carefully designed to look, taste or even smell like the intervention that's being tested. 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Together, they scoured PubMed, the database of medical research maintained by the National Library of Medicine, as well as reference lists from Cochrane, the World Health Organization and the CDC. Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto, said he was blown away when he saw the final list of studies, which included about 2.5 million participants in total. 'The body of evidence for many of the vaccines that we use is very impressive, and the data is robust,' said Bogoch, who didn't contribute to the project. 'This type of work is extremely important in era of unprecedented vaccine hesitancy.' Scott said the research proves that Kennedy's statements are 'demonstrably false.' To understand why, it's useful to break down the parts of Kennedy's argument, which he has repeated in different iterations for years. Kennedy has shifted the goalposts, but there are a few things he has said would make a clinical trial meet his requirements: First, an inert placebo, meaning a placebo control that didn't have any biological effects on the body, like water or saline solution. Kennedy has said that without comparison to an inert placebo, the true side effects of vaccines can't be fully understood. He also uses the term 'prelicensing,' meaning the research is conducted before the US Food and Drug Administration has approved the vaccines. The FDA sometimes accepts enough evidence to approve a vaccine but then will require more safety studies and monitoring after approval. Kennedy and other critics argue that more safety testing should be done before the vaccines are approved in the first place. In some instances, Kennedy has also said that these studies should be large, including many participants, and long-running. 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'You know that the Cochrane Collaboration in 2016 published a study that showed that the predictive capacity of placebo-controlled trials, which are the gold standard, is actually not any better than good observational trials in retrospective trials. So we can do those kind of studies without subjecting people to an unethical experiment,' Kennedy said during a May 20 Senate budget hearing when asked about the need to test established vaccines in large, lengthy placebo-controlled trials. In his 2021 book, 'The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,' Kennedy repeats the claim that vaccines for children haven't been tested against inert placebos, saying that he and groups he's affiliated with have explicitly asked to be shown such studies. He cites two letters between the Informed Consent Action Network or ICAN, a group run by his close associate Del Bigtree, and HHS. 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When it comes to vaccines routinely recommended for children, specifically, Scott found that at least nine of the 16 on the CDC's regular schedule have been tested against inert placebos: These are the vaccines against Covid-19; rotavirus; polio; influenza; measles, mumps and rubella; human papillomavirus; varicella, or chickenpox; pneumococcal; and H-flu, or Haemophilus influenzae. One of the largest of these trials was on the polio vaccine. The placebo-controlled part of the study included more than 400,000 grade-schoolers. Half got the inactivated polio vaccine created by Dr. Jonas Salk, and the other half were given injections of an inert placebo, which was saline solution. The trial was conducted in 1954, and the results were announced in April 1955. So great was the urgency to get the vaccine to kids that the FDA licensed it the same day. 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It also allows researchers to isolate the benefits and side effects of the vaccine proteins, since everyone got the adjuvant. 'You're literally saying, 'OK, we're testing a vaccine that has ingredient A plus B against a non-vaccine placebo that has ingredient B.' So the only thing different between the two of them is the actual vaccine,' Poland said. An active comparator might also be used rather than an inert placebo because of ethics. When there's already a vaccine that's considered to be safe and effective against an infection, it's considered unethical to deny study participants the chance to get it. In that case, companies that want to test a new and improved version of a vaccine against an older one would normally have to offer participants in their control group the older vaccine. Many modern vaccines have been compared against older versions of the same vaccine. Flu vaccines are a good example, Poland says. If you were testing an improved type of flu vaccine, chances are that the board that oversees your clinical trial wouldn't approve a study that used an inert placebo – especially if you were testing it in a vulnerable group, like people over 65, for whom an infection is more likely to be dangerous. 'It's unethical because the recommendation is that everyone, each flu season, receive an influenza vaccine. So it'd be unethical to enroll people in a study where they may just get placebo and not get any benefit of protection,' Poland said. Poland said he's been puzzled by Kennedy's statements, too. He's concerned that they are getting traction with the public now that Kennedy is the head of the nation's health agencies. 'This notion that there are no placebo-controlled vaccine trials is patently false, but it's a really interesting phenomenon that I have a hard time understanding,' he said.
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an hour ago
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