Chromotherapy

Chromotherapy, sometimes called color therapy, colorology or cromatherapy, is an alternative medicine that is considered pseudoscience and quackery. Chromotherapists claim to be able to use light in the form of color to balance "energy" lacking from a person's body, whether it be on physical, emotional, spiritual, or mental levels. For example, they thought that shining a colored light on a person would cure constipation. Color therapy is unrelated to photomedicine, such as phototherapy and blood irradiation therapy, which are scientifically accepted medical treatments for a number of conditions, as well as being unrelated to photobiology, which is the scientific study of the effects of light on living organisms. Avicenna (980–1037), seeing color as of vital importance both in diagnosis and in treatment, discussed chromotherapy in The Canon of Medicine. He wrote that "color is an observable symptom of disease" and also developed a chart that related color to the temperature and physical condition of the body. His view was that red moved the blood, blue or white cooled it, and yellow reduced muscular pain and inflammation. Pioneer of photography Robert Hunt performed experiments on the effects of different wavelengths of light on the germination and growth of plants, detailed in his 1844 book Researches on Light. Apparently influenced by this work, from 1860 Augustus Pleasonton started to conduct original experiments, and in 1876 published the book The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Color of the Sky, detailing how the color blue can improve the growth of crops and livestock and can help heal diseases in humans. This led to the birth of modern chromotherapy, influencing contemporary scientists Dr. Seth Pancoast and Edwin Dwight Babbitt to conduct experiments and publish Blue and Red Light; or, Light and Its Rays as Medicine (1877) and The Principles of Light and Color (1878) respectively. Throughout the 19th century "color healers" claimed colored glass filters could treat many diseases, including constipation and meningitis.