Color Therapy (chromotherapy)

What is Color Therapy?

Color Therapy (also called chromotherapy or chromatherapy) is the application of color in various ways for purposes of healing and maintaining optimum health. It is a natural and noninvasive therapy without side effects, and is extremely powerful in the field of prevention.

Color therapy is a holistic practice concerned with nourishing and balancing vital life energy and is complementary to all other holistic practices such as homeopathy, yoga, massage therapy, reflexology, chiropractic, acupuncture, Riki, naturopathy, and so on. Color therapy is the fastest growing spa treatment in the United States.

History of Color Therapy

New applications are currently in the experimental or research stages in many leading universities, however, color therapy is certainly not new. In fact, color therapy it is one of the very first healing treatments that we know of. The ancient Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, and other major cultures made significant medical use of color. The use of individual colors for their healing properties continued throughout history and was practiced by the medical profession right up until the discovery of penicillin. Color therapy, along with many other natural therapies, was then quickly replaced by pharmaceuticals. A comprehensive history of color therapy can be found here.

Understanding Color Therapy

To understand color therapy you must understand color. Color therapy is not "voodoo" or magic. Color therapy is based on the understandable scientific principles of light and color and their biological, psychological, and emotional and spiritual effects on human beings.

What is color?

In 1676 Sir Isaac Newton found that colors were the children of light. By passing sunlight through a prism, he found the seven colors of the rainbow and recognized that color comes to us in the form of powerful electromagnetic energy.

Color is a form of radiation as are x-rays, ultraviolet rays, and microwaves. The difference is that the radiation of colored light is visible to us. Various frequencies of the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, from 700 to 400 nanometers, are known to us as the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Each has its own purpose and effect on living organisms. Traveling together, we see the mix of all color radiation as white light or daylight.

Selective Absorption

We are able to see individual colors because of a process called selective absorption. All substances, including the human body, selectively absorb only the energies they need from light. The energy that is not needed is reflected from the surface rather than absorbed. It is this reflected portion of light energy that we see as color.

Consider a red apple for example. We see an apple as red because the only light energy not absorbed by the apple is the red frequency. The energy of orange, yellow, green, blue and violet are absorbed by the apple and used as its necessary nutrients in order to live and grow. The red energy is not needed by the apple and is reflected rather than absorbed, allowing us to see the apple as red.

Light, which contains the full spectrum of color, is a basic human nutrient and is absorbed by the human body in order to live and grow. Indeed, light is our very life-force. As colors are the components of light, you can understand the importance and implications of color therapy.

Doctor Recommended

Many esteemed physicians recommend dichromatic or LED lamps for color and light therapy and refer their patients to us. Click here for more information.

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