Red light therapy has been rising in popularity, but with a lot of posts about it on social media, it's hard to know if what's being promised is backed by science. Physician and board-certified anesthesiologist Dr. Azza Halim, who works at the Sanctuary Medical Center, says red light therapy isn't new.

"Because of social media, TikTok, more people are trying it, getting on that bandwagon," Dr. Halim said.

An article published on NASA explains research funded by NASA used red light therapy to grow plants in space in the mid-1990s. Pretty soon, NASA scientists working under the lights discovered that abrasions on their hands were healing faster than normal. Dr. Rich Joseph is a chief medical officer for Restore Hyper Wellness, which offers red light therapy at more than 125 locations nationwide.

"Red light, in particular, we're learning, might have more advantageous properties for healing because of its ability to penetrate the skin because of its longer wavelengths," Dr. Joseph said.

Both he and Dr. Halim say there are a few medical studies regarding red light therapy.

One study suggests an increase in collagen density. Collagen provides structure and strength to your skin, muscles, bones and connective tissues. Another study suggests there are potential psychological benefits for people facing depression and anxiety.

However, Dr. Joseph cautions someone facing mental health issues should also seek out treatment from mainstream medicine like the use of anti-depressants. Dr. Halim says red light therapy should always be considered as an addition to your wellness practice.

"It needs to be used in conjunction with other therapies because there's been controversy with people trying to upsell red light therapy," Dr. Halim said.

Dr. Joseph says more clinical trials are needed to confirm its effectiveness as a treatment. What he can confirm is that red light therapy is safe because it won't cause skin damage like UV rays from the sun. Before you decide to spend your money on this growing trend, Dr. Halim suggests you talk with your physician to see what makes the most sense for you.

 

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she had not decided if the U.S. House of Representatives will join the Senate in backing a bill to ban TikTok from federal employee devices.

The legislation would aim to prevent federal employees from using the China-owned app on government-owned equipment.

Kiichiro Sato/AP

A group of bipartisan lawmakers recently unveiled a new bill that would ban the app's use in the U.S.

The legislation come after years of concern through the Trump and Biden administrations that the Chinese government could potentially be influencing to company to work in a nefarious way.

TikTok has said U.S. user data is stored safely outside of China, and said it should be out of reach of government officials.

WASHINGTON —

Democrats brushed aside months-long divisions and approached House passage of their expansive social and environment bill Friday, as President Joe Biden and his party neared a defining win in their drive to use their control of government to funnel its resources toward their domestic priorities.

Final passage, which had been expected Thursday, was delayed as Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., held it up with an hours-long broadside criticizing Biden, Democrats and the bill. Most Democrats abandoned the chamber after midnight with McCarthy still talking, and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., told reporters that leaders planned for passage later Friday.

House approval was still expected on a near party-line vote. That would send the measure to a Senate where cost-cutting demands by moderate Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and that chamber’s strict rules seemed certain to force significant changes. That will prompt fresh disputes between party centrists and moderates that will likely take weeks to resolve.

Even so, House passage would mark a watershed for a measure remarkable for the breadth and depth of the changes it would make in federal policies. Wrapped into one bill were far-reaching changes in taxation, health care, energy, climate change, family services, education and housing. That underscored Democrats’ desire to achieve their goals while controlling the White House and Congress — a dominance that could well end after next year’s midterm elections.

“Too many Americans are just barely getting by in our economy,” Hoyer said. “And we simply can’t go back to the way things were before the pandemic.”

House passage would also give Biden a momentary taste of victory, and probably relief, during perhaps the rockiest period of his presidency. He’s been battered by falling approval numbers in polls, reflecting voters’ concerns over inflation, gridlocked supply chains and the persistent coronavirus pandemic, leaving Democrats worried that their legislative efforts are not breaking through to voters.

Biden this week signed a $1 trillion package of highway and other infrastructure projects, another priority that overcame months of internal Democratic battling. The president has spent recent days promoting that measure around the country.

McCarthy spent over eight hours on his feet, at times shouting or rasping hoarsely. Democrats sporadically booed and groaned as McCarthy glared back, underscoring partisan hostility only deepened by this week’s censure of Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., for threatening tweets aimed at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

McCarthy, who hopes to become speaker if Republicans capture the chamber in next year’s elections, recited problems the country has faced under Biden, including inflation, China's rise and large numbers of immigrants crossing the Southwest border. “Yeah, I want to go back,” he said in mocking reference to the “Build Back Better” name Biden uses for the legislation.

House rules do not limit how long party leaders may speak. In 2018, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., minority leader at the time, held the floor for over eight hours demanding action on immigration. McCarthy passed that mark just before 5 a.m. Friday.

The House inched toward a final vote after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the package would worsen federal deficits by $160 billion over the coming decade. The agency also recalculated the measure’s 10-year price tag at $1.68 trillion, though that figure wasn’t directly comparable to a $1.85 trillion figure Democrats have been using.

The 2,100-page bill’s initiatives include bolstering child care assistance, creating free preschool, curbing seniors’ prescription drug costs and beefing up efforts to slow climate change. Also included are tax credits to spur clean energy development, bolstered child care assistance and extended tax breaks for millions of families with children, lower-earning workers and people buying private health insurance.

Most of it would be paid for by tax increases on the wealthy, big corporations and companies doing business abroad.

The measure would provide $109 billion to create free preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds. There are large sums for home health care for seniors, new Medicare coverage for hearing and a new requirement for four weeks of paid family leave. The family leave program, however, was expected to be removed in the Senate, where it’s been opposed by Manchin.

There is also language letting the government issue work permits to millions of immigrants that would let them stay in the U.S. temporarily, and $297 billion in savings from letting the government curb prescription drug costs. The fate of both those provisions is uncertain in the Senate, where the chamber’s nonpartisan parliamentarian enforces rules that limit provisions allowed in budget bills.

In one major but expected difference with the White House, CBO estimated that the bill’s added $80 billion to beef up IRS tax enforcement would let it collect $207 billion in new revenue over the coming decade. That meant net savings of $127 billion, well below the White House’s more optimistic $400 billion estimate.

In a scorekeeping quirk, CBO officially estimated that the overall legislation would drive up federal deficits by $367 billion over the coming decade. But agency guidelines require it to ignore IRS savings when measuring a bill’s deficit impact, and it acknowledged that the measure’s true impact would worsen shortfalls by $160 billion when counting added revenue the IRS would collect.

Biden and other Democratic leaders have said the measure would pay for itself, largely through tax increases on the wealthy, big corporations and companies doing business abroad.

Both parties worry about deficits selectively. Republicans passed tax cuts in 2017 that worsened red ink by $1.9 trillion, while Democrats enacted a COVID-19 relief bill this year with that same price tag.

Republicans said the latest legislation would damage the economy, give tax breaks to some wealthy taxpayers and make government bigger and more intrusive. Drawing frequent GOP attacks was a provision boosting the limit on state and local taxes that people can deduct from federal taxes, which disproportionately helps top earners from high-tax coastal states.

After months of talks, Democrats appeared eager to wrap it up and begin selling the package back home. They said they were planning 1,000 events across the country by year’s end to pitch the measure’s benefits to voters.

Facing uniform Republican opposition, Democrats could lose no more than three votes to prevail in the House, but moderates seemed reassured by CBO’s figures. Some said projections about IRS savings are always uncertain, others said the bill need not pay for it roughly half-trillion dollars for encouraging cleaner energy need because global warming is an existential crisis.

Florida Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a leading centrist, said she would back the measure after the latest numbers showed the legislation “is fiscally disciplined” and “has a lot of positive elements.”

Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote gives Democrats control of the 50-50 Senate. That leaves Democrats with zero votes to spare, giving enormous leverage to Manchin in upcoming bargaining. The altered bill would have to return to the House before going to Biden’s desk.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which preaches fiscal constraint, estimated that the bill’s overall cost would be nearly $5 trillion if Democrats hadn’t made some of its programs temporary. For example, tax credits for children and low-earning workers are extended for just one year, making their price tags appear lower, even though the party would like those programs to be permanent.

___

AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro and reporter Farnoush Amiri contributed to this report.

A new national survey found nearly half of college students said they consumed cannabis in 2020 – a new record.

Forty-four percent of college students surveyed reported using marijuana in 2020. That was the highest level in the survey's history. 8% said they used marijuana daily or nearly daily last year, up from 5% in 2015.

Some students at Metropolitan State University in Denver, Colorado said smoking marijuana helped them cope with the struggles and loneliness of pandemic life.

At the same time, college students reported drinking far less alcohol. 56% of students surveyed in 2020 reported drinking in the past 30 days, compared to 62% in 2019. Additionally, just 28% reported being drunk in the past 30 days, compared to 35% in 2019.

Binge drinking also fell dramatically. Only 24% of students said they binge drank in 2020, compared to 32% a year earlier. Students told Newsy they stopped drinking as much when the pandemic brought their social lives to a halt.

This story was originally reported by Kellan Howell on Newsy.com.

As COVID-19 misinformation continues to spread, experts say many people who are sharing it don’t realize the harm they could be doing to others.

It’s not always easy to differentiate between what’s true and what’s not, especially on social media.

It’s exactly what Sally Baalbaki-Yassine teaches her students: to pause before believing everything you see online, because there are algorithms in place specifically directing that information at you.

“My biggest thing is teaching them to always be skeptical of what they see on social media. You just can’t trust everything. To be able to go past this overconfidence bias that we all have," Baalbaki-Yassine said. “We’ve given them permission to do that, right? Where we have agreed to all of these things that we don’t necessarily read that say they can track everything we do on the social media platform and they are using algorithms from like Siri, for example, listening to what we say.”

Unlike disinformation, misinformation isn’t intended to mislead others, but it still can.

“So, if you’re already getting controversial information on other forms, that’s an easy way for a social media platform to be like, 'OK, this person is already absorbing this kind of information, let's give them more of this information,'" Baalbaki-Yassine said.

Anything that you see on social media has been purposely generated to get in front of your eyes.

“What you’re researching, even on Facebook, and who you’re following on Facebook will affect what kind of information you see in your news feed and then if you like certain things that your friends put on Facebook, then you’ll start getting that kind of information to show up as well," Baalbaki-Yassine said.

Experts say when you’re hungry for certainty and clarity, you can become more vulnerable to misinformation.

Jennifer Reich is a professor of sociology and explains it’s only natural for humans to want to feel the information they are getting is a guaranteed safety net. But that’s not the case with science, because there are always new discoveries.

“It’s important noting that when people lack official information that’s clear and trustworthy, they go to informal information. And it’s not exceptional. Most of us listen to our friends, our family, people we think reflect our values and lifestyle, the people we trust," Reich said. “And so that level of uncertainty that surrounds us feels scary and it feels like it’s not trustworthy, and the challenge is that just because we don’t know everything, it doesn’t mean we don’t know anything. You know, science is constantly refining and learning and we’ve seen this with vaccines in the past.”

Researchers with the World Health Organization say there were at least 800 global deaths due to misinformation related to COVID-19 within the first three months of 2020.

“So, there’s a constant process of learning and refining, but living through that process can be really anxiety-provoking and those are the opportunities where official information can feel uncertain and people look for other kinds of information," Reich said. “One of the traits with misinformation is it’s often stated with great certainty and that’s kind of a flag when there is no room to say from what we know now, as we’re learning, right? The kind of things we would expect a scientific process to unfold.”

Reich says that’s why so much misinformation has come out surrounding COVID-19 and the vaccine. As things are discovered, original information can be changed and more people become skeptical.

“And it’s not that it’s all true or untrue, but often it’s competing information. So, there might be something that was shown to be true, and then it’s evolved in a way that doesn’t work scientifically and we’ve learned new things, but that becomes hard to challenge, hard to kill in a lot of ways and it’s still shared," Reich said.

Baalbaki-Yassine and Reich say self-educating is one of the best favors you can do for yourself, but sharing, on the other hand, has larger implications than you may realize.

“So, educating them and helping them understand, giving them digital literacy of it’s not the end all be all, and you should be always skeptical, do your research and don’t share it," Baalbaki-Yassine said.