You’ve seen the ads. Quantum dietician. Energy field tuning. Your social feed is flooded with the “Q-word.” 🙄
Dismiss them. They are nonsense. But here is the problem: that mountain of woo makes it hard to discuss actual science. Clinical trials suggest light, electric, and magnetic fields can treat acne. Hair loss. Cancer.
This isn’t magic. It might, however, be quantum mechanics.
Margaret Ahmad, a photobiologist, put it plainly:
“We have something that works; we doesn’t really know why.”
This is the sticking point. Biology is wet, warm, and messy. Quantum states are fragile. They usually collapse in seconds. How do they survive inside a living cell? Clarice Aiello from the Quantum Biology Institute says researchers are still fighting to prove or refute the possibility.
If we can prove quantum states last long enough to matter, medicine changes. Maybe drugs aren’t the only answer.
The hierarchy of weird
First, define the term. All matter is quantum. Atoms behave like smeared clouds of probability, described by a wave function. When observed, the particle picks one state. Boom.
But “quantum biology” is not a dumping ground for things scientists don’t understand, Gregory Scholes of Princeton argues. To find order in the chaos, Aiello splits the field into a ladder.
Level 1: Atoms sticking together to make molecules.
“Yay!” Aiello jokes. “That’s trivial. But it is there.”
Level 2: Tunnelling. Small particles like protons cheat through barriers they shouldn’t be able to cross. Plant enzymes use this to find their targets. It’s quantum, sure, but unsexy. Most people don’t think of this when they hear “quantum.”
Level 3 & 4: The serious stuff. Superposition and entanglement.
Superposition means existing in multiple states at once until you look. Like a particle passing through two slts simultaneously. Entanglement ties two particles together so that observing one instantly reveals the state of the other, no matter the distance.
These don’t just happen because particles are small. They require sophisticated, long-lived states.
Birds seem to do it. 🐦
Migratory species navigate using Earth’s magnetic field via cryptochromes in their eyes. Light hits the protein, exciting electrons into a superposition of spins. The magnetic field tilts those spins. The bird sees a compass.
Photosynthesis? Tricker than expected. Once thought to be pure superposition, it turned out to be a hybrid involving quasiparticles called phonons. Vibrations that shuttle energy efficiently.
So. Quantum exists in life. But does it apply to medical treatments?
The light therapy mess
Light therapy started in the late 1800s. Niels Ryberg Finsen treated his own skin disease with sunlight beams. He won a Nobel Prize. Died young, but paved the way.
Today, clinics claim light grows hair. Cures erectile dysfunction. Stalls Alzheimer’s.
The evidence varies.
Low-level lasers are standard for oral mucositis (mouth inflammation from cancer chemo).
LED devices? The FDA approves them easily. Why? Because they seem harmless. That safety profile accidentally lends credibility to dubious claims.
“There are so many crackpots,” Ahmad warns.
Some say specific light wavelengths stimulate mitochondria. The cell’s battery. But jumping from “mitochondria happy” to “hair regrows” leaves huge gaps. Ahmad doubts it’s that simple.
Scholes suspects light therapy works at Level 1 or 2 chemistry. Or maybe mimicry. Classical systems can sometimes fake quantum behavior without being truly quantum.
Electricity and magnets
Enter electromagnetic therapies. Newer players.
Optune, a device for brain and lung cancer, uses alternating electric fields. Approved in the US and Europe. The idea? The fields scramble proteins that organize cell division. Cancer cells divide fast, so they fall apart first.
Is it quantum? Probably not.
Callum Jones, who has researched Optune funding, says the mechanism seems “perfectly classical.”
However, magnetic therapies might tap into higher quantum levels. Remember the bird compass? If human cells respond to magnetic fields similarly—using paired quantum spins—we might be onto something.
Plausible, Aiello says.
But right now, treatments are moving faster than theory. We are throwing darts in the dark. Dose matters immensely. Five minutes of light helps. Ten minutes? Maybe nothing.
“We need to find the mechanism,” Ahmad says. “Intelligently. Reliably.”
Until then, it’s a jungle. 🌿
The Alzheimer’s angle
Philip Kurian at Howard University wants to aim high. Literally.
In 2024, his team looked at microtubules —structural proteins inside cells. Covered in tryptophan. They found something weird. The amino acids acted like a fiber-optic network. Entangled.
Instead of blinking individually, the network flashed together. Superradiance.
Why would a cell need this?
UV light damages stressed cells. Kurian suggests this network absorbs that UV efficiently, protecting the cell.
Speculation: It transmits data faster than chemical signals.
“There’s this huge world… classical neuroscience doesn’t consider,” he says.
Here is the hook: Amyloid plaques. The hallmark of Alzheimer’s. Also covered in tryptopham.
Kurian argues these plaques aren’t just toxic waste. Maybe they’re defense structures. Shielding neurons from metabolic stress and UV damage.
If that’s true, current drugs fail. We’ve been trying to scrub the shields off.
Scholes is skeptical.
“It’s difficult to measure,” he notes. Superradiance is elusive.
We are left with a gap.
The woo sells.
The science is promising.
The mechanism?
Still hidden.
Maybe the next breakthrough won’t come from a lab, but from the question we stopped asking: Is biology just chemistry?
Or is it something more? 🌀
