Chromotherapy
pseudoscientific alternative medicine method using colored light
Chromotherapy, sometimes called color therapy, colorology or cromatherapy, is a pseudoscientific form of alternative medicine which proposes certain diseases can be treated by exposure to certain colors. Its practice is considered to be 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. Historically, chromotherapy has been associated with mysticism and occultism.
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.
History
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.
The public source identifies “Chromotherapy” as pseudoscientific alternative medicine method using colored light. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Chromotherapy, pseudoscientific and alternative.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q371276. The Library of Congress control number is sh85028582. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1037 and 1844.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chromotherapy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.