The colorful story of phototherapy for neonatal jaundice

Colors have always attracted our fantasy and imagination. Medicine, like many other human activities, did not escape their attraction, sometimes with fatal consequences. The scientific literature, magazines, etc. are full of reports on the beneficial, miraculous effects of colors. Even in nowadays, where photobiology and photomedicine have been put on very firm bases, chromopaths are still at work. The evolution of light therapy from chromotherapy to photomedicine is presented in brief, with the aim of contributing to the action against the unscientific behavior of researchers and clinicians who support biological and/or clinical results without serious and well documented work. Colors have played an important role in the phototherapy of neonatal jaundice. It is an interesting example of how even a rigorous scientific search for the optimal color has progressed in part by chance, due to the lack of an action spectrum, too hurried extrapolations of animal results to man, unsuspected dynamical behavior of bilirubin molecules, etc.. The story of its evolution up to present knowledge is reported in this paper.