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Originally Posted by thingstodo
From what little I scanned, it looks like this thing works but I didn't see how with biological, living animal.
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The short answer is that it doesn't.
Or rather it does, but not in the application presented.
Raman spectroscopy relies on the Raman effect to determine the makeup of a small sample of a substance. The Raman effect applies to a very small number of photons under the particle theory and works based on the fact that while most absorption/emission of photons on the molecular level is elastic in nature (ie the amount of energy that is absorbed and emitted are the same, like an elastic band stretching and then returning to it's original shape) some of the incident photons are scatterd (absorbed/emitted) at two different wavelengths, or inelastically. This is due to vibrational quanta being absorbed or lost.
In english, it means that if you shine a light on something the light it reflects will be very very very slightly different in colour. This obviously is a massive oversimplification, but it works for our purposes. The amount the light changes and how it changes will be dependent on the material in question, therefore with some highly sensitive equipment and a carefully controlled light source, it can be used to determine the molecular makeup of a sample.
At first glance, it seems like this would support the device working and I'm not a biology major so I may be misunderstanding. But what I got out of reading about the biophotonic scanner is that it tests for carotonids in your system. The problem with that is that Raman spectroscopy (again as I understand it) is best used on a sample that's uniform in nature. Because it relies on Raman scattering it's very difficult to control precisely which molecules in the sample the photons will interact with, which means it will not give a reliable reading on anything so diverse as the human body, where the molecular makeup of the skin is different from the blood is different from muscular tissue is different from nervous tissue, etc etc. And even so, the majority of the photonic interaction will occur in the skin cells on the surface of your body, which (we all remember high school biology right?) are dead and not likely to provide any useful information anyway. And even if they did, performing the test on someone's hand in a high school gym, the possibility of contamination is very high.
The beauty of this device, assuming it actually works on Raman spectroscopy, is that no two people have exactly the same molecular makeup, so even though the numbers it's giving aren't particularly useful it will give a different one for each individual. And if you mention the Raman effect, start talking about vibrational quanta, Raman and Raleigh scattering and stokes lines, most people are going to zone out and assume 'it's scientific, it must work'. The people performing the test may well believe that what they're doing is accurate and helpful, simply due to a lack of understanding.
Failing that, if you don't want to read my nerdy (amateur) scientific analysis, think of it this way. The Raman effect was observed in the 1930's and this device according to the literature has been around for several years. If it's been around that long and is really that helpful, why isn't one in every hopital and clinic in every first world country the world over? Doctors and health professionals would love a way to quickly and accurately determine the level of different substances in the body and if this thing truly does work based on the Raman effect it should be pretty easy to adapt it to detect any substance you could name. So why aren't we using it?