Sleep Blog

It’s often been said that a little information can be a bad thing. Attorneys will often tell you that a person can know “just enough information about something to be dangerous.”

When it comes to sleep and sleep disorders, those thoughts are especially true.

For more than seven years now, on an almost daily basis — yes, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays included! — I’ve worked with people from around the country on a variety of sleep-related issues they battle, including sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea. The worst battles I have is when someone is talking to me and says something along the line of:

Oh, no! What you’re telling me can’t be true. My great aunt Nellie’s best friend’s sister, Shania, has a pet rabbit, MoGoToPo, whose pet bedbug told me that sleep apnea isn’t serious. In fact, the bedbug, Kooka-Loca, says it is nothing more than snoring, and for me not to worry about it.

Yep, I absolutely hate when someone has a friend or family member who knows someone with a talking rabbit, and later, find out the rabbit has a talking pet bedbug. It usually turns out the bedbug, and perhaps the rabbit, are telling tall tales about things they know nothing about. In fact, that is akin to the old attorney joke that slams doctors:

Attorney 1: What do you call the guy who just graduated at the bottom of his class from medical school?
Attorney 2: Um … I don’t know. His name, maybe?
Attorney 1: No! It’s a good thing you don’t work in malpractice law. You call him the same thing you call the guy who graduated at the top of the class: Doctor.

I mention all that to discuss a blog post that a 27-year-old man mentioned to me. He person contacted me because he was diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea only after his bedmate forced him to talk with the family doctor about snoring, gasping, and other indicators of sleep apnea. That doctor-patient talk led to an overnight sleep study, which led to him being diagnosed. Pretty cool how that works, huh? Sometimes the system really works like a finely tuned watch, but other times, it seems, things fall into an abyss.

Until he was diagnosed, everything was fine. Talking with the doctor was more of an exercise to him, just like discussing any other issue of little consequence. That all changed when he was diagnosed. He was now on the offense, waging an information warfare battle, trying to do nothing more than “prove” sleep apnea isn’t a serious health issue. In seeking out information to prove his argument, he found a blog called Sleep Facts, which had a post — “Sleep Apnea - the Silent Killer” — supporting his less-than-accurate argument.

At first glance, it sounds like the post would demonstrate apnea is a serious health issue that needs to be treated. Instead, he pointed out, first to his bedmate, then to me, a sentence from the post. It reads:

In the worst cases of sleep apnea a face mask is worn in order to prevent the air from becoming blocked and stimulate its flow.

The problem with that comment is that it sounds like only a small percentage of people diagnosed with apnea need to be treated with CPAP or bi-level (BiPAP) machines. That isn’t the case

If a person is diagnosed with apnea, the reasonable and prudent thing to do is treat it — beginning immediately. See, “the worst cases of sleep apnea” are those in which a person is diagnosed. If you’re diagnosed with having 8 or 10 apnea per hour, that’s unhealthy.

Let’s think of thing in another way: If you’re on the bus, at work, or even at the dinner table, and the person beside you stops breathing, what are you going to do? Most people immediately think of initiating cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and calling 911. The same holds true for a person who stops breathing during their sleep. Just because the situation happens in the bedroom does not mean it is any less urgent, nor does it make it taboo. In that case, though, the CPAP or BiPAP machine is at-the-ready — and should be already working and preventing apnea.

As I told the gentleman who contacted me, looking for additional resources to backup his story that apnea isn’t serious: If you put just half the effort into properly treating the apnea as you do in trying to prove it isn’t serious, you’d be a lot happier, more energetic, and on the road to preserving your health.

Until next time … sleep well!

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