131–140 of 261 posts
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I've slept long into a power outage and woken up with a headache and significant disorientation and my mask still on. Really upsetting. And with an AHI off the charts, I may very well die without one.
Might be worth investing in an Uninterruptible Power Supply for it if you haven't already.
That said I should get a UPS for my machine, I literally cannot sleep without it!
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Curious why you won't do a sleep study? I recently went through this whole process, and it was pretty fascinating to see the data they collected from all the sensors (also confirming that I have mild OSA).
I have a _very_ delicately balanced sleep routine and a sort of mortal terror both of insomnia and of hypnotic drugs. If it were safe and easy I'd probably just buy the APAP and see if it made me feel better. I don't feel much urgency; I get about 6 hours a night on the regular and don't as a rule feel tired or cloudy during the day (but it's possible that with an APAP I would, relative to my current condition, feel…
Bit odd of an experience, but nothing that should concern you much.
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> Not saying free market and medical are a good mix (who knows?), but what there is in America not is not even a market at all. The free market is simply incompatible with health care. Imagine a world where, any time you have a life-threatening health problem, you can expect to transfer everything you own to the hospital, since they have perfect leverage over you.
That's not how free markets work. Otherwise food would also cost everything you own.
In medicine, you tend to need very specific treatments. This means the set of potential suppliers is much lower, which essentially means the supply is restricted. If you won't sell me an epi-pen for less than 100 dollars, there aren't a lot of places I can turn to. Moreover it's not like open-heart surgery is going to work.
Besides, some procedures are just actually expensive. Open-heart surgery takes a lot of labor, organ transplants require intense logistics. Dialysis is a complex and repetitive procedure. The 'fair price' for these in the economic sense is still high. Way to high for most people's morality.
Should people really have to chose between death and the bankruptcy of their entire family? Because in a functioning free market, it is near essential that some people have demand for something they can't pay for. So if we turn dialysis, heart surgery, etc. into free markets, there are going to be people who need those treatments that cannot pay for them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious why you won't do a sleep study? I recently went through this whole process, and it was pretty fascinating to see the data they collected from all the sensors (also confirming that I have mild OSA).
I have a _very_ delicately balanced sleep routine and a sort of mortal terror both of insomnia and of hypnotic drugs. If it were safe and easy I'd probably just buy the APAP and see if it made me feel better. I don't feel much urgency; I get about 6 hours a night on the regular and don't as a rule feel tired or cloudy during the day (but it's possible that with an APAP I would, relative to my current condition, feel…
I have to adjust my own pressure as well, since I can't afford to do another sleep study (American Healthcare rocks!). The biggest difference in my sleep came from when I purchased a machine that auto adjusts based on what you need, so no one could lock me out from getting the best healthcare possible.
I know I suffer from sleep apnea (poor sleep quality, relatives have noticed me stop breathing for brief periods while asleep, loud snoring) but I literally cannot bring myself to get a sleep study done because I know it's not going to be cheap, and to top it off I don't even know how expensive it's going to be in the first place. It's not like I can't afford to pay either, I do have some money stashed in my HSA but…
Weight gain is a symptom of untreated sleep apnea, so you should consider whether you're doing this in the right order.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a _very_ delicately balanced sleep routine and a sort of mortal terror both of insomnia and of hypnotic drugs. If it were safe and easy I'd probably just buy the APAP and see if it made me feel better. I don't feel much urgency; I get about 6 hours a night on the regular and don't as a rule feel tired or cloudy during the day (but it's possible that with an APAP I would, relative to my current condition, feel…
I did my sleep study when I was 24. There were no drugs involved. It's just a bunch of sensors taped to you while you sleep with a camera watching you. Bit odd of an experience, but nothing that should concern you much.
Accessing the clinician menu on most machines is accomplished by a quick Google search. I've adjusted my pressure several times to bring down AHI, or to reduce some side-effects of higher pressures as my weight comes down. Most machines report AHI in the main menu. My point is this... the article's premise is on target, but the situation isn't as dire as characterized.
This was my personal experience as well. I use a ResMed machine and I remember when I first got it that the instructions warned that only technicians could make setting adjustments. After a few nights of waking up feeling like I couldn't move air through my nose, I just looked up how to do it. It only consisted of holding down two buttons at the same time. Very straight forward. I haven't tried accessing the internal…
Messing with your own PAP settings can be a bad idea. I have complex apnea - a little bit of obstructive apnea (small pie hole), a little bit of central apnea (brain messages to breathe don't get through). I had an Auto BiPAP machine, which is like an intelligent ventilator that varies settings to determine the best one. A sleep study plus home monitoring indicated that the machine made my apnea worse! After another…
That being said, the regulations around medical devices and healthcare have evolved in a certain cultural environment where blame is the name of the game: if any treatment ever fails, the public and political uproar against the healthcare industry is always vicious and patients will never accept any personal responsibility. It's understandable why the medical professionals react by removing any kind of control away from the patient - you cannot assume responsibility for something that you do not control.
That lone idiot that pushes his treatment to eleven to see if it has any effect on his erection ruins it for the rest of us. And I guarantee you that for any user accessible feature on a medical device, there will be such an idiot, and that he or his family will sue. And that's the case against which medical manufacturers optimize against, in this instance, by abusing unrelated copyright regulations and denying life saving options to other patients.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious why you won't do a sleep study? I recently went through this whole process, and it was pretty fascinating to see the data they collected from all the sensors (also confirming that I have mild OSA).
I have a _very_ delicately balanced sleep routine and a sort of mortal terror both of insomnia and of hypnotic drugs. If it were safe and easy I'd probably just buy the APAP and see if it made me feel better. I don't feel much urgency; I get about 6 hours a night on the regular and don't as a rule feel tired or cloudy during the day (but it's possible that with an APAP I would, relative to my current condition, feel…