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Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

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171–180 of 188 posts

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#171

Tangentially related, but very important to me and hopefully helpful to others here: I have sleep apnea. So do most of the men in my family. Though I am overweight, I haven't always been, but I have always had the condition, as have they. For those who don't know, sleep apnea is a condition where you stop breathing in your sleep, wake up slightly to fix that and start breathing again, and then fall back asleep. It so…

CPAP is a very American solution, pay money and treat the symptom with minimal effort but not the underlying cause. The vast majority of cases of sleep apnea can be cured with weight loss, exercise, nasal breathing exercises..

100% and it's rather sad people cant see through it as medical rent seeking.

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPAP is a very American solution, pay money and treat the symptom with minimal effort but not the underlying cause. The vast majority of cases of sleep apnea can be cured with weight loss, exercise, nasal breathing exercises..

That is simply not true. Anecdotally, three people in my family including myself have sleep apnea. I am the only overweight one. The others are a normal or even low BMI. Also, I had sleep apnea when I wasn't overweight. Studies show that non-overweight or obese people with sleep apnea are extremely common and make up between 20 and 40% of all apnea sufferers: 1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5181619/ 2. ht…

Medicine is wholly corrupt. If a hypothetical drug existed that was radically cheap and improved general health outcomes by 25%-50%, the institution of medicine and insurance by logic of self-preservation would not allow to exist or be known.

Such a drug would undermine things as they stand and so institutional self-preservation is now the primary purpose trumping any sort of too good actual solution.

You will learn more operating orthogonal to such a corrupt anti-inquiry, science-theatre. Just as a doctor-spouse (an unpaid friend-consultant) will always give you better advice than a paid doctor.

...Im saying if you are willing to read the research you are probably willing to run some n-of-1 quasi experiments.

For example dont use a computer, TV or phone for a month. Don't sit under LED or Fluroescent Lights for a month...I dont know, just try dumb things and you will learn faster than professionals "games".

This is because we operate in a low bar expectation brought on by arrogance of theory over experiment.

When crowd sourced n-of-1 combinatorial design apps drop for patients and scale to large enough, ... this point will make sense

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#173

Tangentially related, but very important to me and hopefully helpful to others here: I have sleep apnea. So do most of the men in my family. Though I am overweight, I haven't always been, but I have always had the condition, as have they. For those who don't know, sleep apnea is a condition where you stop breathing in your sleep, wake up slightly to fix that and start breathing again, and then fall back asleep. It so…

Do you think they even want to understand apnea? It seems to me there is a toxic incentive situation here. I'd bet money a full blown set of variable controls will be found to solve this problem and come from outside sleep medicine. Its not magic, its that modern professionalized science is devoid of inquiry.

In countries with subsidised health care there's still an incentive to solve these problems, since the solution will lower healthcare costs.

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is simply not true. Anecdotally, three people in my family including myself have sleep apnea. I am the only overweight one. The others are a normal or even low BMI. Also, I had sleep apnea when I wasn't overweight. Studies show that non-overweight or obese people with sleep apnea are extremely common and make up between 20 and 40% of all apnea sufferers: 1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5181619/ 2. ht…

Medicine is wholly corrupt. If a hypothetical drug existed that was radically cheap and improved general health outcomes by 25%-50%, the institution of medicine and insurance by logic of self-preservation would not allow to exist or be known. Such a drug would undermine things as they stand and so institutional self-preservation is now the primary purpose trumping any sort of too good actual solution . You will learn…

All of your posts on this thread, honestly are some of the most bizarre I've ever seen on this site.

I'm here saying: "this treatment massively improved my life and might have actually saved it!" and your response is "this shows medicine is wholly corrupt and cannot be trusted."

It's especially odd given that CPAP is a non-invasive low-to-no-side-effect solution whose only real drawback is that the machines are expensive and hard to calibrate, and don't work if you don't use them. We're not talking about a new drug or vaccine or something. We're literally just talking about helping people breathe easier. And it's not like I am using the CPAP blindly with no idea whether it's working. I can literally tell every day just by existing in a rested state that it is working.

I'm not saying there isn't some theoretical better treatment out there. But it seems like you think I should... not use the treatment I have because the people who produced it might be corrupt?

I genuinely don't see how these things follow or are even related.

And for what it's worth, I do have a doctor-spouse, and she demanded I get a CPAP and is happy every day that I have one.

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#175
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something akin to Mr Toad's Wild Ride You know the plot of that ride, right?

Yep.

For those who don't know, you end up in jail for a DUI, get out, drive your car into a train, and arrive in hell.

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#176
post #85
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, except we also have digestive issues. I'm really hoping a paleo diet and good probiotics will save me. It's already helped me a lot. I'll let you know in 40 years if it prevents me from getting Alzheimer's.

[x] Anxiety [x] Sleep apnea [x] Digestive issues [x] Former psychonaut [x] Highly stressed pretty much always due to work I can only hope that whatever brand of dementia I end up with is something akin to Mr Toad's Wild Ride, or whatever. I'd be happy just to go out either laughing or well-rested.

[deleted]

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#177
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walking. Walk 3 miles a day. It gives you a drastically different set of benefits from running, and you can walk all day without worry of overtraining. Running is great too. But be careful of doing it too much. Overtraining can break down your immune system and make you more susceptible to disease.

I walk over six kilometres (almost) every day and don't sleep well.

How's your sleeping environment? Do you have black out shades? Keep your room cool?

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#178
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've found, being overweight negatively affects sleep. As far as I can tell, the extra weight simply makes it hard to breathe at night, leading to apnea. This can then cause depression and anxiety, depression because you wake up tired and feeling awful every single day and anxiety because you may wake up with night terrors after suffocating in your sleep. At least it's easy to get a home sleep apnea test an…

> At least it's easy to get a home sleep apnea test and an APAP/CPAP these days. If one wants to rule out sleep apean (being not the best sleeper) but probably doesn't have it (but other causes like stress) but at least want to measure it somewhat, how could one test that oneself with at least some probability? Lots of things that are called "at home test" seem to involve getting special equipment and sending stuff t…

The tester they give is basically just a pulse oximeter that logs your heart rate and SpO2 all night. I'm not sure how they interpret it, but I'd imagine that if your heart rate goes crazy and your oxygen drops, that's probably bad.

Otherwise you can look at questionnaires that ask things like whether you wake up a lot at night or snore, etc.

That said... it's pretty easy to just get a device that they give you that you connect to your phone to log data for a night. And they know what they're doing when they interpret it. So I would recommend that, since it's really easy to just go to a place and get a device and do a test.

This isn't like it used to be where you'd have to sleep in some strange place.

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#179
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've found, being overweight negatively affects sleep. As far as I can tell, the extra weight simply makes it hard to breathe at night, leading to apnea. This can then cause depression and anxiety, depression because you wake up tired and feeling awful every single day and anxiety because you may wake up with night terrors after suffocating in your sleep. At least it's easy to get a home sleep apnea test an…

Easy to get, hard to get used to for many. It’s common for doctors to offer little to no support after prescribing the machine.

There are discords where users offer each other advice. That said, many of the tuning parameters require the doctor to set them and if you make an appointment you can talk over the problems and get them to adjust the pressure or whatever.

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#180
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would support look like in this situation? Honest question I simply don't know

In my case: Showing me how to use the machine Showing me how to wear the mask Configuring the machine with anything other than the default settings A new machine with the default settings is a nightmare. The apap algorithm will spike your pressure up to 16 (which is too high for most people) one minute and drop down to 4 (which is too low for most) the next. At the high end is aerophagia and leaks, at the low end, yo…

That's a bad doctor, IMHO. Ours at least could be talked to and would adjust the pressure, etc.
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