51–60 of 261 posts
My wife (oral surgeon) says the only real solution to sleep apnea is surgery. CPAP machines to her and bunk. I believe she moves the jaw forward to help open up the airway. Whatever works I guess.
There are few treatments with better cost/effect ratios.
One way around this is to get a bed that has something like a zero gravity mode. Sleep a bit upright and your airway won't collapse in on itself. I don't need CPAPS yet, but if a CPAP alone isn't working for you, you can try this combined with CPAP or just using the bed itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That means the machine has an airtight mask and could in principle suffocate you if it malfunctions. Ummm... no. If the CPAP machine fails, you'll just start sucking air in the holes that are normally used to expel your exhalations. (When you exhale, the air goes out through these vents, not back into the machine.) It's significantly less airflow, and will cause you to wake up, but it's not going to suffocate you.
But isn't the point of sleep apnea that the lack of air does not wake you up?
My wife (oral surgeon) says the only real solution to sleep apnea is surgery. CPAP machines to her and bunk. I believe she moves the jaw forward to help open up the airway. Whatever works I guess.
CPAP is life saving treatment for some. Sleep apnea surgeries have poor success rates https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3480570/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That means the machine has an airtight mask and could in principle suffocate you if it malfunctions. Ummm... no. If the CPAP machine fails, you'll just start sucking air in the holes that are normally used to expel your exhalations. (When you exhale, the air goes out through these vents, not back into the machine.) It's significantly less airflow, and will cause you to wake up, but it's not going to suffocate you.
But isn't the point of sleep apnea that the lack of air does not wake you up?
If lack of air not making you wake up was the problem, patients would die long before seeing a doctor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
One way around this is to get a bed that has something like a zero gravity mode. Sleep a bit upright and your airway won't collapse in on itself. I don't need CPAPS yet, but if a CPAP alone isn't working for you, you can try this combined with CPAP or just using the bed itself.
What other device hacking subcultures exist for medical devices?
There are also folks making implants, LED lights and rfid tags and such. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grindhouse_Wetware
In the past, the CPAP machines my wife and I used needed to be programmed in various ways, and they had separate data cards as described. The ones we got a couple of months ago are completely dynamic, they aren't pre-configured in any meaningful way. Also, they send their collected data up to 'the cloud' over a cellular network, where we can view the data, in some detail, with our web browser, as authenticated by a c…
This annoys my doctor because it means she has to read the SD card rather than pulling my data out of the air, but I explained to her that I knew as much about computer security as she did about respiratory medicine, and if she knew what I knew she'd be horrified.
I think the risk of death is probably overstated, as these people have often gone decades without a CPAP, and lived just fine.
Maybe a badly configured CPAP machine is worse than nothing at all? The article says the data they collect include something called "mask leak rates". That means the machine has an airtight mask and could in principle suffocate you if it malfunctions.