(01-06-2018, 02:57 PM)Mogy Wrote: (1) I think the gsykes says my opinion well. "I mean, naturally, none of us are meant to sleep hooked up to a machine and wearing a mask. It's quite limiting and it can be difficult for your spouse to get used to as well."
(2) Currently, my apnea is mild. According to the studies, PAP therapy does not necessarily help me. Compliance to therapy that does not necessary help me is not my goal.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2564770/
(3) In retrospect I should not have mentioned the compliance thing.
(4) I was hoping the thread would be more focused on alternate therapies.
(5) I find this thread inspirational.
http://www.apneaboard.com/forums/Thread-...didgeridoo
(1) The entire purpose of medicine, including the ancestral practice of eating certain leaves, bugs, and compounds, is to restore natural functioning and is relatively unnatural. Of course, nobody was meant to sleep with a machine or have invasive devices such as pacemakers and defibrillators implanted in our bodies --- but to condition your thinking on this basis is to rationalize a point of view and actions that may be contrary to the maintenance of your health. As for difficulty and your therapy's impact on others, that is simply the price you pay for intervention in nature.
(2) Compliance and the degree to which it mitigates your health issues can rarely be determined from how you feel at the moment, or even generally. Many conditions are insidious, creep up over time, and go unrecognized until you experience a traumatic event or receive an unfavorable diagnosis. Pulmonary hypertension is both irreversible and ultimately fatal -- and could be a hidden, quiet consequence of sleep apnea. Using studies to illustrate your point of view is a fool's game. Mostly because most studies are garbage, confuse correlation with causation, have a small sample size which prevents decent statistical analysis due to independent variables and co-morbidities in the "population accessible to the researcher" which is conditioned by location, time, effort, and cost rather than obtaining a true research sample, or is the result of applying statistical tools to the data post facto.
(3) Compliance is the key to all therapy and cannot be ignored as part of the discussion.
(4) While alternative therapies can work, they are often used to avoid and rationalize the time, effort, costs, and unpleasant nature of more conventional treatment modalities. I think the best illustration of this can be found in the death of Apple's Steve Jobs. Here you have an intelligent man delaying conventional treatment in favor of diet and holistic cures -- until the cancer was so widely spread that there was no hope of a conventional cure or mitigation possible. Had he taken prompt action when first recommended, the chances are that he would still be with us.
(5) I also find the story about the didgeridoo inspirational but learning the technique of circular breathing and being faithfully compliant makes this a niche complementary therapy rather than a primary treatment modality for moderate to severe OSA -- and its effect on CA's is not well studied. In many cases, it is hard to separate out the placebo effects or the fact that it might be simply strengthening the lungs or clearing mucus (like the "Lung Flute" for COPD patients.)
Not to sound negative, but being proactive in your own health care is a great thing -- but only if it is based on the type of individual (and reliable) diagnosis, therapy, and monitoring that demands the acceptance of and compliance to recommended and proven technological therapies. Which is a long way of saying, stick with the CPAP and slowly improve your compliance rather than look for something that will justify lesser machine use.
While it could be that you could drop below the suggested level of intervention (AHI < 5), remember this is a value used as a short-hand proxy for normal functioning by physicians and insurance companies and may not truly reflect what is going on in your heart, lungs, kidneys, or other systems.
I wish you the best of luck on your journey to feeling great.
P.S. Thanks for reminding me that I should not be overly critical of my equipment and internet connection when it slows down slightly to 25 mbs.
"The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." -- Marcus Aurelius
