01-19-2024, 10:22 AM
RE: CPAP issues after tonsillectomy + septoplasty
My opinion is that too many doctors follow a fairly rigid if --> then procedure to diagnose and treat people. It works for lots of stuff, but I think a lot of folk have lost sight of the fact that OSA is a syndrome, not a disease, which means there are any number of underlying causes that can cause a similar kind of trouble. Sleep docs are too keen on fighting the OSA fire by simply aiming the extinguisher at the flames with CPAP.
Part of that may have been the reputation in the past about OSA being a disease for people who are old and fat. Age and weight are still considered risk factors today, but when sleep disordered breathing is looked for, it is found in more and more people of all shapes and ages. It's frustrating as a relatively young and healthy person to get told by the sleep center to try CPAP, or if you don't want to do that you can ignore it until it starts impacting your health even more and then try CPAP later. Then following 3 years of trying different things, take matters into my own hands, get a camera up the nose, and immediately told there's easily correctible stuff causing most of the problem. It sounds like your doctors came to you with the proposal to pick the low-hanging fruit, which is a credit to them in my book.
I might be biased because of my own experience, but I'm starting to notice a pattern here at this board. I think the age distribution of folks here is too young. By that, I mean that the majority of folk who get an OSA diagnosis are probably still older on average, but those are the same people who are the best candidates for CPAP and it works for them and we never hear from them here. There are a ton of threads started by people in their 20s and 30s who are trying to use CPAP and it's not working well for them, I think we are the ones who need to dig deeper and find what's burning before we spray the extinguisher.
It's totally your decision what to do next. As a mechanical engineer, I completely support digging deeper into the physical components of the system to see which of them are improperly performing their functions. A sleep endoscopy is the closest you'll get to finding out why your particular airway is occluded, so if you want to tunnel further down the rabbit hole, that's the next step because you already had surgery to correct the stuff that appeared problematic when you were awake.
Part of that may have been the reputation in the past about OSA being a disease for people who are old and fat. Age and weight are still considered risk factors today, but when sleep disordered breathing is looked for, it is found in more and more people of all shapes and ages. It's frustrating as a relatively young and healthy person to get told by the sleep center to try CPAP, or if you don't want to do that you can ignore it until it starts impacting your health even more and then try CPAP later. Then following 3 years of trying different things, take matters into my own hands, get a camera up the nose, and immediately told there's easily correctible stuff causing most of the problem. It sounds like your doctors came to you with the proposal to pick the low-hanging fruit, which is a credit to them in my book.
I might be biased because of my own experience, but I'm starting to notice a pattern here at this board. I think the age distribution of folks here is too young. By that, I mean that the majority of folk who get an OSA diagnosis are probably still older on average, but those are the same people who are the best candidates for CPAP and it works for them and we never hear from them here. There are a ton of threads started by people in their 20s and 30s who are trying to use CPAP and it's not working well for them, I think we are the ones who need to dig deeper and find what's burning before we spray the extinguisher.
It's totally your decision what to do next. As a mechanical engineer, I completely support digging deeper into the physical components of the system to see which of them are improperly performing their functions. A sleep endoscopy is the closest you'll get to finding out why your particular airway is occluded, so if you want to tunnel further down the rabbit hole, that's the next step because you already had surgery to correct the stuff that appeared problematic when you were awake.
Look, I'm an engineer, not a doctor! Please don't take my opinion as a substitute for medical advice.
