Sleep Apnea, CPAP, and how the Medical Mafia is Killing You

“Did I never tell you? I suffer from sleep apnea.  That’s why I had to bring this guy with me. My CPAP machine.”

“Oh, my God.  Did you just rent that so you could have your own bed?” – The League

So, to demonstrate how sleep apnea occurs, I cut a cartoon cadaver in half.  It’s messier than it sounds – ink went everywhere.    Fortunately I had lots of ACME towels to sop it up.  But then the towels exploded.

It looks like this cadaver died from being shot in the mouth with blue arrows.

Recently, The Mrs. sat me down and said that she was worried that I might be snoring . . . a bit too hard.  I disagree – I assured her that I had never heard myself snore, so she must certainly be in error.  Especially when she indicated that the snoring had, on several occasions, triggered tsunami alerts in Hawaii, and we live firmly in flyover central northern Upper South Midwestia.

I started doing some research.  Snoring’s not dangerous, right?

No.  Snoring can be deadly.  Very deadly.  Like 40,000 deaths a year in the United States (at least).  That’s more people than Rosie O’Donnell drives to suicide monthly.  Wow!

How does snoring kill you?

Cardiovascular disease.  Car accidents.  High blood pressure.

Huh?

Turns out that snoring, especially loud snoring, is a sign of sleep apnea.  Sleep apnea is where the “sleeper” periodically stops breathing for 10-60 seconds, up to 80 times per hour.  This, in turn (simply, neither of us are going to med school) causes a plethora of piñatas problems.  Increased carbon dioxide causes parts of your brain to die.  It also causes your heart to freak out, and beat harder and faster to get more blood moving.  It may even lead to shots of adrenaline that keep you from sleeping soundly.

The end result is you’re tired, all the time.

Your heart is getting stressed out, every night.

You are getting (subconsciously) stressed each night as you periodically are suffocated.  By yourself.

The causes of sleep apnea are fairly common.  Be an aging dude, be overweight.  Have allergies.  Have a thick, football player neck.  In turn, this leads to more weight gain, daytime sleepiness, heart attacks, strokes, and car accidents from drowsy drivers.

So, you’re saying, “John Wilder, you’ve convince me that this can kill me.  What on earth can I do about it?”

I’m so glad you’ve asked.

Give up drinking, smoking.  Lose weight.  Sleep on your side.

See the problem?  Drinking is certainly possible to give up, but why would you want to?  (I mean besides all the documented health benefits).  Losing weight is hard enough, but sleep apnea actually changes your body chemistry so it’s harder to lose weight.

What’s the solution?

CPAP.  (I’ve most often heard people pronounce this as “see-pap” as in “See Pap’s eyes as he has another heart attack???”)  The symptoms (including snoring) that you might need CPAP are being drowsy during the daytime, drowsy driving during the daytime, nodding off after Thanksgiving Dinner, and generally being able to fall asleep at the drop of a hat.  I thought I had a skill – I could fall asleep anywhere, anytime, generally in thirty seconds or so.  It turns out that it might just have been sleep apnea, curable by CPAP.

CPAP stands for Continuous Positive Air Pressure, and not Constant Peer Alcohol Provision, as one might think.  Uncharacteristically, it is one of the three things invented by Australians that don’t involve alcohol, marsupials, or Australian Rules Football.

Back when ESPN® was good, it would show Australian Rules Football at 1AM.  All the guys on my high school football team watched it, mainly because the referees were so . . . amazing. 

As I was saying, Dr. Colin Sullivan, AC/DC fan and uncle of Angus Young (I made that up to make him more interesting) was a guy who treated people with sleep apnea.  At that time, the prevailing treatment method was a tracheotomy.  Yes.  They would cut a hole in your throat to stop the apnea.

So, Dr. Sullivan figured that there had to be a better way, even if it was less cool than slitting the throats of his patients.  He experimented with dogs (dingoes, maybe?) and must have found a group that snored but that didn’t drag off babies.  Here was the first CPAP.

After he got it to work with a patient whose throat he was going to cut open.  He put that first CPAP on the patient, and the patient had seven great hours of sleep in the first time since forever.  Unlike throat slitting, this was a medical procedure with no significant adverse side effects.  None.  Sadly, Dr. Sullivan deprived thousands of doctors of the joy of cutting open patients as the first commercial CPAP machines went on the market in 1985.

Now the crazy facts:

• 22 million Americans are probably suffering from some degree of sleep apnea.
• Machines are relatively inexpensive, with many costing less than $350.
• Only 10% or so of sleep apnea sufferers have machines.
• Sleep studies (required for the prescription of this harmless but helpful machine) cost between $600 and $5,000.
• 40,000 Americans a year die from sleep apnea.
• John Candy died from complications related to sleep apnea.
• William Shatner has sleep apnea.

The facts speak for themselves.  Lifesaving technology is being kept hostage to gatekeepers that could be replaced by software or a cellphone app at very low cost?  Where have we seen this before?  If we let Silicon Valley “disrupt” sleep apnea treatments we’d probably have machines costing less than a $100, since your cell phone would become the machine brain and the data would be uploaded to some cloud site and analyzed and tweaked in real time to provide even better performance and better apnea control (hint: as a business idea).  Heck, it could even provide a real-time alarm if it saw actual life threatening patterns developing.

Oh, yeah, when I wrote about optometrists (LINK).  There’s a low-cost way to get a very accurate (I can attest) prescription.  But they want to scare you.  As would anyone who saw a lucrative meal ticket floating away.  Such as anyone who does sleep studies.  These are gatekeepers that server a very limited role in society today – their skills can be replaced inexpensively by technology.

I talked to someone I know from work (he doesn’t work at the same place as I do, but we talk frequently.  I asked him if he had ever used a CPAP.

“Man, that’s the best thing ever.  I love it.  I have been using it for years.  If you travel you will forget your toothbrush, your underwear, your deodorant, but you will never forget your CPAP.”

John Wilder:  “How was the sleep study?”

Him:  “Sleep study?  Didn’t get one.  Just ordered one off of my dad’s prescription.”

He described a fairly tough few days getting adjusted to the machine.

“But the first day you sleep through the night?  Oh, man.  You feel like you’re sixteen again.  Energy!  I woke up after four hours – more refreshed than I’d been in years.  I love it.”

As for me?  I think this system where you have to pay an artificial gatekeeper for proven, safe technology is immoral and strangles market competition and innovation.  And, as the facts would say, also fattening.  Quite literally, this market manipulation to serve a few medical professionals kills thousands of people a year, but since they have nice jobs and serve on the PTA nobody recognizes them for the killers they are – more efficient than organized crime.  More deadly than gun violence.

And the people in Hawaii are probably getting tired of the tsunami warnings, what with the volcano, they have enough on their hands.  They should take up a collection for a sleep study for me . . . or in a sane world, I’d just walk down to the store and buy a CPAP.

But the Sleep Mafia won’t let me . . . .

Repeat to yourself:  John Wilder is NOT a doctor.  Do NOT take medical advice from humor bloggers on the Internet.