Do Sleep Doctors Need Hearing Aids?
This year has brought a sizeable increase in my coaching practice. As has been typical for most years, I see 99% of individuals who have failed to gain substantive benefits from their efforts guided by conventional sleep doctors and their sleep clinic staff. There’s been a notable increase in chronic insomniacs who’ve sought my help, and this increase stems largely from reading my comprehensive book, Life Saving Sleep.
The much larger cohort are those struggling with CPAP. And, I simply wanted to share with you several examples of their extreme frustrations in dealing with conventional sleep doctors who continue to foolishly tell their patients, “if you just keep trying, eventually your CPAP will give you more benefit.” So, instead of listening to the individual describing the poor response of persistent fatigue and sleepiness, low energy, nocturia, lack of concentration, the sleep doctors continue to insist it’s the patient’s fault for not using CPAP long enough each night, or worse, “in some people it just takes a long time to appreciate how much CPAP is helping you.”
None of these individuals are hearing anything about Bilevel devices or ASV Bilevel devices. They find this information on their own, and then when they ask the doctors about this advanced technology, the doctors respond, “it’s not really any better than CPAP.”
Finally, in some cases it gets into the discussion about UARS (flow limitations, RERAs), and here we find individuals literally turned away from sleep centers, because they’re told, “well your AHI is too low, so you won’t qualify for a device, and besides your sleep apnea probably isn’t the cause of your problems.” Again, the patients try to bring up UARS, and it’s as if the doctors ears are plugged with some foreign substance preventing them from hearing anything at all.
As you can imagine, these individual are frustrated and angry, and regrettably, the field of sleep medicine and the American Academy of Sleep medicine remain clueless with respect to all these elements, instead choosing to focus on the one-third of individuals who actually gain fantastic results from CPAP.
Talk about narrow-mindedness coupled with a lack of listening skills and you’ve got a sure fire mixture to produce high levels of antagonism towards sleep doctors and sleep clinics. As I’ve written about many times previously, these scenarios are moving closer and closer to the arena of medical malpractice.