If you or someone you know has one or more of the following symptoms, it may be Sleep Apnea:



• Snoring

• Gasping for air or stopping breathing during sleep

• Falling asleep in inappropriate situations, such as while driving, at a movie, or sitting in a meeting

• Waking up feeling unrefreshed

• Large neck size (greater than 17” in men; greater than 16” in women)

• Morning headaches

• Getting up during the night to… Continue

It's a dirty little secret of Respironics, ResMed and other CPAP manufacturers, but one that touches the lives of each and every one of us, especially in these difficult economic times: vendors of CPAP equipment aren't allowed to advertise CPAPs below a certain price that the CPAP manufacturers dictate. The result is that you will more often than not pay more… Continue

I'm a fairly black and white kind of guy, so when I first got CPAP, I actually read the care and maintenance instructions. I'm also a fairly lazy kind of guy, so half-way through reading them, I stopped and gave up. I never liked puzzles, and assembling and disassembling and caring for a mask, humidifier, CPAP, tubing, etc., all seemed to me like a puzzle from hell, each night for every remaining night of my life.



Then my physician, who is at Stanford Medical Center and is… Continue

DRAFT VERSION



Friends,



Today, we face an unacceptable situation with Sleep Apnea. Sleep Apnea is a chronic, serious disease that approximately 30 million Americans have, only 10% of whom have been diagnosed. Although the disease is completely treatable with the “gold standard” of positive airway pressure (“PAP”), of those who… Continue

Here at SleepGuide, ResMed and Respironics have always loomed large as the big boys of the Sleep Apnea industry. Bad news for us, the patients, because that kind of duopoly can't be good for competition and innovation, the two forces we see as critical to moving these devices forward in terms of ease of use and comfort for patients. So we were delighted to see… Continue

If you have no idea what happened on March 13, 2008, you're in good company. What happened on that day rocked the world of absolutely nobody except for the owners of sleep labs across the country: Medicare, for the first time ever, agreed to reimburse for CPAP equipment prescribed pursuant to home tests, rather than under the ordinary in-laboratory sleep… Continue

I have a dream for CPAP use that I announced in a previous blog posting on this site that has sparked a fair amount of controversy which I did not anticipate. The agenda was as follows:



• Users should use their machines at least 5 hours a night, almost every… Continue

I might have had Sleep Apnea my entire life, but even when I started to wake up in a panic feeling as if I were suffocating to death, I didn't know it. I chalked it up to stress at work, and the feeling of trudging through each day without any energy to some form of depression. Wrong on both counts. How did I find out? During a casual conversation with a friend… Continue

As you probably can tell by my other blog entries, I love CPAP. Since using it, I've felt energized when I wake up in the morning, with a zest for being active during the day instead of bumming around and wanting to sleep in. But even I hit speed bumps from time to time, and the other night was one of them. Around 4:30 a.m., I felt as if I were choking, unable… Continue

Sleep Apnea is hard enough as it is without doctors making our lives even harder. Of course not all doctors are ignorant, stupid and incompetent. But Bill's doctor certainly is.



Bill is a dear friend of the family who has severe sleep apnea, along with a host of other problems such as diabetes and heart disease, probably brought on in part by not… Continue

We at SleepGuide will always stand up for the Sleep Apnea population first and foremost, without regard for what's best for the manufacturers, insurance companies, DMEs, doctors and others whose interests may not always be perfectly aligned with our own. This Sleep Apnea population includes anyone with Sleep Apnea, whether using dental devices, CPAP, surgery, or… Continue

It didn't have to be this way. When the Office of Inspector General (OIG) recently unveiled its plans to audit the Sleep Industry as part of its Work Plan for fiscal year 2009, it sent a shudder of fear through the sleep community, with doctors, sleep labs and DMEs scrambling to put their best foot forward. With an economic crisis afoot and President-elect Obama… Continue

It's no secret that a lot of people have trouble adjusting to CPAP, or other positive pressure therapies, to treat their sleep apnea. The conventional estimate is that about 50% of those who are prescribed CPAP have trouble with it, get frustrated and give up. Although I believe the vast majority of these… Continue