Services - Sleep Apnea

Students/Parents | Adults | Sleep Apnea | High-Tech

If you have obstructive Sleep Apnea from nasal obstruction you need to see an ENT physician to take care of that problem first! However IF your obstruction is due to the tongue position closing off the posterior pharynx and you are on a forced breathing machine then read below....

THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS ARE DR. BACH'S VIEWS ONLY AND BASED ON RESEARCH CURRENTLY BEING DONE:

What if your car's engine was broken, but you needed to drive to work? You go to the mechanic and he gives you a tow truck and driver to drag you every day back and forth. It may sound stupid, but this has been the accepted norm with patients across the country who suffer from sleep apnea. Instead of diagnosing and trying to fix the engine (tongue position and oral-pharynx structures blocking the airway)... the only thing many practitioners have known up to this point is how to force more air into the airway at night with a machine (tow truck). Until now, this may have been a decent, sometimes wonderful, short term solution, but it's time to move beyond that approach and actually try to fix things.

SO WHERE ARE WE GOING?

Early results out of Europe (Fritsch, et al) seem to show that using an appliance such as an OSA-Monobloc at night to reposition the lower jaw forward AND open, helps to change the position of the tongue in a manner that opens the airway immediately at night. ALL patients in the study found relief and after a year would not discontinue the appliance. This is a great first step and the few patients I've treated this way have NOT used their CPAP machines since wearing an OSA Monobloc. I first started using Monoblocs in growing children over 30 years ago, but this is a new, exciting application! But what about daytime breathing and the effects of oxygen depletion?

WHAT ABOUT CORRECTION?

Now that we've repositioned the structures and loosened the impingement of the tongue can we try to fix the underlying cause? Based on the writings of Dr. Melvin Moss at Columbia (my professor) about the Form and Function in the human body (and particularly the facial structures) some clinical researchers in the U.S. (Damon, et al) are trying to take this to the next step and expand the dental and skeletal arches to permanently create a "cured" situation where the patient is free from any outside appliances or devices and breathes freely with much improved sleep patterns. Again, the early results are very good and a study is currently setting up at Stanford University to publish the results.

SO WHAT ABOUT YOU?

You should continue on your breathing device. However... knowing that much of the follow-up scientific data is not out yet. You could start with an OSA-Monobloc that you can wear with your CPAP so you can see if it helps even more; and you have nothing to lose in your therapy. THEN if you get off the machine and want to try to go further we can discuss the approach being used by Damon, et al on the West Coast..... hmmmm.... think about it.....

William Penn: Right is right, even if everyone is against it; and wrong is wrong,
even if everyone is for it.