It’s important that all medical doctors, dentists, and other healthcare professionals empathize with their patients. You must understand, or at least appreciate, what your patients are experiencing and feeling in order to relate to them and understand their concerns. While clinical skills make a good doctor or dentist, understanding the patient’s experience makes great doctors and dentists. Here, you will learn what your patients experienced with their home sleep test in hopes that you’ll gain a better understanding of what they went through to arrive at your office for Obstructive Sleep Apnea treatment.
Understanding the symptoms and available tests is crucial if you suspect you have Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) or have been recently diagnosed. The terrible sleep, the waking up feeling tired, the daytime fatigue, the sore throat in the mornings, headaches, and the lack of concentration and memory.
Many couples joke about their partner’s snoring and often kick the snoring spouse to the couch or guest room, but snoring may indicate a severe medical condition such as Obstructive Sleep Apnea. While snoring may seem like an annoyance that you have to put up with because your marriage vows say you have to take the good and the bad until death do you part, snoring is the sound people make when they struggle to breathe during sleep.
In our fast-paced, digitally driven world, we find ourselves in front of screens all day long, right up to the time we go to bed. All that constant exposure to computer screens, tablets, phones, and other devices can impact the quality of sleep we get, particularly if we don't put the devices away early enough. As we head into spring, when everything is coming back to life, why not breathe life into your sleep by enforcing a little digital detox?
Between balancing work, family life, and your social life, it can be hard to find time to go to the doctor to address your sleep apnea. And yet, when you aren’t sleeping well, it can be even harder to balance all those different aspects of life. When we sleep, our brain and body work on restoring themselves so we’re ready for the next day. And if that can’t happen, how can we expect ourselves to manage that balancing act?
Do you wear a smartwatch to bed? If you do, you know that it tracks your sleep. It provides data on how long you slept, how long you spent in each stage of sleep, and how many times you woke up throughout the night. More sophisticated watches estimate blood oxygen saturation, snoring, sleeping heart rate, and restlessness. You’d think you could diagnose your own sleep disorder with all that information, but a doctor still needs to provide a diagnosis. Here’s why.
Finding out that you have obstructive sleep apnea is equal parts relief and uncertainty. On the one hand, you’ve finally discovered the cause of your snoring, daytime sleepiness, and cognitive changes. On the other hand, you’re left with a choice, should you use CPAP or oral appliance therapy to treat your sleep apnea?
You often hear jokes couples make about the other one snoring, but snoring is actually an indication that something is physically amiss with your partner. While we like to tease loved ones about their loud snoring keeping the whole house awake, snoring usually indicates some type of breathing-related sleep disorder that may need medical attention.
Traditional sleep apnea testing is done in a lab over one night. It’s called in-lab polysomnography. You go to a sleep testing lab for one night, and sensors and a tech monitor your sleep for the night. The data is then given to a sleep doctor who would diagnose you or not. However, the problem is that sleep apnea episodes fluctuate nightly, making the severity of your sleep apnea hard to diagnose in just one night of monitoring. Not only that, but sleep testing labs can be uncomfortable, like sleeping in a hotel. You may or may not sleep as you normally would at home.
The world of wearable technology is making waves in sleep medicine, with Apple and Samsung at the forefront of innovation. These tech giants are now offering groundbreaking tools to detect sleep apnea, a common yet often undiagnosed sleep disorder. At SleepTest.com, we're thrilled to dive into these advancements and explore their potential impact on sleep health.
