stuffuru

While I somewhat agree that surgeons can be trigger-happy when it comes to surgery, orthodontists and dentists can err in the opposite direction—exhausting every "non-invasive" option to avoid surgery, even when surgery is warranted. Some of the recent "advances" in airway orthodontics amount to little more than moving teeth around, potentially compromising patients' periodontal health without meaningfully improving their airways.

I learned abt sleep apnea from HN a couple of years ago. Treatment has made a noticeable improvement to my quality of life. I went the surgical route (EASE, MMA, pharyngoplasty) and while it's not made me 100% (one of the surgeons was a butcher), I was able to work and drive again.

It helped me. I no longer wake up feeling congested. The impact on sleep was more subtle. I had some prior complications so I wasn’t able to expand as much as the avg patient.

lots of people with chronic allergic or non-allergic rhinitis aren't able to breathe through their nose.

Look into the EASE procedure by Dr. Kasey Li

The first surgeon was incompetent in hindsight. I had meager advancement from the jaw surgery and the expansion pattern was suboptimal (in addition to various complications).

I was tired all the time. My sleep got really bad in my late 20s and I ended up getting a sleep study (AHI ~10, no RDI scored) based on recommendations from the HN crowd. My then symptoms were excessive daytime sleepiness and erectile dysfunction. My second sleep physician got me on CPAP (first one wouldn't do anything so I fired him) which helped with the cardiovascular aspect of sleep apnea but didn't do much for sleepiness. A dentist-prescribed MAD helped me a lot which convinced me that jaw surgery is the way to go (had multiple people telling me about needing jaw surgery, including the late Dr Christian Guilleminault who coined the term obstructive sleep apnea). I went to a Stanford sleep surgeon for maxillary expansion and jaw surgery, who turned out to be a butcher, so now I'm getting these procedures redone with another surgeon and trying a BiPAP.

In my experience vitamin D tests were never part of their standard blood test panel. They had no problems prescribing it for me when I asked but it wasn't covered by insurance.

how does soundmind compare to the dreem headband?

I'm one of those people who have had success with MADs in r/SleepApnea. Unfortunately I couldn't use it long term due to preexisting issues with my bite, and had to get surgeries instead.

do you score RERAs (respiratory effort related arousals) in your home sleep test?

My arch nemesis when it comes to sleep is obstructive sleep apnea. I have some soft tissue redundancies (long uvula and turbinate hypertrophy) as well as skeletal deficiencies (recessed jaw and narrow nasal cavity), and I had to have multiple surgeries in addition to PAP therapy to get reasonable (but not great) sleep. When I first started having unrefreshing sleep a couple of years ago, I tried everything under the sun when it comes to sleep hygiene (which helped a bit), but there comes a point when you really need medical interventions.