Back for some more straws while I am sick in bed.

Came across this company in SM and saw a few straws about it. So I decided to do some digging. Spoke to a good friend of mine who works as a researcher in a Sleep Apnea lab. His response was "Oral treatment is a rip off. Gold standard is always ventilators. Oral treatment only work on some patients with mild sleep apnea. The chance of them working on patients with moderate to severe sleep apnea are very low. I don't like this!"

But then I thought, if that many people are using the product, they must provide some sort of benefit. So I looked into it a bit more and came across a journal review: Review of oral appliances for treatment of sleep-disordered breathing by Dr. Victor Hoffstein. Is been 10+ years since I graduated from my science degree, but luckily I was still able to understand some of the result. It confirmed my friends view regarding its effectiveness in treating moderate and severe sleep apnea patients. But the following findings are what fascinates me:

• It shows tremandous improvement in treating sleep apnea patients with their snoring (avg -45%)
• It shows good improvement on patients' daytime function. It is measured by Epworth sleepiness score (ESS). And In all investigations, the ESS dropped with the use of oral appliances. For the entire group, there was a significant reduction in the ESS from 11.2 to 7.8.
• Finally, patients' preference. Patients subjectively prefer oral appliances over CPAP. In five out of seven studies, the patients expressed preference for an oral appliance, in one study neither treatment was preferred and in another study CPAP was preferred.

It kind of demonstrated that oral appliance does offer lots of symptoms relief for patients even if is not treating the root of their problem. A bit like pain killers I guess. Won't treat the cause but will sooth your symtoms. Base on this and the current price, I have gone against my friend's advice and decided to buy in today.

DISC: Hold in SM and will soon hold IRL