3 Responses to “Tired of Being Tired?”

1. James Noah on January 30th, 2009 7:18 pm

   I am a patient of Dr. Li’s and I am interested in hearing your interview with the respiratory therapist. When can I find this on your site, or other site?
   Thanking you in advance for your assistance.

   James Noah

2. Rosie O’Donnell and the 5 Sleep Myths That Women Have | Dr. Steven Y. Park - Information on How You Can Breathe Better, Sleep Better, and Live Better on February 14th, 2009 5:04 pm

   [...] The last myth has to do with the actual sleep study itself to determine the degree of sleep apnea you have.  Many patients preempt these formalized tests by saying "I won’t be able to sleep in a sleep lab." Being in a strange bed with multiple monitors and leads attached to your body is an uncomfortable and annoying experience, but it’s rare when I have someone that really could not sleep enough to gather useful data. We don’t need an entire night’s sleep; we only need about 3-4 hours of continuous or even interrupted sleep. Some even complain that they did not sleep at all. But the brain waves on their sleep study results, by definition, shows that there was significant sleep present. Another frequent scenario I run across is when a patient undergoes a sleep study and the test does not reveal any significant obstructive sleep apnea. But just because the sleep study did not reveal any apneas does not mean that the quality of your sleep is still good. The reason for this is that an "apnea" is defined as a total stoppage of breathing due to obstruction in the throat for 10 seconds or longer. There is a lesser form of an "apnea" where there is still some airflow, but greatly diminished, yet it lasts more than 10 seconds (hypopneas). If the minimum threshold for obstructive sleep apnea is 15 "apneas" every hour.  and if you stop breathing 30 times every hour, but if each episode lasts for only 8 seconds, then you will have zero apneas and hypopneas.  As confusing as that sounds, in this case, you are told that you don’t have sleep apnea, but you still feel lousy when you wake up in the morning. This is a common situation with patients who have upper airway resistance syndrome, which is a preliminary stage before they proceed to having OSA (To learn more about UARS listen to our podcast on this topic by clicking here). [...]

3. Severe OSA or UARS? | Dr. Steven Y. Park - Holistic Information on Obstructive Sleep Apnea, Snoring, and Upper Airway Resistance Syndrome on August 17th, 2009 3:41 pm

   [...]   In my attempt to locate more information, I came across your journal entry “Tired of Being Tired” to learn more about UARS.  My main question, is how possible is it that I have a [...]

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