“Positional patients ... can sleep in the lateral position and sleep quite well,” said Arie Oksenberg, PhD, a sleep researcher formerly at Loewenstein Hospital in Ra’anana, Israel.
But it’s not easy to find this in the official AASM treatment guidelines, which instead go right to the money-making options like CPAP machines, surgery, central apnea, and mouth appliances.
Dealing with apnea by shifting slightly in bed gets little more than a couple of paragraphs in AASM’s guideline on “other” treatments and a little box on a long and complex decision chart.
A third or more of patients wear CPAPs only a few hours a night or stop using them. It turns out people don’t like machines in their beds.
“Positional therapy is an effective treatment option for some patients,” said Ms. Gibson. But she said there are concerns about whether patients will sleep on their sides long term and whether trying to stay in one position might cause sleep interruptions itself.
It’s true that side-sleeping doesn’t help everybody. And it often takes practice. (Some people tape a tennis ball to their pajamas to keep them off their backs.) Even conservative sleep doctors say CPAP machines are the best solution for many patients.
But there is a largely overlooked alternative.
“Are we missing a simple treatment for most adult sleep apnea patients?” was the name of a 2013 paper that Dr. Oksenberg and a colleague wrote about positional therapy.
In my case, the answer was “yes.”
KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.