Comment by ivraatiems | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivraatiems | Hacker News Reader

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That is simply not true. Anecdotally, three people in my family including myself have sleep apnea. I am the only overweight one. The others are a normal or even low BMI. Also, I had sleep apnea when I wasn't overweight.

Studies show that non-overweight or obese people with sleep apnea are extremely common and make up between 20 and 40% of all apnea sufferers:

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5181619/

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41440-024-01669-9

3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9130173/#:~:text=Ap...

4. https://ejo.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43163-024-006...

5. https://home.liebertpub.com/publications/respiratory-care/68...

"Nasal breathing exercises" cannot overcome physiology and cannot help you if you are sleeping and have no conscious control over your muscles. Apnea is caused by physiology and while it can be made worse by weight, weight loss alone does not fix it. It may bring some people's apneas down to an acceptable level, but that is not the case for all or even most patients.

Your advice is roughly the same as telling people to skip their flu or COVID shots and hope their diet and exercise keeps them from getting sick. It's not that diet and exercise are bad for you, but they aren't the same as an exact treatment for the problem you have.

Medicine is wholly corrupt. If a hypothetical drug existed that was radically cheap and improved general health outcomes by 25%-50%, the institution of medicine and insurance by logic of self-preservation would not allow to exist or be known.

Such a drug would undermine things as they stand and so institutional self-preservation is now the primary purpose trumping any sort of too good actual solution.

You will learn more operating orthogonal to such a corrupt anti-inquiry, science-theatre. Just as a doctor-spouse (an unpaid friend-consultant) will always give you better advice than a paid doctor.

...Im saying if you are willing to read the research you are probably willing to run some n-of-1 quasi experiments.

For example dont use a computer, TV or phone for a month. Don't sit under LED or Fluroescent Lights for a month...I dont know, just try dumb things and you will learn faster than professionals "games".

This is because we operate in a low bar expectation brought on by arrogance of theory over experiment.

When crowd sourced n-of-1 combinatorial design apps drop for patients and scale to large enough, ... this point will make sense

All of your posts on this thread, honestly are some of the most bizarre I've ever seen on this site.

I'm here saying: "this treatment massively improved my life and might have actually saved it!" and your response is "this shows medicine is wholly corrupt and cannot be trusted."

It's especially odd given that CPAP is a non-invasive low-to-no-side-effect solution whose only real drawback is that the machines are expensive and hard to calibrate, and don't work if you don't use them. We're not talking about a new drug or vaccine or something. We're literally just talking about helping people breathe easier. And it's not like I am using the CPAP blindly with no idea whether it's working. I can literally tell every day just by existing in a rested state that it is working.

I'm not saying there isn't some theoretical better treatment out there. But it seems like you think I should... not use the treatment I have because the people who produced it might be corrupt?

I genuinely don't see how these things follow or are even related.

And for what it's worth, I do have a doctor-spouse, and she demanded I get a CPAP and is happy every day that I have one.

I know I was a bit over-the-top, but I stand by this logic that is far more general than "CPAP-as-an-answer" (but I do personally think it applies here but that is moreso speculation):

> "...If a hypothetical drug existed that was radically cheap and improved general health outcomes by 25%-50%, the institution of medicine and insurance by logic of self-preservation would not allow to exist or be known."

The reasoning is that there is a large capacity and infrastructure of trained professionals and insurance expectational-warp. If the medical visits and drug prescriptions were decimated the financial side of things would collapse. The reason they turn a blind eye to what we think of as truth-oriented science is that early career professionals have mortgages and debt and so are themselves locked-in to playing their cards in favor of institutional self-preservation. When this gets out of hand they begin to habitualize a rationalization-like thinking that is purely self-serving.

I am of the opinion that we are far past the point of corruption (it is unconscious in the professionals themselves), but it is mostly a question of debt thresholds and group psychology.

My reasons for saying you should yourself as a sleep apnea patient should just figure it out is that that is how pessimistic I am about such professional blindness. To be honest I'm leaving out the main problem with CPAP because by your response you just aren't ready to engage in creative thought (no offense that is almost all of humanity). Most of the intellectual and professional world sets a bar so damn low its like they are playing limbo. Meanwhile patients are like zombified robots programmed to trust the white lab coats like lambs to the slaughter.

Just like political debate is self-perpetuating such that a negatively defined identity is preserved and valued over mediation and understanding, most professionals use their brain power to self-sabotage away from institutional-skeptical inquiry as its too uncomfortable to self-sacrifice reputation, income and eventually their careers.

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