A Common Pill May Shorten Life Expectancy by Nearly 6 Years
parade.com
parade.com
Paper [Association of sleep duration and sleeping pill use with mortality and life expectancy: A cohort study of 484,916 adults](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23527...)
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-observ...
I'm sorry but this fail more than a few sniff tests https://mglink.org/2025/04/13/reading-simple-things/
Yeah the article spends very little effort to define what it means by sleeping pills.
Melatonin? Valerian? They're pills people take to sleep but they aren't considered drugs.
How about Hydroxyzine? It's on/off label for many things, inc nausea and it's an antihistamine.
How about muscle relaxers like Tizanadine? Those are used to sleep. They're OTC in some countries.
How about Mirtazapine? It's a tetracyclic antidepressant but is used for sleep too.
Importantly, they're all very different types of medications - that also happen to be prescribed for sleep.
Furthermore, speaking as someone with chronic intractable insomnia, mixed with hypersomnia and other sleep-related disorders, if you go without sleep long enough and often enough, you will wish that you had already died six years ago, so is the remainder of your life going to suck, or will it be just a touch more bearable because you've had a good night's rest?
What saved my bacon (and still is) are the meds I mentioned in my post above. None are scheduled and most Dr's are comfortable prescribing them.
Mirtazipine has been the best of the lot. It's also wrecked my diet but I need to sleep. I also take Hydroxyzine and Tizanadine. The latter doesn't sit well with everyone but it treats me okay.
I rotate the meds. I take one or two types a night. Three on tough nights. I also have a few flexaril for breakthru insomnia.
The last thing that might be worth considering is Phenibut. It's a soviet era tranq that (so far) has never been Rx listed in the US. Edengrows presently makes a quality version.