Comment by justinator
2 days ago
> what I believe in many cases is a structural issue
Many cases it is not. I'm not trying to be a contrarian but I don't want to plant hope in some people who suffer from sleep apnea thinking it's something they can just do breathing exercises for.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/central-sleep...
In MOST cases it actually is a structural issue. The brain anomaly that causes paused and intermittent breathing is much more rare.
Maybe? I didn't write "most", I wrote "many". What do you have a problem with syaing "many" instead of "all"
I suffer from obstructive sleep apnea, but I would never, ever tell people that their sleep apnea HAS to be obstructive too.
It's like telling a Type 1 Diabetic that they had a friend with diabetes that "cured" themselves with diet. We're talking about two different problems, and we don't discount the Type 1 Diabetic because there are Type 2 Diabetics.
fwiw I really believe it is, my sleep problems come and go based on entirely physical variables--how flexible I feel, how much time I spent "shrimping", how tight my back and neck are.
Personally I would not be surprised at all if in 50-100 years we look back on this era as one where we massively overprescribed CPAP machines to treat an entirely-fixable condition in most people (alongside all the other medical interventions that will turn out to be bandaid fixes for actually fixable problems). I'm aware this is a bit of an outlandish take. But you can tell how many people's breathing and posture is bad just by existing in the world for ten minutes and looking at them. I think it's really an epidemic.
I don’t think it’s an outlandish take at all. You can possibly also put orthotics and spectacles in the list of interventions as solutions to problems largely induced by unnatural adaptations to an unnatural environment.
yeah... mostly I said it that way because this take upsets some people. The full list (which I think are 80+% fixable by lifestyle) is something like: sleep apnea, obesity, back pain, most things that require physical therapy outside of injuries, probably orthotics and myopia, depression, ADHD, anxiety... probably there are others I'm not thinking of also.
I would like to also include cancers since we cause most of them but that is maybe a different category. Although I have heard of theories that suggest diet can reduce skin cancer (e.g. the mediterranean diet phenomenon) as well as one that suggests exercise can reduce prostate cancer (by strengthening the muscles surrounding veins to prevent testosterone from leaking into the prostate), and of course smoking-related cancers are entirely preventable, so I would not be surprised if there are a lot more that are prevented by health lifestyles.
Generally it doesn't seem to work to just tell people to be healthy, though; to really get any of this work you need society at large to be structured in a healthy way so that it becomes the default instead of an act of willpower. But that seems.. imminently doable, if people want to do it. However it's a huge change, so it takes a movement. For example you pretty much have to make people's lifestyles more walking-oriented, which means rearranging society completely.
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Sure, and I wouldn’t tell someone to not see an ENT, and maybe a CPAP, surgery, or this pill are the right solution for you. I’m just throwing out another option to consider with different tradeoffs.