All you need is one bad night’s sleep to know why that’s so important. Okay, so we all know sleep’s the big deal, you know, as far as regenerating our health and stuff. The way that works in a dental office is, first of all, it’s law that you have to have a sleep study.
And that sleep study will generally need to be done through somebody who specializes in sleep medicine. Now, that can be a sleep doc that has a clinic for sleep medicine. More often than not, it’s a neurologist or a pulmonologist.
But once you’ve had the sleep study, you’re going to figure out where do you stand in the hierarchy here. If they meet certain parameters and they won’t wear a CPAP, okay, or can’t wear a CPAP. CPAP’s a gold standard.
We don’t ever talk somebody out of a CPAP. If they can wear and will wear a CPAP, wear a CPAP, please, by all means, okay. But if for some reason they can’t, and there are legitimate reasons why they can’t oftentimes, then the sleep clinic will refer them to us to make a dental device called a mandibular advancement device.
And what that device is, is it almost looks like two mouth guards, one on the top and one on the bottom. So like two athletic guards. And they’re joined together by all sorts of different kinds of apparatuses.
But what they’re doing is they’re pulling your lower jaw out, just ever so slightly, because your tongue’s attached to your lower jaw. And if you lay back, what’s gravity do? Puts the tongue right back, right? Okay. So blocks the airway.
Well, people think their airway’s like this big because they can feel their trachea. Oh, yeah, my airway’s that. Your airway’s about like that.
So if you open it like that, that’s huge. So it doesn’t have to open it way up. It just has to open it so you get enough air in there.
They work very, very well, but they’re like anything else. You have responsibilities in how you’re going to take care of it, what you’re going to do in the morning when you take it out. If you’re not going to do those things, then don’t choose that as a, you know, treatment regimen.
It’s not going to work well for you. If you’re one of those people that can follow the rules in how you do that, they just work great. It changes people’s lives.
You know, usually when somebody comes in as a result of seeing a sleep, or having a sleep study, they’re not actually coming in because of the sleep study. They’re coming in because of the bed partner. The snoring, the stopping breathing, all those kind of things are happening.
And pretty soon somebody puts their foot down and they start getting treated for it. You know, it’s like anything else you hear. A knee replacement or something.
Oh, I wish I’d done this years ago. It’s so comfortable. I don’t know what I was worried about, you know.
So yeah, they have very positive outcomes as far as relationships, but they also have positive outcomes for health, obviously, because sleep’s super important.
