Life Without CPAP: The True Story of a Healthcare System that

Life Without CPAP: The True Story of a Healthcare System that Eliminated Sleep Studies and CPAP for Five Years as Told by a Physician

In this sequel to "Life After CPAP", McCamy Taylor describes her experience as a family physician at a large, urban public health clinic that she calls "XYZ Health" that decided to cut costs by eliminating sleep studies and CPAP. In the opinion of XYZ administrators, too many sleep studies were being ordered on normal people and too many people were non-compliant with their CPAP treatment. The ban on diagnosing and treating Obstructive Sleep Apnea--a condition that affects an estimated one in ten adults over 40 and which, if left untreated can lead to heart disease, stroke, car wrecks and renal failure---had unintended consequences. Severe, untreated sleep apnea causes blood pressure to rise and makes diabetes difficult to control. It increases the appetite, causing weight gain. It causes anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder and depression. Untreated OSA sufferers have three times as many automobile accidents. They have more painful medical conditions, and sleep deprivation causes their bodies to resist the effects of opiates, meaning that higher doses of narcotic pain medications are required to control their pain. Studies have shown that patients whose sleep disorders are not treated use more medical services, have more accidents and are a drain on the economy due to lost productivity.

OSA is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Typically, only two out of ten people with sleep apnea are aware of their condition at any one time. The statistics are even worse for women. Dr. Taylor discusses the factors that make sleep disorders more difficult to diagnose than other medical conditions. She describes the consequences of the failure to treat even the most severe, obvious cases of OSA at XYZ Health. And she describes the strategies that she developed to get around the ban on sleep studies and CPAP, including diagnosing patients based on their symptoms and history and using alternative treatments.

"Life Without CPAP" is a cautionary tale.If we ignore disease prevention and concentrate our medical resources on treating the end results of years of medical neglect, we spend much more to achieve much less. Unless something is done to reform the way healthcare is delivered in this country---unless we become proactive rather than reactive--the U.S. will continue to spend twice as much per person per year as any other industrialized country to achieve results that are second world at best.
Country USA
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2014-07-13
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2014-07-13
Format	Kindle eBook

Life Without CPAP: The True Story of a Healthcare System that Eliminated Sleep Studies and CPAP for Five Years as Told by a Physician

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