Snoring Problems? A Dental Appliance May be the Solution

The night before my application interview at my future dental residency in Richmond, VA, I was pretty nervous.  And when I get nervous, I have trouble sleeping.  Lack of sleep the night before some important event is nothing new for me, but usually I eventually fall asleep and the effects are annoying but tolerable.  On this night, though, I got no sleep whatsoever.  Why?  Sharing the small hotel room with me was a friend/colleague of mine who was also interviewing for a residency position.  And this friend (lucky for me) snored at an incredibly high decibel.  Think of the loudest, oldest, rustiest chainsaw being revved up over, and over, and over again all...freaking...night.  Needless to say he was the worst snorer I'd ever heard, and I was miserable.  Around 3:00 AM I was so bored and distraught I actually recorded his snoring on my cellular phone to play back for him that next day.  Obviously, the interview wasn't fun for me, but he and I were both accepted to the residency.  When I played his snoring back to him, though, he was pretty surprised at how bad it was.

Skip forward to four months later.  This same friend of mine and I (now busy dental residents) had to once again share a hotel room for a dental conference.  Obviously, I was dreading the experience.  However, this time when we hit the sack there was nary a peep from his corner of the room.  I was pleasantly shocked and slept like a baby.  When morning came I saw the reason for this transformation: my friend was wearing some sort of mouth-guard.  When I asked him about the device he smiled and told me that listening to my recording had spurned him to action.  He decided to enroll in a sleep study and learned that his snoring resulted from a  form of mild sleep apnea.  This same sleep apnea was preventing him from achieving sound, quality sleep.  Not to mention disrupting the sleep of anyone in a 5 mile radius!  Anyways, to fix the problem, he had one of our dental instructors fabricate an oral appliance (the mouthguard I saw him wearing) which positioned his lower jaw in such a way that his airway stayed open throughout the night.  Poof!  The sleep apnea all but disappeared.  He told me he was amazed at how refreshed he has started feeling after using the device, and that he couldn't believe how much of an improvement it has made.

Snoring and/or sleep apnea can be a major problem for some people.  Amazingly, the solution in the form of a dental oral appliance is not well known.  It definitely worked for my friend, and I know he continues to use this device to this day.  His newly acquired fiance can attest to that!  A few of the better known brands of these appliances are the TAP , the SomnoDent and the Silent Nite, but there are others.  So if you have a snoring problem and you would like to seek a solution, try telling your local Northford Family Dentist about it.  The solution may lie with one of these devices

-DRS