Source: MidwesternDoctor.com
I believe one of the biggest issues in modern medicine is that patients often don’t get the opportunity to establish a genuine relationship with their physician and hence often lack the critical voice which is necessary for a therapeutic doctor-patient relationship. Because of this, my goal here was always to be able to correspond with everyone who reached out to me. Unfortunately, due to the traffic I now receive, it’s not possible to do that. For that reason, I decided the best solution was to have a monthly open thread (where people could ask any question they wanted) and link that to a topic I’d wanted to write about but didn’t quite feel merited a full article. In this month’s open thread, I will discuss another facet of the insomnia puzzle—the devices that improve sleep and strategies for sleep friendly housing.
Presently, I believe one of the most important things for health is having restorative sleep which in turn requires having a functional sleep cycle. For example, as I showed in a recent article, some of the critical functions of sleep include:
- Maintaining circulatory health and preventing heart attacks.
- Ensuring proper metabolic health (e.g., preventing hunger, diabetes, and weight gain).
- Supporting immune function (e.g., reducing susceptibility to the flu).
- Preventing cancer.
- Avoiding fatigue, brain fog, and serious accidents.
- Keeping you awake and alert.
- Healing and restoring the brain (e.g., reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s).
- Regulating hormonal function and maintaining fertility (e.g., sleep deprivation lowers testosterone levels).
- Processing emotional trauma (e.g., sleep is typically disrupted in PTSD, and PTSD often significantly improves once a drug is given which prevents PTSD from disrupting sleep).
- Interpreting emotional signals.
- Allowing rational control over impulses.
- Maintaining one’s sense of reality (e.g., prolonged sleep deprivation can trigger psychosis, and sleep is known to be disturbed in schizophrenic patients).
- Facilitating creativity (e.g., many paradigm-shifting discoveries came from dreams, Thomas Edison was well-known for using dreams to concoct his inventions, and when people are woken up from REM sleep, they often demonstrate a radically improved abstract problem solving capacity).
- Reducing one’s sensitivity to pain (whereas sleep deprivation increases it).
- Facilitating the long-term retention of memories.
More importantly, rather than these benefits being abstract, people immediately notice how much worse they feel when they are sleep deprived or they have a condition (e.g., fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue) which prevent them from getting restorative sleep.
Given how critical sleep is for health, it’s remarkable that our society fares so poorly with it and our health authorities do so little to support it. This I believe is due to many different economic interests being opposed to creating the changes necessary for healthy sleep. For example:
•Many industries depend upon having consumers use bright electronic devices at night (which is terrible for the sleep cycle).
•Many industries (e.g., hospitals) depend upon workers having abnormal hours (e.g., periodically working night shifts), something which is highly disruptive to the sleep cycle and thus health (e.g., the WHO classifies shift work as a probable human carcinogen since existing research shows it causes a 33-62% increase in the risk of cancer).
•The pharmaceutical industry (which now exerts significant control over the government) is reliant upon Americans having as many chronic illnesses as possible. Because of this, safe and unpatentable ways to maintain health (e.g., regular outdoor sunlight exposure) are actively disparaged by the medical industry.
•Insomnia is one of the largest drug markets in the United States (e.g., in 2022, 65 billion was spent on sleep aids), so the industry benefits from insomnia being a chronic condition which has a marginal response to the existing medications, in turn requiring the populace to become lifelong consumers of these products. In the case of sleeping pills, this is particularly unfortunate as rather than help you sleep, most of them function as sedatives which block the sleep cycle from occurring once the user is knocked out. Because of this, sleeping pills have many severe side effects (e.g., one large study found, depending on how many sleeping pills were taken, that these pills increased the risk of death by 3.6-5.4 times), and sadly, many other equally disturbing datasets about these medications exist….