Posted by Bird Watcher on March 02, 2009 at 06:36:28:In Reply to: Bought Encore Viewer posted by Riv on March 01, 2009 at 13:02:22:
I REALLY DO HOPE you can get some of your questions figured out. The first step, though, is trying to figure out what you DON'T NEED to figure out.
1. You don't need to figure out every day's or night's data, specifically. More importantly, you need to figure out how you feel the next day and try to relate this to your overall activity level(mental activity vs. physical activity ratio) and your diet the previous day.
2. You don't need to figure out Average Flow Limitation Index, Average Vibratory Snore.
3. It will be important for you to figure out when your leak average has increased above normal and do something to correct the tightness or looseness of the mask to prevent the leak. You can't get therapy if the air is leaking. Also, the machine responds differently when a large leak is present and this may screw up your results.
4. You need to figure out that an AHI index of less than 5 is desirable and an AHI of 3 or less is better and leave it at that.
5. You need to learn a bit more about and understand the deeper stages of sleep and dreaming. More specifically, you need to understand why deeper stages of sleep are important, vital, and necessary. They are important because this is the period of sleep when our bodies sort out memories - keeping what is necessary and deleting what is clutter. This aids the process of LEARNING. Without learning or keeping our abilities to learn, we pose a great risk to ourselves that outweighs many of the less important little things that we have go wrong.
6. If you haven't figured it out by this writing, the therapy or report 'day' on the machine goes from 12:00 noon to 11:59 am the next day. You can't change this setting. If you have the machine on and are sleeping through the noon hour, it will screw up your reports - a sleeping period in two different days. The hours of noon and 11:59 were choosen because it was thought this was the least likely time people would be sleeping.
7. You need to figure out that finding a cure to your sleep problems or getting off PAP entirely may not be possible. More importantly, you need to focus on making small improvements to how you sleep and avoiding activities and a lifestyle that make sleep worse. This can and is most importantly measured by how you feel the next day and relating this to what you ate and did the previous day, or more importantly than that, what you ate and did within 5 hours of going to sleep the previous day.
8. Understand there is no conspiracy from doctors or providers about the data the machine can give. The machine is only one sensor as compared to many that are used during a proper lab sleep test - that sensor being the tach in the blower motor and the current it draws and the speed it's at at any one moment. Most of it is only math that is easy to program. The results and reports that you see only serve to market the machine - and not really HELP the patient.