"Life After CPAP" A physician's experience with OSA, e-book available free.
Hi, longtime, no see, DU. I am not writing political journals very much, now that we no longer have our Selected President Bush. I spend my days practicing medicine and writing an occasional piece about health disparities along with a lot of fiction, which is what I prefer to write (when we do not have a Supreme Court coup).
Below is a link to the e-book I Just wrote, "Life After CPAP: A physician's experience with Obstructive Sleep Apnea, the Most Commonly Missed Common Diagnosis in the U.S." I am a family physician working at a large urban public clinic. I also have a Master's Public Health in the area of health education. I wrote this book as first person narrative, because I think that many readers will recognize themselves, and health ed messages are more effective if the target/reader thinks "This applies to me!"
I was disabled for ten years, unable to work as a physician, because it took three years for my doctors to figure out that I had sleep apnea. And they only solved the mystery after my husband (not a doctor) made the diagnosis. It took me several more years to get my OSA under control.
The e-book is free for Kindle for five days, then I will have to start charging for it as per Amazon policy. If you don't have a Kindle and are broke because you can't work because you don't know that you have OSA or can't get it treated without insurance but you do have a computer---which probably applies to everyone here---I can also send a free word document to anyone who e-mails me at McCamyTaylor@earthlink. net. This is intended to be a health resource, not a money making venture. This is NOT a screed against CPAP. CPAP works great in about a quarter to a half of the people with OSA. It didn't work for me---and in the book I spell out exactly why it did not work for me and I go over a lot of other treatment options that work. I have done research (physician surveys) about why primary care doctors are so bad at diagnosing sleep disorders. I have a few suggestions for how we can improve our doctors' diagnostic skills. Most of them involved increased public awareness--which is another reason I have written this. This book is also an attempt to make the initial diagnosis easier, because if you don't know you have sleep apnea, you will go around chasing your tail treating all the complications. Sleep apnea is now a particular area of interest of mine in practice, since so many of the disabled uninsured that we see got that way because when they had insurance, their doctors did not notice that they had a sleep disorder, and the complications of untreated sleep apnea got them fired. If they had only known about their health condition, they could have kept their jobs by getting treatment and taking advantage of special laws that protect the disabled until their OSA improved. I also see a lot of people who qualify for Social Security disability but who keep getting turned down, because they do not know that they have OSA--a condition which the government considers disabling if it is severe enough. If you get Social Security, you (eventually) get Medicare--and then you get treatment and get back to being your own self and maybe even back to work, the way that I did.
If you have fibromyalgia, migraine headaches, hard to control BP, ED, nocturnal angina and mini-strokes, depression that does not respond to medication, poor driving skills, memory loss, over 40 sudden onset "ADD" and doctors can not tell you what is wrong with you, there is a very high chance that you have an undiagnosed sleep disorder. OSA--obstructive sleep apnea--is the most common of these.
http://www.amazon.com/Life-After-CPAP-Physicians-Obstructive-ebook/dp/B00HUISHVE/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1389806861&sr=8-13&keywords=McCamy+Taylor
= new reply since forum marked as read
