Why You Should Add Sleep to Your Practice This Year

Episode #375 with Dr. Mark Murphy

Dental sleep medicine has gotten easier, safer, and more effective. And on top of that, up to 25% of the U.S. population have obstructive sleep apnea. If you haven't already, why not add sleep to your practice today? To further explain why you need to add airway, Kirk Behrendt brings back Dr. Mark Murphy from ProSomnus, along with advice on how to start implementing it into your practice. If you want to help people have better lives with airway, listen to Episode 375 of The Best Practices Show!

Main Takeaways:

Up to 25% of the U.S. population have obstructive sleep apnea.

Today, dental sleep medicine is easier, safer, and more effective.

Now, 20% of physicians are favorable towards oral appliance therapy.

There's never been a better time to add sleep to your practice.

Not adding sleep could mean liability for malpractice claims.

Quotes:

“20% to 25% of the U.S. population — 40 to 50 million Americans — have obstructive sleep apnea. What's counter to that thought is, 40 to 50 million have obstructive sleep apnea, but only 10%, maybe 15%, have ever been diagnosed. So, 85% of that population that I just talked about have never been told they have obstructive sleep apnea. They think it’s snoring. Snoring does not mean sleep apnea, but they go together very much, very frequently, most of the time.” (4:33—5:00)

“You think back to your training, you learned the six essential elements. And one of them was oxygen. You can't live three minutes without it. And so, it’s a very essential element. And we didn't know and understand much about sleep. When the older generation like me were learning about physiology, we didn't learn much about sleep. We still don't know a lot, but we know a lot more than we did. And sleep is critical to our overall health.” (5:16—5:40)

“They're tying poor sleep to things like dementia, cardiovascular disease, stroke, arrhythmia, diabetes, depression, we could go on. It doesn't start or cause all those diseases. Maybe the only disease it’s actually tied to from a causal standpoint might be arrhythmia. But it makes every one of those things on that list worse, so that you're 23 times more likely to have a heart attack, four times more likely to have a stroke, five times more likely to die of COVID-19 if you've got obstructive sleep apnea.” (5:40—6:04)

“Picture that you've got two pathways when you look at one of your own patients and you say, ‘This patient looks like they have sleep apnea, and they should get tested.’ I can either, in all but about four or five states, I can order the sleep test. I cannot read it and interpret it — I can read it, but I can't interpret it. I can't issue a diagnosis. I can't order up an oral appliance. That always has to be done by a physician. But I can order the starting of the ball to roll down the hill. Or I can send them to my local sleep physician. Those are my choices.” (12:50—13:17)

“I can order the sleep test and then a doc-in-the-box who’s sitting in an office somewhere, god knows where in the country, but they're licensed in your state, reads and interprets the sleep test, writes a diagnosis, and writes you a prescription. That's fine. It doesn't endear you to your local physicians at all, but it’s a way to get the ball rolling in your own practice. And I do that about half the time. The other half of the time, I send them to my local physicians, who are sleep physicians, and they do the testing. And if they're mild or moderate, they send them back to me. And if they're severe, they send them for a CPAP. And we’ve all agreed to those kinds of protocols and standard operating procedures.” (13:17—13:49)

“If you went back just five years ago, if you found one out of 100 physicians who was favorable towards oral appliance