As someone suffering from sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) & insomnia for over a decade, and diagnosed with sleep apnea 5 years ago, I've read a zillion websites, articles, and books. This is the first one, since the first book I read, that substantially added to my understanding in a variety of ways. It's not just another list of good sleep habits, or signs of apnea and recommendations for CPAP, or a meditation technique that will miraculously cure your insomnia. In fact, as a compendium of interventions to try, it's not particularly comprehensive. But that's because the focus of the book is presenting a new, wider paradigm for the complex of SDB conditions and symptoms.
Dr. Park connects a variety of existing studies - the co-occurence of apnea & reflux, apnea & depression, the increase in heart attacks after surgery, sleep problems when pregnant - with his own observations from his clinical practice about how a variety of superficially unrelated conditions (sinusitis, PTSD, fatigue, depression) all seem to occur mainly in people who can't sleep on their back. He presents growing research that mild SDB - hard to find on a sleep study, yet with mounting health impact over time - is yet another one of those chronic, subtle conditions that are surprisingly common and usually missed.
Sleep is our body & mind's crucial time for recuperating and rejuvenating, and yet we have little understanding of how it works and how it fails. Dr. Park has made an extremely valuable contribution to growing that understanding. I call it a paradigm expansion, rather than a shift, because his work doesn't contradict any of the existing sleep research. Rather, he incorporates it into a broader set of feedback loops and co-occurences.
I believe him, because the book named several symptoms that I have and had never connected to my chronic SDB, because the narrower conventional sleep science paradigm hasn't realized they are connected yet. Now that I know that the root cause of these symptoms is SDB, I can focus on treating that cause, rather than the symptoms. And if, like me, you've ever had a doctor tell you that a chronic health problem is all in your head, or caused by your thoughts or your habits, it's very comforting to learn that it's real, it's common, and it's because of your airway, not because you sometimes read in bed or worry about not getting enough sleep.
This is not a handbook for curing you (though it has some great pointers), and unlike much alternative medicine, it doesn't offer any unique miracle cure or 30-day program. But it will help those people with SDB (and not just simple insomnia) better understand their condition, get diagnosed, and get treatments that actually work (CPAP or surgery). I recommend this book to anyone who suspects that they or a loved one have sleep-disordered breathing, particularly if they don't fit the apnea stereotype (middle-aged overweight male). And I highly recommend it to anyone open-minded in the sleep medicine field.
