I have been thinking about this analogy all afternoon and getting madder and madder at the thought that someone here might be misled by it.asleep@thewheel wrote:It is a prescribed medical therapy. * * * This is why you can not buy over the counter opiate narcotics. You potentially might take too much and die.
First and foremost: air is not a controlled substance.
Second, not all prescriptions signify that a drug is a federally-controlled substance. You can't get penicillin OTC, either. There are even a lot of medications that are now OTC that were once prescription-only. Are they any less dangerous now that they are not prescription only? No.
Third, let's consider the opiates analogy for a moment. If you have prescription for opiates, it is not ILLEGAL to deviate from the dosing instructions. Here's an example. You have a tooth pulled, you get a prescription for painkillers. The label says take it every four hours. You go to bed and don't get up in the middle of the night to take it, so you go eight hours between doses. Is that "illegal"? Of course not. The next day, your mouth doesn't hurt very much, so you start stretching out the time between doses. Is that "illegal"? Of course not. There's no law that says if you are prescribed opiates, you must take every pill in the bottle (there is a law that says that if you are prescribed opiates, you can't let someone else have them, but that's a different matter). I should also point out that if you have a valid prescription for opiates you can still take too much and die. Your prescription does not prevent you from doing so.
Fourth, let's consider this situation. Imagine that you are a CPAP patient with a lazy doctor who prescribes you an APAP with the pressures set from 4 to 20, which isn't really a prescription at all. In our hypothetical, let's also assume that your lazy doctor at least made the effort write that prescription for a data-capable machine. You dutifully start using the machine and you discover over time that (1) you absolutely suffocate at a pressure of 4 every night until the machine climbs to around 10 and (2) you never, ever, see the pressure climb above 12. Why on earth would it be illegal to change the APAP range to 10 to 12? Those are the only pressures you are actually using.
I think a much better analogy for xPAP is insulin. Diabetic patients who are insulin dependent have to learn a great deal about managing their own blood sugar. The insulin is "prescribed," but the amount the patient has to administer to his or herself may be quite variable.
In some cases it may be a dumb idea to change your pressures, but it ain't illegal.
