Is doing this hurting me and so forth

[sleepyjane]

I recently saw this about some purrsleep product pulled from the market..

http://www.apneasupport.org/about10015.html

I am not that familiar with it. someone recommended it for my son who has sleep apnea and is pulling off his mask in his sleep.

Are these products safe or is it only some of them that are not safe possibly.

Also more importantly for me. Now I am questioning a practice I have used off and on for 17 years of using a bipap/cpap. I am currently on autobipap.

I do not use the humidifier; however, I do sometimes use essential oils with my machine. I use eucalyptus when I am stuffed up or have a cold or can't breathe right and lavender when I am stressed out or cannot fall asleep. I have two hoses connected together with a piece and I open them up and shake several drops of the essential oil down the tube and reconnect them and put on mask and turn on. this floods me with the scent of the oils and then I can breathe better or fall asleep easier.

At first I had a lot of difficulty with the mask breaking off at the nose piece where the tube meets as I was sprinkling the oils in the nose piece..this was apparently damaging the plastic and making it weak and I at first did not realize that was the cause of several masks breaking.

When I realized this, that is when I started doing it via the two connected tubes. I did notice that the connector piece starts to melt over time and I replace once a year or so as it is damaged via melting the plastic.

After reading the link above, I am now wondering if

1. breathing the concentrated essential oils as I have been is bad for me

2. if I am breathing the melting plastic in small dose each night and hurting myself or my lungs. I have long had lung problems off and on like wheezing, shortness of breath. coughing but was finally diagnosed as having allergic rhinitis due to I think mold..when I moved from a house I discovered on moving that the carpet had mold under it into the wood floors..I always thought I had chronic bronchitis due to several hour coughing fits where I coughed so hard I could not breathe and it felt like my ribs were broken, but when I moved, it all went away.

After remodeling this new place and replacing the sinks, cabinets, tub, toilet etc, I returned to find a thick dust over everything, I started getting symptoms again and felt it was due to them removing the tub, and sinks and there was a leak under sink so maybe mold was present and the removing and stirring around mold somehow got into the dust which I breathe in when I feather diusted till I could do a more thorough cleaning and immediately started coughing, wheezing ete, but these symptoms have pretty much abated now that several months passed...but now I am wondering if some of these lung problems were connected or exacerbated with breathing the essential oils...

Could someone shed more light on this or give their opinions on what I have been doing as far as the essential oils..I always thought doing this was a good thing but I never thought about how combining it with pressurized (and therefore unnatural) air might affect the use of these 100% essential oils that I get at the health food store.

Also your opinion on the purrsleep products..

_________________

CPAPopedia Keywords Contained In This Post (Click For Definition): bipap, humidifier

[Julie]

I would think that if you've been doing it for 17 years (!), you have nothing to worry about. Recalls (like the Pur-sleep one) are usually done when a specific batch (or car or can of food) of a product is bad, or they believe it's not up to standard, and it rarely means the product is otherwise bad. I know (from the brochures that come with my Cpap) that putting anything in the humidifier besides water if a bad idea (though people still do it), but whether the oils affect the hose enough to harm you (the deteriorating plastic) is hard to say, though as I mentioned - after 17 yrs, you're obviously not doing too badly! Whether the plastic deteriorates from the oils or just as a matter of age only the manufacturer could say (and probably would tell you not to use anything to protect the company from a lawsuit if anything at all ever happened to you that could be traced back to the company!).

[lilsheba]

That thread is two years old.....these are pure essential oils and they are perfectly safe. The drops don't go into the mask anywhere, or in the humidifier, they sit on a diffuser pad by the intake valve and that's it. The oils never touch anything on the machine/hose/mask. As for whether they are safe for cats that is debatable I guess but my cats never touch it so it's not a worry for me. IF it don't smell like cat food they don't care

[DreamStalker]

I recently saw this about some purrsleep product pulled from the market..

http://www.apneasupport.org/about10015.html

I am not that familiar with it. someone recommended it for my son who has sleep apnea and is pulling off his mask in his sleep.

Are these products safe or is it only some of them that are not safe possibly.

Also more importantly for me. Now I am questioning a practice I have used off and on for 17 years of using a bipap/cpap. I am currently on autobipap.

I do not use the humidifier; however, I do sometimes use essential oils with my machine. I use eucalyptus when I am stuffed up or have a cold or can't breathe right and lavender when I am stressed out or cannot fall asleep. I have two hoses connected together with a piece and I open them up and shake several drops of the essential oil down the tube and reconnect them and put on mask and turn on. this floods me with the scent of the oils and then I can breathe better or fall asleep easier.

At first I had a lot of difficulty with the mask breaking off at the nose piece where the tube meets as I was sprinkling the oils in the nose piece..this was apparently damaging the plastic and making it weak and I at first did not realize that was the cause of several masks breaking.

When I realized this, that is when I started doing it via the two connected tubes. I did notice that the connector piece starts to melt over time and I replace once a year or so as it is damaged via melting the plastic.

After reading the link above, I am now wondering if

1. breathing the concentrated essential oils as I have been is bad for me

2. if I am breathing the melting plastic in small dose each night and hurting myself or my lungs. I have long had lung problems off and on like wheezing, shortness of breath. coughing but was finally diagnosed as having allergic rhinitis due to I think mold..when I moved from a house I discovered on moving that the carpet had mold under it into the wood floors..I always thought I had chronic bronchitis due to several hour coughing fits where I coughed so hard I could not breathe and it felt like my ribs were broken, but when I moved, it all went away.

After remodeling this new place and replacing the sinks, cabinets, tub, toilet etc, I returned to find a thick dust over everything, I started getting symptoms again and felt it was due to them removing the tub, and sinks and there was a leak under sink so maybe mold was present and the removing and stirring around mold somehow got into the dust which I breathe in when I feather diusted till I could do a more thorough cleaning and immediately started coughing, wheezing ete, but these symptoms have pretty much abated now that several months passed...but now I am wondering if some of these lung problems were connected or exacerbated with breathing the essential oils...

Could someone shed more light on this or give their opinions on what I have been doing as far as the essential oils..I always thought doing this was a good thing but I never thought about how combining it with pressurized (and therefore unnatural) air might affect the use of these 100% essential oils that I get at the health food store.

Also your opinion on the purrsleep products..

Firat of all, the people over there on that other forum are weird ... they think everything about PAP treatment is dangerous and often call this site a renagade outlaw site because we encourage patients to take control of their own therapy.

Having said that, placing any kind of oil directly on plastic may indeed damage the plastic. The way these oils are administered is by using a cotton based pad and adding the oil to the pad then placing the bad on a ceramic dish near the machine's air intake (just make sure the pad is heavy enough not to get sucked up into the intake).

Bret, the Sleep Guy can provide you with additional info.

[ozij]

That thread is not 2 years old - it's from May 2007.

The product pulled back was (I quote from that thread) the "controversial PurSleep In-line Diffuser " note the "In-line" - it is no longer sold.
Take a look at the site http://www.pur-sleep.com/ and on the other hand, take a look at this thread - and pay attention to SAG - and knowledgeable sleep tech, and his dialogue with sleepguy.

viewtopic.php?p=211423#211423

You'll have to make up your own mind...

O.

[WearyOne]

Pur-sleep was originally designed to use in an in-line diffuser. It was pulled from being sold and when it came back, it came back that you use the oils on a pad that sits outside the air intake on the machine. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on this.)

Pur-sleep use has many folks on either side of the issue. I, personally, never tried it because any fragrances at all stop up my nose. (All my detergents, soaps, etc. are fragrance-free, and I never use perfume.)

As ozij said, you have to decide for yourself.

Pam