What is dial wing(ing)?

[teddynola]

I just joined this site and I saw several posts referencing dial winging. What is this?

[HoseCrusher]

Chasing numbers without letting a new setting work for awhile.

[Sir NoddinOff]

It's when, with or without sleep software, you repeatedly go into the clinician's menu of your CPAP and change your settings without any real basis, education or time frame for doing so (worst case scenario: every night). It's like you've got a gopher in your backyard and just start digging randomly without trying to figure out where the little bugger is. Yes, I currently have one in my backyard! A gopher, not a CPAP machine.

[chunkyfrog]

Thanks, Sir, now I can't help thinking about gophers and weiner dogs.

[jnk...]

"Dial-winging," I believe, was originally coined to refer, in a pejorative sense, to "winging it" when trying to "dial in" a certain result. It was meant to paint the picture of someone aimlessly spinning dials in an out-of-control panicked way that fixes nothing but makes everything worse.

It used to be that when people came to this forum to ask for help, what resulted was multiple people suggesting "hey, why don't you try more pressure?" and multiple people suggesting "hey, why don't you try less pressure?" all at the same time, which caused people to start changing pressures for no particular reason with no particular result in mind. The good thing about that is that it established that patients have the right to change pressures on their own machines. The bad thing about that was, well, uh, practically everything else.

Eventually some principles of constructive CPAP pressure changes by patients were settled upon by some founding members of the forum. Then the phrase "dial-winging" here came to refer also to an educated patient's making pressure choices based on solid scientifically established principles. Some of those principles, according to my personal shorthand, are:

1. Have a reason for making a change yourself instead of just doing it for the heck of it or because others do it.
2. Make small calculated moves to one PAP-machine setting at a time--not large moves, and not moves to multiple settings simultaneously.
3. Monitor your data and how you feel according to averages over several days or weeks, not one night at a time.
4. Understand that there is MUCH more to sleep than the effects of pressure settings on sleep-breathing, so don't attribute everything you experience to that one factor.