help me address these comments

[Calist]

First of all, the post I made Saturday morning (my last post) is completely gone. It was in this thread, on this page. I get this strange feeling that we have a mod here that does not care for the things I say.

Secondly, I understand that it may be briefly enjoyable to pretend that a small group of forum users can all get together and rewrite medicine on a forum. Now I know that statement offends you because as I'm sure that any one of you might point out, you are not rewriting medicine so much as you are educating people.

But consider for a moment that you are "educating people" with "original research" that has not been repeated, peer tested or in any way validated by individuals outside this forum. I could very well forgive the fact that most of the "Original research" appears to be an anonymous debate of myth by patients who consider themselves to be experts, but to repeatedly state over and over again that you know more than medical professionals who have done nothing but eat, breathe and live sleep science for the last ten years is a bit of an outrageous claim. How can you really state that you know more than these people when you do not even have the slightest clue as to what it is that they know? As for these juvenile attempts at calling me names while trying to get other anonymous users to high five you- please, lets grow up shall we? Whatever validation your "Common knowledge" approach to medicine might find here in the forum I can assure you it does not exist in the real world. Over here, where I live, in the real world... I can easily rebuke any statement or claim which has been made in this forum, on any particular thread.

I will do it with the statement "#12444" and I am confident that an RPSGT would know exactly what that means.

[Calist]

I'm not sure who mentioned Hippocratic Oath here but I'm pretty sure our friend did not take that oath. He mentioned something about the lab so I presume he's a lab tech or implies that he is. Speaking of lab techs, ours was an M.D, educated and practicing in India but was working as a lab tech here for 2years while he studied to meet the requirements to take the U.S. Boards. He was wonderful, dedicated, very knowledgeable, patient and respectful. He took me into the lab and showed me the equipment he would be using, gave me a mini-course on what he would be doing all night and in the morning when I returned, while Mike was still sleeping,he took me back again and let me see him sleeping on the screen and explained the graphs he was looking at. And unlike many others who have said their titrations were not pleasant or accurate, Mike had the best night's sleep in many years and his titration was 13. After 2 years of much experimenting using that pressure as our guide, he now sleeps at 12 which is pretty much on the mark. I hope Bakram has taken the Hippocratic Oath by now, he'll make a wonderful doctor.

Oh my god, I know him. I heard he left GWSDC about six years ago, glad to see he is still running studies.

I must have missed your reply among so many pages, but to be honest I think you should know that in the interest of privacy I thought it best to use a fictitious name when speaking of our sleep tech. Bakram was my son's roommate in medical school many years ago and now practices Urology in another country. I believe it's a fairly common name in India.

Sleep is a very small field, I actually did not remember his name. But I remember his circumstances. Did he work for GWSDC?

[LoQ]

I understand that it may be briefly enjoyable to pretend that a small group of forum users can all get together and rewrite medicine on a forum.

Briefly? Is the fun of rewriting medicine ebbing for you already?

You seem to be missing the fact that most of the statements being made that are contrary to established scientific research are coming from you.

[Calist]

I understand that it may be briefly enjoyable to pretend that a small group of forum users can all get together and rewrite medicine on a forum.

Briefly? Is the fun of rewriting medicine ebbing for you already?

You seem to be missing the fact that most of the statements being made that are contrary to established scientific research are coming from you.

I AM medicine.

[-SWS]

Need medicine.

[LoQ]

I AM medicine.

I see you've made a funny reply. Thank you for making us all laugh! It's good to get rid of some of the tension through humor.

[Calist]

This forum is full of people linking to sites with graphs claiming research and statistics that I have never even seen in the real world. "90% of all doctors agree that..." What doctors? Who? Where? I got a guy in the other thread trying to convince me that ASV cures everything just because a respironics sales rep gave him some graphs. This isn't medicine. This isn't science. Science is what is happening out there, in hospitals. Not in here on the forums. You go to youtube and post a comment about how easy it is to start messing with a CPAP device and how 90% of doctors agree that you should do that... do you really think that is science? Do you think it is only a matter of time before the rest of the medical community catches up with you?

All of your debate and out of context fact checking mean nothing to us. So far I've seen only two people on this forum that even work in medicine. Me and one other person that you all chased off, a person who warned me not to have high hopes for knocking sense into you all. Seriously, before you formulate a response to this post right here... stop and ask yourself what it is you are railing against.

[Calist]

I AM medicine.

I see you've made a funny reply. Thank you for making us all laugh! It's good to get rid of some of the tension through humor.

Yeah I figured I'd take a bit of Francis Ford Coppola, I couldn't resist. I loved his whole "I am VietNam" line.

[So Well]

I can easily rebuke any statement or claim which has been made in this forum, on any particular thread.

Oh really now?

You totally miss the point of this forum and overlook the good praises from thousands who have benefited by reading and posting here and getting their questions answered.

I am not sure what your problem is but I am happy to leave it with you.

[nanwilson]

Is there any way we can get rid of this know it all dude. He has to have a very thick skin to just bypass all the jibes, but he still doesn't get it. ggggggrrrrrrrrrr
N

[elena88]

This forum is full of people linking to sites with graphs claiming research and statistics that I have never even seen in the real world. "90% of all doctors agree that..." What doctors? Who? Where? I got a guy in the other thread trying to convince me that ASV cures everything just because a respironics sales rep gave him some graphs. This isn't medicine. This isn't science. Science is what is happening out there, in hospitals. Not in here on the forums. You go to youtube and post a comment about how easy it is to start messing with a CPAP device and how 90% of doctors agree that you should do that... do you really think that is science? Do you think it is only a matter of time before the rest of the medical community catches up with you?

All of your debate and out of context fact checking mean nothing to us. So far I've seen only two people on this forum that even work in medicine. Me and one other person that you all chased off, a person who warned me not to have high hopes for knocking sense into you all. Seriously, before you formulate a response to this post right here... stop and ask yourself what it is you are railing against.

what exact sense would you like to knock into us exacty? would you like to tell me that it was senseless to change my pressure to discover I had
positional apnea? Would you have rather that I just lived with what the LAB STATED.. in the test.. if I did that I would have quit a long time
ago.. it is all the people here, the knowlege they shared with me, who helped me figure all this out.. The lab test, the titration at home,
two sleep doctors.. everything you are insisiting is where the facts lie, let me down completely.. so, is that the sense you want to knock into me?
That I should have just suffered for the rest of my life and not figured out what was the problem... you are an tunnel visioned idiot, and I mean that in the nicest context. Why dont you take some courses in "practical experience and reality? "

[Calist]

I can easily rebuke any statement or claim which has been made in this forum, on any particular thread.

Oh really now?

You totally miss the point of this forum and overlook the good praises from thousands who have benefited by reading and posting here and getting their questions answered.

I am not sure what your problem is but I am happy to leave it with you.

Asking questions and getting answers because for some strange reason you could not get your physician to answer them. So you all go to a forum and answer each other's questions. The problem is that Medicine is getting more and more complicated, every single day. Where as there are some physicians that do a good job of dumbing down answers in order to bring patients to an acceptable level of understanding, this has gotten a lot harder in the last twenty or thirty years as the education gap has intensified.

When I was a child, I read this book. It was a fantastic book and I wish I still owned it. It was a picture book about this little boy that gets a virus. The virus was represented by teeny tiny monsters that lived inside his body and caused all kinds of mayhem. A doctor came over with a syringe. the syringe was filled with the cure for this virus and the cure was represented by these teeny tiny soldiers. They looked to be right out of the 1600s with muskets and bayonets. When the doctor put the syringe in the little boy's arm the soldiers deployed inside his body and there was a huge firefight. Afterward the little boy had no more teeny tiny monsters living inside his body anymore. This was a cute book which attempted to explain the reasons behind going to the doctor and how it wasn't such a scary thing because the doctor was on our side.

Nowadays patients tend to think that the lungs are a muscle. They think that you need to be careful with oxygen or else you will get addicted. They think that they're doctors are big jerks because they won't do anything about an 88%sa02 baseline. People can die in their sleep from apnea. Heart attacks cause their blood to flow backwards. They think that snoring is proof of apnea. Complex sleep apnea is real, fibromyalgia as well. The list goes on and on and on.

The reason they think some of these things is because people tell them that it is common knowledge. They make assumptions and draw conclusions for the rest. I can appreciate a patient's desire to better educate themselves. I really do. But there are better ways to do it. Taking a high school biology class and talking to people on the internet is not going to cut it. I've been in sleep for over ten years and I can tell you exactly which areas of medicine I know nothing about. That would EVERYTHING OTHER THAN SLEEP. This is why physicians refer patients to other physicians on a daily basis, it is because medicine has become so complicated that it requires a vast array of specialists to treat a single patient. These family doctors and ENTs who the patient feels should know everything and be able to diagnose everything- they are just the front door. They are the hostesses at the restaurant of medicine. Their job isn't to fix anything, it is to refer their patients in the right direction. So there you have it. Trading speculation on a forum is not going to make anyone any smarter than they were coming in. It will however set them up for future parodies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9_4szyx8IU

[Calist]

This forum is full of people linking to sites with graphs claiming research and statistics that I have never even seen in the real world. "90% of all doctors agree that..." What doctors? Who? Where? I got a guy in the other thread trying to convince me that ASV cures everything just because a respironics sales rep gave him some graphs. This isn't medicine. This isn't science. Science is what is happening out there, in hospitals. Not in here on the forums. You go to youtube and post a comment about how easy it is to start messing with a CPAP device and how 90% of doctors agree that you should do that... do you really think that is science? Do you think it is only a matter of time before the rest of the medical community catches up with you?

All of your debate and out of context fact checking mean nothing to us. So far I've seen only two people on this forum that even work in medicine. Me and one other person that you all chased off, a person who warned me not to have high hopes for knocking sense into you all. Seriously, before you formulate a response to this post right here... stop and ask yourself what it is you are railing against.

what exact sense would you like to knock into us exacty? would you like to tell me that it was senseless to change my pressure to discover I had
positional apnea? Would you have rather that I just lived with what the LAB STATED.. in the test.. if I did that I would have quit a long time
ago.. it is all the people here, the knowlege they shared with me, who helped me figure all this out.. The lab test, the titration at home,
two sleep doctors.. everything you are insisiting is where the facts lie, let me down completely.. so, is that the sense you want to knock into me?
That I should have just suffered for the rest of my life and not figured out what was the problem... you are an tunnel visioned idiot, and I mean that in the nicest context. Why dont you take some courses in "practical experience and reality? "

Want to know what I'd like to knock into you? I'll tell you....

First we have the basics.... http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Practi ... 927&sr=8-1

Then we have a bit of a primer.... http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Clinical-Sl ... pd_sim_b_1

Then to top it off... http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Polysomnogr ... d_sim_b_17

After that, you should have very few questions.

[elena88]

are you really that dense? OMG!


shoo!

[Calist]

are you really that dense? OMG!


shoo! Please leave us to the fate of the DME companies. We aren't concerned with reality. We have convinced ourselves that we can treat ourselves. I mean honestly do you think this is an unbiased forum? Where do you think we get our money from to keep the site open? When we said "Healthcare professionals are also encouraged to participate in the forum and online chat. There are already many healthcare professionals who are registered members." We were just joshing ya! We do our best to actually run off health care professionals.

Yeah I know. I assumed that a while ago actually. I feel that I have a responsibility to my patients however and I really don't want them to get confused by people like this.