Sterile Water NOT Necessary for Humidified CPAPs!

Snoredog wrote: sure sounds like using non-distilled water is the smart thing to do, but if you don't have any empirical data to back that article up then we are not supposed to use it. Ah forget it, we'll use the non-empirical data, that word has be way over used here anyway.

Don't sell all that good scientific stuff short, Snoredog. Without it, we're left with assumptions like: "Tap water comes out dirty or clean, and that yields a 50-50 chance of drawing dirty tap water."

And, of course, the above statement is clearly right or wrong... as are all the statements on this message board. And if each statement has a 50-50 chance of being wrong (by mere virtue of two possibilities), then exactly half the statements on this message board are wrong. No more! No less! Yes, let's leave the notion of empiricism and methodology off the message boards. Let's rely on a common-sense and reason-it-out approach instead! That's what any red-blooded message board needs more of----especially the health and medical message boards! .

You guys crack me up. To add more fuel to the fire: The original study is from a bunch of German doctors....

Maybe they were using Heavy Water . . . or radioactive tap water from Eastern Germany.

Or it might all be part of a socialistic plot to reduce the tax burden on German citizens.

SleepGuy wrote:You guys crack me up. To add more fuel to the fire: The original study is from a bunch of German doctors....
Maybe they were using Heavy Water . . . or radioactive tap water from Eastern Germany.
Or it might all be part of a socialistic plot to reduce the tax burden on German citizens.

ROTFL! ..Or even an ancient batch of primordial soup. I can see them now, testing with pencil, paper, and stop-watch in hand....

Scientist 1: "Is it soup yet?"

Scientist 2: "No, but it sure does look like an earlier version of us"

on edit: So where's the tie-in with Germany in all that? Ate at a German restaurant once where they served soup.

I don't buy that there are no problems in using tap water...

I travel a lot... several times when I've had to use tap water I've gotten sinus infections.

So I do my best to always get either distilled or at least bottled water.

Kathy makes the observation that she travels and sometimes gets a sinus infections and implies a connection.

This is the worst kind of critical thinking and associating 2 unrelated events.
Whatever the cause of her infection, it definitely was not spread from the hunidifier, if this is what she is implying,

Causality ve coincidence is often misaplied here.

Statements such as this can mislead people who come here for better information.

It sure is nice to know that someone is making sure that we are not mislead into thinking that each and every one of our humidifiers has fire-breathing radioactive hexapedal frogs causing us into thinking we are getting sinus infections by associating unrelated events by implication of a connection.

[quote="kathy55"]I don't buy that there are no problems in using tap water...

I travel a lot... several times when I've had to use tap water I've gotten sinus infections.

So I do my best to always get either distilled or at least bottled water.

-SWS wrote:

Snoredog wrote: sure sounds like using non-distilled water is the smart thing to do, but if you don't have any empirical data to back that article up then we are not supposed to use it. Ah forget it, we'll use the non-empirical data, that word has be way over used here anyway.

Don't sell all that good scientific stuff short, Snoredog. Without it, we're left with assumptions like: "Tap water comes out dirty or clean, and that yields a 50-50 chance of drawing dirty tap water."

And, of course, the above statement is clearly right or wrong... as are all the statements on this message board. And if each statement has a 50-50 chance of being wrong (by mere virtue of two possibilities), then exactly half the statements on this message board are wrong. No more! No less! Yes, let's leave the notion of empiricism and methodology off the message boards. Let's rely on a common-sense and reason-it-out approach instead! That's what any red-blooded message board needs more of----especially the health and medical message boards! .

Yup! Chuck, I'm very inclined to agree with you there. Appropriate scope and focus of conversation is a very tough thing to settle on. I think I'd personally like to see a few occasional albeit high-level references/discussions to science here.

This thread is a perfect example. I'm waiting this thread's outcome to see if I should continue sleeping with my newly acquired radiation protection suit. The twelve hundred bucks I already spent is water under the dam. But it's gettin' downright hot sleepin' in these jammies every night:
http://www.saferamerica.com/productDeta ... ductID=160

I had a hard time finding the article that you referred to at the beginning of this thread...
the actual article is at http://www.chestjournal.org/cgi/content ... 128/4/2138


It is interesting... but the article refers only to heated convection type humidifiers and not to some passover humidifier, which is what I had used for years.

So this can be misleading to all those who use passover humidifiers.


I found the article in the link below more detailed and more helpful.

http://www.sleepreviewmag.com/article.p ... 06/05&p=10


below is an excerpt from this article....

Aside from the hassle associated with wearing a bulky mask, “rain-out” or condensation forming within the mask and/or tubing that drips on the patient’s face is particularly bothersome. Other concerns include the risk of infection, especially given reports of microbes contaminating ventilator tubing, humidifiers, and nebulizers. Manufacturers have eliminated older “bubble-through humidifiers” because of the fear that aerosolized water particles could transport bacteria and increase the risk of respiratory tract infection. However, a more recent study has demonstrated that heated convection humidifiers, as used in current CPAP systems, do not aerosolize water droplets.24 Instead these systems produce molecular water vapor, which cannot transport bacteria or other microorganisms. Therefore, it is unnecessary to use sterile water to prevent infections. Using distilled water, however, is still a good idea since minerals found in tap water may degrade the operation of the heating element.

I should note that my problems with sinus infections were most likely caused by lack of humidification because of the passover type humidifier rather than using the tap water.

My new machine gave out this weekend and I've had to go back to my old passover type humidifer and have woke up with headaches every day. And I used distilled water.

SWS
I love that 'water under the dam'. ROTFL

GoofyUT wrote:

-SWS wrote:

Snoredog wrote: sure sounds like using non-distilled water is the smart thing to do, but if you don't have any empirical data to back that article up then we are not supposed to use it. Ah forget it, we'll use the non-empirical data, that word has be way over used here anyway.

Don't sell all that good scientific stuff short, Snoredog. Without it, we're left with assumptions like: "Tap water comes out dirty or clean, and that yields a 50-50 chance of drawing dirty tap water."

And, of course, the above statement is clearly right or wrong... as are all the statements on this message board. And if each statement has a 50-50 chance of being wrong (by mere virtue of two possibilities), then exactly half the statements on this message board are wrong. No more! No less! Yes, let's leave the notion of empiricism and methodology off the message boards. Let's rely on a common-sense and reason-it-out approach instead! That's what any red-blooded message board needs more of----especially the health and medical message boards! .

Snoredog wrote:careful there chuck, if he should suddenly stop it will take a crane to pull your head out

Awe, man... you're still irked at me for havin' a different view in that Encore Pro thread? .

kathy55 wrote:It is interesting... but the article refers only to heated convection type humidifiers and not to some passover humidifier, which is what I had used for years.

A passover humidifier is basically a "convection" type!

The term "convection" type indicates that air flows only over the surface of the fluid and is used to distinguish from "bubble-thorough" type where is passes through the fluid.

Cheers,

Bill