Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2006 5:19 pm
Since you asked for opinions;
Tim: your doctor sounds like a great salesman (used car), if you follow his advice you should be seeing him at least every 3 months Not to say your doctor doesn't really know what he's talking about, just that he doesn't know based upon what you posted.
I've had 4-5 autopaps and several cpaps, some that recorded some that didn't. I've always checked the delivery pressure on my machines using a simple and very accurate manometer. Unlike your car tire pressure gage a manometer is very accurate. On your particular Remstar Pro2 machine, you indicated it only provided "compliance" details, what your doctor doesn't/didn't know is that machine is capable of delivering full sleep data just like an autopap does. If you search here for some of Jerry's reports you'll see that machine delivers full detailed data even without Derek's software (using only the EncorePro reports). If you understand how the machine generates the data for these reports you'd know the data seen is pretty accurate as it comes from the decision tree of the algorithm that triggers the machine to respond or not respond. Do these machines miss events? Sure they can miss events, but so can a person sitting at a desk half asleep titrating you. The way I look at it, a little bit of data is better than no data at all. If you want to see if your doctors changes to therapy are the right choices, just do a EncorePro report. If your doctor makes a change your sleep should improve and that would be seen on the reports. We've seen it here all the time, if you increase pressure by 1cm, it can make your condition much worse. Without the software you wouldn't know that and neither would your doctor.
Bill: Looking at your reports, it would seem you could possibly benefit from an increase to your low pressure of 5cm? I say that only because during those runs your pulse rate increases indicating possible heart oscillations corresponding to the times your oxygen levels drop (and the SDB runs shown on the EncorePro reports). If that were my case, I would increase that bottom pressure to like 7cm and see if things didn't improve. I bet they would improve just going to 6cm.
Tim: your doctor sounds like a great salesman (used car), if you follow his advice you should be seeing him at least every 3 months Not to say your doctor doesn't really know what he's talking about, just that he doesn't know based upon what you posted.
I've had 4-5 autopaps and several cpaps, some that recorded some that didn't. I've always checked the delivery pressure on my machines using a simple and very accurate manometer. Unlike your car tire pressure gage a manometer is very accurate. On your particular Remstar Pro2 machine, you indicated it only provided "compliance" details, what your doctor doesn't/didn't know is that machine is capable of delivering full sleep data just like an autopap does. If you search here for some of Jerry's reports you'll see that machine delivers full detailed data even without Derek's software (using only the EncorePro reports). If you understand how the machine generates the data for these reports you'd know the data seen is pretty accurate as it comes from the decision tree of the algorithm that triggers the machine to respond or not respond. Do these machines miss events? Sure they can miss events, but so can a person sitting at a desk half asleep titrating you. The way I look at it, a little bit of data is better than no data at all. If you want to see if your doctors changes to therapy are the right choices, just do a EncorePro report. If your doctor makes a change your sleep should improve and that would be seen on the reports. We've seen it here all the time, if you increase pressure by 1cm, it can make your condition much worse. Without the software you wouldn't know that and neither would your doctor.
Bill: Looking at your reports, it would seem you could possibly benefit from an increase to your low pressure of 5cm? I say that only because during those runs your pulse rate increases indicating possible heart oscillations corresponding to the times your oxygen levels drop (and the SDB runs shown on the EncorePro reports). If that were my case, I would increase that bottom pressure to like 7cm and see if things didn't improve. I bet they would improve just going to 6cm.