An Operation Obsession
about experience with CPAP treatment commonly reveal a quick abandonment of this invaluable treatment without any effort to learn or implement solutions to its many nuisance problems.
The failure to give a "fair trial" to CPAP may reflect as much on the doctor and technicians as on the patient who gives up too easily early in treatment. The first few weeks of treatment represent a crucial period in determining whether a patient will stick it out our not, yet typically the patient has no follow-up from the doctor until long past this interval, and has little confidence that a call will prove welcome. Closer follow-up by physicians and technicians would probably help many people avoid the "noncompliance" with CPAP for which they often unjustly get the blame!
However, even beyond this hindrance of inadequate support, I suspect an obstacle to CPAP within the mind of the person newly diagnosed with apnea.
This is a serious, chronic, often disabling, sometimes fatal disease such as no one wants to have. The prospect of lifelong dependence on such a visible device as a CPAP machine evokes understandable distaste, if not dread. The appeal of an alternative such as surgery which offers the mirage of "cure" gains strength from these fears.
Nevertheless, the fears often prove as transient as the "cure." People who have successfully used CPAP for years, often after early difficulties, come to accept the machine as indispensable and inoffensive. Compared to many medical treatments, it has no dangerous side effects. Even its image, as perceived by the patient and those closest to the patient, including the bed partner, becomes inconsequential with time.
Moreover, the concept of "cure" is fraught with potential for deception. In the strictest of its meanings, cure requires a complete resolution of a disease without even a trace remaining of the illness or its treatment. A person suffering an acute episode of pneumococcal pneumonia usually recovers completely with antibiotics, needing no further treatment, and having no later signs of this illness. This is a true cure.
In this strict sense, few chronic diseases have proven susceptible to cure by even the best of medical or surgical treatments. To illustrate, hypertension and especially its dangerous consequences of stroke and heart attack, responds well to treatment with blood pressure medications; but the need to continue these leaves the person far from "cured." Likewise, surgical treatment for a condition like ulcerative colitis may remove the high risk
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