Are You Fed Of Sleeping In The Spare Room?

“The Tooth And Nothing But The Tooth”

By Chris “Dr Smile Maker” Branfield

Are You Fed Of Sleeping In The Spare Room?

Hello again. I hope that you are well. It’s all go as usual. I was In Bury yesterday on a practice management/customer service course. It’s not only the clinical stuff that I have to keep up with and constantly look for better. This Friday/Saturday I’m at Cambridge University on a course looking at a way to speed up healing. It looks very interesting.

What Are You On About…The Spare Room

Well, there is actually a National Stop Snoring Week. It’s 23rd-29th April. Snoring is really quite common. It can be mild or severe. In very severe cases it becomes sleep apnoea when you actually stop breathing for several seconds at a time before a big gasp and this happens several times an hour. This can put a big strain on your heart.

The Big Yawn

One of the big drawbacks of snoring is lack of sleep. This can be for the snorer, but not always. Sometimes the snorer is blissfully unaware and sleeps well. The vibration or noise can interrupt sleep, sometimes you are not aware of it and it is more of an arousal from sleep rather than waking up but it still interrupts the normal cycle of sleep stages and leaves you really tired still in the morning. Obviously if the snoring is loud enough then it interrupts the sleep of a sleep partner and this is when the bed in the spare room comes in!

What Causes It

The cause is airway collapse and vibration. The main cause is the vibration of the tongue collapsed back against the soft palate.

Can You Treat It?

Well, yes you can. The aim is to stop the collapse. One way is to posture the lower jaw forwards which in turn brings the tongue forwards and opens up the airway using a mandibular advancement device. The one we use now is the Sleepwell device as there has been loads of research and great results out of Barts and the London Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry led by Professor Ama Johal. I did some training with him.

Another way is Non-surgical laser therapy. My Colleague Ilay and myself are trained in this using the Nightlase™ protocol with Nd:YAG and Er:YAG laser. The great thing with this is no numbing, no down time, no surgery and it starts to work from the first session and the airway is improved 24hrs a day and not just when a device is worn. It’s all clever stuff. I’ll expand on it next time.

It’s That Time Of Year Again

It’s coming to the end of the football season. Will Hull City stay up? It’s been a funny season. I really hope that they do. Come on lads, keep it together and push until the end.

Until next time. Take care and be good. 

Chris Branfield is Principal Dentist at Castle Park Dental Care, Castle Villa, 28 Castle Road, Cottingham, telephone 01482 772550. He has been in dental practice for 25 years and has a special interest in life changing, pain free dentistry with dental implants, rapid teeth straightening and cosmetic dentistry. And, not only that Chris is founder member and trustee of Dental Mavericks charity- ending the daily dental pain of Moroccan kids. For more patient success stories and Chris’s humanitarian work go here now www.castleparkdental.co.uk