How do I find a physician to treat my sleep apnea? Well as with everything you start with your primary care physician. Well as with everything you start with your primary care physician. Explain the situation...
Well as with everything you start with your primary care physician. Explain the situation and I think in this day and age, we are becoming better and better educated about this. The words getting out there that it's not the antiquated belief that snoring was funny and it was always humorous to see grandma fall asleep at the dinner table. That notion is a sort of falling by the wayside. Now, it's like this is not the least bit funny, this could be a marker for something quite serious. So I think those days are passed us by. So bring it up with the primary care physician, explain what's happening to you. The usual problem will be given from two kinds of reports to a primary one. I am sleepy during the day, I can't seem to stay wake, I can't seem to concentrate. I think there is something wrong with my sleep. I just don't feel refreshed the next day, I can't get going. I got to drink coffee all day long. If it's the child my kid is running around a lot and he is doing poorly in school and can't seem to concentrate but every time I put him in the car you know he would sleep in two seconds.
He may get off that kind of report and then the other report you will get is usually from the wife from the spouse. The husband may not complain at all that anything is wrong. They may not even recognize that they are that sleepy or they that are that grouchy. They may not perceive it like that but the spouse will say, "I can't sleep with him. He snores so loudly and I hope he doesn't stop, because if he stops breathing and I am not sure he is going to restart." That's also an extremely common report. A lot of times it's extremely helpful that when people come to a physician to explain their problem that they bring the person who they are sleeping with. And again if you are asleep you probably are unaware of what's going on.
You are not going to know that you are restless or you kicking or you sweating because you are unconscious or asleep. But the person you are sleeping with will probably know. So you know it can be real helpful for a physician to have whoever it is who are sleeping with to come with you and explain what they see and hear. Once you get beyond that then I think you need to find somebody who is training in sleep medicine and that can be wide variety of different kinds of individuals. There can be psychologist, psychiatrist, neurologist, pulmonologist and the people who are none of those things who just had general medical background or fellowships in that field.
