Sleep, Interrupted: A physician reveals the #1 reason why so many of us are sick and tired

As someone suffering from sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) & insomnia for over a decade, and diagnosed with sleep apnea 5 years ago, I've read a zillion websites, articles, and books. This is the first one, since the first book I read, that substantially added to my understanding in a variety of ways. It's not just another list of good sleep habits, or signs of apnea and recommendations for CPAP, or a meditation technique that will miraculously cure your insomnia. In fact, as a compendium of interventions to try, it's not particularly comprehensive. But that's because the focus of the book is presenting a new, wider paradigm for the complex of SDB conditions and symptoms.Dr. Park connects a variety of existing studies - the co-occurence of apnea & reflux, apnea & depression, the increase in heart attacks after surgery, sleep problems when pregnant - with his own observations from his clinical practice about how a variety of superficially unrelated conditions (sinusitis, PTSD, fatigue, depression) all seem to occur mainly in people who can't sleep on their back. He presents growing research that mild SDB - hard to find on a sleep study, yet with mounting health impact over time - is yet another one of those chronic, subtle conditions that are surprisingly common and usually missed.Sleep is our body & mind's crucial time for recuperating and rejuvenating, and yet we have little understanding of how it works and how it fails. Dr. Park has made an extremely valuable contribution to growing that understanding. I call it a paradigm expansion, rather than a shift, because his work doesn't contradict any of the existing sleep research. Rather, he incorporates it into a broader set of feedback loops and co-occurences.I believe him, because the book named several symptoms that I have and had never connected to my chronic SDB, because the narrower conventional sleep science paradigm hasn't realized they are connected yet. Now that I know that the root cause of these symptoms is SDB, I can focus on treating that cause, rather than the symptoms. And if, like me, you've ever had a doctor tell you that a chronic health problem is all in your head, or caused by your thoughts or your habits, it's very comforting to learn that it's real, it's common, and it's because of your airway, not because you sometimes read in bed or worry about not getting enough sleep.This is not a handbook for curing you (though it has some great pointers), and unlike much alternative medicine, it doesn't offer any unique miracle cure or 30-day program. But it will help those people with SDB (and not just simple insomnia) better understand their condition, get diagnosed, and get treatments that actually work (CPAP or surgery). I recommend this book to anyone who suspects that they or a loved one have sleep-disordered breathing, particularly if they don't fit the apnea stereotype (middle-aged overweight male). And I highly recommend it to anyone open-minded in the sleep medicine field.

It seems like there is an explosion of people are being treated for sleep apena (OSA for Obstructive Sleep Apnea). Apnea means a short time when a person stops breathing. It is usually measured as a period of at least 10 seconds of not breathing repeated so many times an hour. It seems like many people I know are getting diagnosed with OSA. Dr. Park will sort out the problems of interrupted sleep in a conversational way and after he has reviewed the relevant medical research.OSA was first described in 1960. Upper Airway Resistance Syndrome (UARS) was first described in the early 1990's by a doctor at Stanford University. This explains why these conditions seem to be popping up everywhere - not because they were not existent - but because they had not been identified any earlier as a condition. OSA has been around a while longer so sometimes people do not realize that there is a continuum of conditions between good sleep and OSA. UARS lies somewhere in the middle. Dr. Park shows the interrelationships between the results of interrupted sleep and many resultant conditions in only 239 pages including the references and index. In the past, doctors were diagnosing the resultant conditions not realizing their causes. A review of his chapter titles reveals some of the resultant conditions of interrupted sleep: stress, chronic sinusitis and other ear, nose and throat conditions, panic attacks, depression, & anxiety, hot flashes, night sweats, sleep position, weight gain, cold hands, heart disease, some forms of cancer, and so on. This is not surprising as getting oxygen to our body and its organs is a primary thing.Dr. Park, an ear, nose, and throat doctor, speaks in a conversational way, relating things the way he discovered the links himself through experience with his family and his patients. He is very thorough in reviewing relevant research as he goes. The structure of the book is based on a diagram of interrelationships (page 8 and 40) that are caused by interrupted sleep.The book is an eye-opener. If the reader has read any of the reviews here on Amazon on this book, you already know that doctors are recommending the book. I just gave the book to two of my doctors and discussed it with my dentist. My cardiologist told me that he knew it was a good book as many of his patients had talked with him about the book.

I enjoyed this book very much easy to read and understand a wealth of information for anyone that is confused about the world of sleep deprivation and it's ramifications .I would thoroughly recommend it if you have the slightest feeling that your ill health could be linked to your breathing.covers all the medical solutions as well as all the others not to be missed.

This book has helped me understand some of the symptoms I have had, but also clearly explains symptoms family members have experienced. I shall recommend this book to my patients to help them feel well again.

Excellent and in depth book revealing many aspects of the problems, which can be created by lack of quality sleep.

Very good service. Received goods promptly. Can't believe the difference using the Res zzzzz. Would recommend

A must read if you have insomnia I found it really interesting