Firstly, Happy New Year to everyone reading this. Let’s hope 2021 is way less shit than 2020 was. I’ve been using my Vivos mRNA Appliance for 3 months now, so here’s another update on my progress. The executive summary is that everything is gong fine and I feel slightly less drowsy during the day, but it’s taking time; which is what I always expected. (more…)
Back in February this year I started experiencing an excruciating pain in my shoulders accompanied with a severely limited range of motion. This made everything from reaching up to get things from a high kitchen cupboard to putting on a T-shirt impossible. I was diagnosed with adhesive capsulitis, the stabbing pain of which I once heard a woman who had experienced both describe as “worse than childbirth”. (more…)
It’s been just over 2 months since I started wearing my Vivos mRNA Appliance, so here is an update. I have expanded the upper appliance a total of 2.25mm. Subjectively I’d say I am sleeping better as I’ve had pretty vivid dreams this week, which is good because our body does most of the repair work during REM sleep. I feel a little more alert during the day, but I still need afternoon rests. Perhaps my nasal breathing is improved but I could be fooling myself on that.
My average use of the appliance so far is very close to 16 hours/day, composed of roughly hourly cycles during daytime, and leaving the device installed in the evening and over night. I track my usage in a spreadsheet which helps tremendously with my compliance and generates pretty graphs showing my daily usage so far, like this: (more…)
I caught the tail-end of the free 2020 Functional Oral & Airway Health Summit (affiliate link) this weekend, and wished I’d known about it in time to hear the whole thing. Even though I’ve been researching the importance of airway health for a long time now and heard some of these speakers before, these talks in particular were helpful to me: (more…)
I”ve just finished watching Tom Colquitt’s epic 7 hour video series Stories from the road on the Walk To Wellness, and wanted to promote it here because it contains so much wisdom about healing chronic illness by addressing airway, breathing and sleep. I wish I’d known about this information years ago when I was desperately ill and looking for answers that weren’t forthcoming from my doctors.
I’ve just passed the one month point of wearing my Vivos mRNA Appliance®, so here is an update.
Overall, everything is going reasonably smoothly and the data from my CPAP machine is encouraging. I haven’t noticed any major changes in my daytime symptoms yet, but it’s still early days of a treatment that I anticipate will take 2 years.
I did about 18 months research into palate expansion and surgical options for treating my severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). I was guided by the idea that the best treatment is likely to be the one that most directly addresses the root cause: Underdeveloped jaws exacerbated by the extraction/retraction orthodontic treatment I had when I was 13, leaving me with an airway which is too small to breathe through during sleep.
Along the way I tried many alternative treatments for OSA with limited success, and the two dominant mainstream treatments: a Mandibular Advancement Device (MAD) and Continuous Positive Air Pressure (CPAP) machine. Aside from the lack of success I had with the MAD, I find both of these unsatisfactory because they only deal with symptoms without addressing the underlying cause, allowing the untreated condition to progressively get worse over time. (more…)
Myofunctional therapy is a series of exercises intended to strengthen the muscles of the tongue, mouth and upper throat and help maintain the airway during sleep, improving obstructive sleep apnea. At the end of this talk, Dr Singh answers a question about myofunctional therapy by saying that it should be part of the DNA appliance treatment protocol. A literature review found that myofunctional therapy can reduce AHI by 50% in adults with moderate sleep apnea and could serve as an adjunct to other obstructive sleep apnea treatment. (more…)
Obstructive sleep apnea is caused by a number of factors all combining to create an airway that collapses during sleep. Given the many underlying causes involved, it makes sense that the optimal treatment will also be multifactorial. At the end of this talk, Dr Singh answers a question about myofunctional therapy by saying that it should be part of the DNA appliance treatment protocol.
In addition to myofunctional therapy, I’ve come across several other exercises which may be helpful in getting the most out of my RNA appliance. Here is a summary: (more…)
I first came across the idea of a forward-pull face mask on The Great Work Forum in a thread discussing using face mask with MSE for adult expansion. I didn’t end up pursuing MSE, but I thought that if face mask helped MSE users get forward growth, maybe it would help me get more forward growth with Vivos too.
Dr Felix Liao mentions using face mask with DNA appliance patients in his talk at the Vivos Breathing Wellness conference and gives some case reports in his book 6 Foot Tiger, 3 Foot Cage, which I really recommend to anyone with obstructive sleep apnea who is wondering what to do about it. There is a classic line in the talk at 51:51 where Dr Liao presents a patient who said:
“I have a new girlfriend. I’d would rather sleep with her instead of my CPAP.”