Covering All The Holes: Dr. Mistry and Dr. Max Kerr Discuss Sleep Apnea Treatments
Speaker 1:
Welcome back to the Armour men’s health hour with dr. Mystery and Donna Lee. I’m dr. Mr. Your home here with my certifiable cohost, Donald Lee I’m board certified. Thank you, Ford.
Speaker 2:
I’m just bored. I’m bored. I’m bored of you, you know, what’s going on, you know, what’s going to wake us up today. You have such a sultry voice. I mean, you know what I needed when they introduced themselves on the microphone without being
Speaker 1:
The reason why he does show is to hear his own sexy voice. So,
Speaker 2:
So today we have a guest and I’ll tell you I’m his urologist and he’s my dentist. So our fingers have been in places with each other. That is like, you know what I’m saying? I was wondering, what are the name of our rock band would be? I was thinking, I was thinking it was in mouths. I don’t know if that’s okay to say that that was, that was inappropriate. We believe that. So then it should be facial, facial holes and sexual organs. Wow. The rock band. Well, the rock band.
Speaker 1:
Awesome. And just covered his child’s ears. Since Motley crew was taken,
Speaker 2:
Dr. Kerr is a dentist and he is our partner with his, uh, company called better sleep Austin. So there’s a lot of overlap between how people sleep, obstructive, sleep apnea and urology. And we talk about that on the, on the radio quite a bit, because we want to prepare our patients that come to see us, that when they come to see us for a wide variety of your logic concerns, that sometimes we may pop this question of how are you sleeping? Which I think is amazing. I just, I love working with you guys. You’ll take a holistic approach in, in helping the human being, you know, get down the road and do it. Health help enjoy their health. It’s great to work with you guys. So, you know what surprises me, even though we spend one third of our day, in fact, in this activity called sleeping, people are sometimes surprised that the quality of our sleep can affect our health.
Speaker 2:
That’s where I ended up spending a lot of time trying to convince patients that these questions that we’re asking you, or this kind of Avenue that we’re exploring really has an important impact very much. So. In fact, especially from a urology standpoint, I just read a research article recently saying that a BPH or benign prostate hyperplasia is also associated with obstructive sleep apnea. Also women’s sexual issues, men’s sexual issues, um, nocturia, you know, just waking up and using the restroom a whole lot throughout the night, all plays into a part of poor sleep or maybe obstructive sleep apnea, you know, watching a dentist, try to use a complex medical word. It’s almost like watching a dog, trying to use a remote control and that’s thanks. Thank you for that molar,
Speaker 1:
Tom,
Speaker 2:
Like seeing an orthopedic surgeon, try to try to pronounce a antibiotic.
Speaker 3:
So, um,
Speaker 2:
So if you were going to give me advice on how to couch, what obstructive sleep apnea is to a patient, uh, maybe you could use the words that you use, uh, when, when you’re talking to patients, it’s we need to bring air from the outside of the body, inside the body. And we have a couple of holes to be able to do that with our nose and our neurons in our mouth. You know, again, the oral exactly in both of these could be obstructed just like a river could be obstructed with a bunch of, you know, sticks or rocks or anything like that. And so the job of the body is to try to remove that obstruction. Unfortunately, we just don’t have the capacity to do that. Either we’re overweight or structurally, like our mouths are just too small and our tongue is actually slipping into the back of our throat.
Speaker 2:
It’s very important to try to remove that obstruction so we can just breathe freely and normally, um, and then that way the body is not worried about just choking itself. It can start worrying about things that are more important, well, not more important, but things that we could, they could add to our life like sexual health, or even just sleeping appropriately, you you’ve hit on two very important points. The first point, our bodies really only have so much functional capacity. If you’re struggling to breathe at night and to oxygenate your body’s going to take away important resources from other functions. It’s only going to focus on that because it wants to make sure your brain is getting enough Dublin. And the way I’d now describe sleep apnea to a lot of my patients, almost like kind of getting a little bit choked all night. And so if your oxygenation supposed to be at a hundred percent and you’re at 80% and some people like it, I can see you smiling already.
Speaker 2:
I was probably going to say something and SVU, SVU, SVU, episode it landmines across this whole thing. It’s a little bit of joking. And so that little bit of choking leads to met de oxygenation leads to a number of issues. The overlap with urology fill in the ones that I don’t mention, uh, nocturia polyuria, which is you make a lot of urine at night and have to get up and pee frequently. We see a lot of overlap with, with low testosterone and fatigue. What are some other ones? And just further on, we’re seeing, I know this, you talked about it being a urologic issue, but you know, we’re seeing high blood pressure. We’re seeing, uh, inability to maintain weight, which again, also feeds back into sexual dysfunction or polyuria or nocturia. I mean, all of these things are just, you know, we’re one full organism.
Speaker 2:
And so, yeah, I think you’re right on the, on the nose right there where I think we did see something again, I think we’re starting to start wrong growth, right? So dysfunctional growth of the, of our body systems, um, happens when we’re not breathing appropriately. And so we see that in the sexual organs as well. It’s like an adaptive system totally. Where I think we are in medicine is a lot of the patients I’m seeing are aware that they have sleep apnea or maybe have even been tested, but they hate that. C-PAP yeah. And maybe you could explain to us why people dislike the C-PAP and maybe even, although we’re not going to kind of focus on the C-PAP what has changed about that technology, um, over the last, yeah. So if you can imagine it’s, you’re having something strapped to your, to your nose essentially.
Speaker 2:
And so while you’re sleeping, having something strapped to your face is just uncomfortable doing is providing positive pressure into the airway to move that obstructive tissue out of the way and help that river you flow straight. Yeah. It’s I mean, I, I say we’re blowing up their way kind of like a balloon, right? And so the, the pressure within the airway is preventing the tongue from sliding back into it. And so, so it’s an amazing way to keep your airway open. However, it’s the, all the adjunctive things like the wearing of the mask and all those things and feeling like you can’t move, that’s what people have issues with. And rightfully so, however, it works wonderfully, but it’s just hard to where in fact, I think the studies show show that maybe 40% of people end up wearing their seatbelt. Yeah. I think if 40% are saying that then 20% of you know exactly they don’t want it.
Speaker 2:
They don’t think it’s gender. Yeah. I think, I think that, I think the number is much lower. Uh, I certainly see patients who, um, they love it, their C-PAP and they never go anywhere without it. I haven’t had a patient tell me the other day that he sleeps with his naps. He takes the work, but to C-PAP on. And then there are those patients that just hate it. Right. And so, um, as, as a dentist, you offer a dental appliance and that’s one of our big kind of the gaps that we fill here is this ability to salvage people, because we believe that it’s important to treat obstructive sleep apnea. Correct. And so if you believe it’s important to treat it, but your treatment, which is the C-PAP is something that’s intolerable to a lot of patients, either your throw your hands up and say, well, I guess it’s important, but I’m not going to go any further.
Speaker 2:
Um, I think a lot of, uh, surgeons like ENT surgeons operate on it, but I’m not so certain that the surgeries are like a spectacular success in, in, in every case. Uh, and then, then you have a mouth appliance. Maybe you can explain what your mouth appliances and why it’s different from maybe when you buy off Amazon. So it’s custom fit. And what it does is it moves your jaw and your tongue forward. So it doesn’t allow your tongue and your jaw to fall back into your airway. And for mild to moderate cases of sleep apnea, it’s just as good as the C-PAP. According to all this research. Now, when you do kind of crawl into the severe cases of sleep apnea, meaning you’re choking yourself 30, 30 times per hour, while you’re sleeping, then we start really kind of leaning on the C-PAP because it, the pressure you can adjust the pressure, you know, your body only has so far bef before you can’t move your mandible forward anymore, or your lower jaw. And so, um, it’s really effective. In fact, we see it work probably 80% of the time for all of our patients who suffer from mild to moderate sleep apnea. And, and like I said, it’s just me bringing your jaw forward. It kind of like if anybody’s done CPR, you know, the head tilt, chin lift, that’s essentially what we’re doing while you’re sleeping. And so it’ll reduce, reduce your snoring and it’ll hopefully, you know, make you sleep easier and longer throughout the night.
Speaker 1:
And I always say this, my husband went through this process with you all I needed to C-PAP, but he thought he was drowning. So he kept ripping it off his face. So he went and got the oral appliance. It’s minimal. It fits his not perfectly, obviously it’s molded and he’s snoring went down by 90%.
Speaker 2:
Oh yeah. It’s tiny to me. Well, yeah, for sure. Definitely. He did this after he had to have open heart surgery at the age of 52, and that goes all the cardiology. So, you know, if you have sleep apnea, you know, maybe get it fixed before you’re open
Speaker 1:
Your quadruple bypass.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. And it’s a negative feedback mechanism, right? So the worse, your sleep apnea is the worse, your body kind of deteriorates. Therefore the worst, the further gets your sleep apnea. It gets worse and worse as time goes on. So max, how do people get ahold of you? We have a website yesterday. Wasn’t ready for them.
Speaker 1:
[inaudible]
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Sleep better. austin.com. Just look for us, Google it, give it to Google. And, uh, yeah, we’d love to have you bring you in. We have free consults, whether that’d be with or without a sleep study. And so we just like to meet you and show you what we can do for you and then move forward from there, especially in dr. Max direct, well, they can get ahold of us to Donna. How do they get ahold of us?
Speaker 1:
You can call us during the week at (512) 238-0762. We are in round rock, North, South Austin and dripping Springs. Our website is Armour men’s health.com and you can send us questions or dr. Kirk questions to Armour men’s health@gmail.com. That’s Armour men’s health@gmail.com. We’ll be right there. The armor men’s health hour. We’ll be right back. If you have questions for dr. Mystery, email him at Armour men’s health@gmail.com.