Sleep and the Immune System - Howard Hindin
Thank you very much. First I wanna thank Dayna for inviting me to come and secondly Alan Green who, since I arrived here, he sort of asked me if I wanted to be on the board of directors, nominated me, elected me, and now I’m the first dentist on the AKM board. My history is going back, my practice was built on my relationship with doctor like you. Michael Schacter is my friend, and his office is right next door to mine. I work with Robin Atkins, Ronald Hoffman, going back in those days it was related to mercury, chronic infections, periodontal disease. And I took care of the dental aspect, and when I needed support for restoring health, I relied on those doctors. We had some success. It was also the days when we did cavitation surgery, and we had successes and we had failures, never really sure which patients would benefit and which wasn’t. Now, I’ve become really interested in sleep over the last few years, and that seems to be the missing link. So what I would like to do is get you excited about the sleep and getting excited about working with dentists and other health care practitioners. So, I have no commercial support and I don’t represent any company. But I do have two organizations that I’ve created and founded.  One is the American Academy of Physiological Medicine and Dentistry, which is a group of all kinds of health care practitioners focused on interdisciplinary approach to airway and sleep problems, and to raising awareness about these issues. The second one is the Foundation for Airway Health, which is the public organization doing the same thing. So today, our learning objectives are to recognize people who have air or sleep disorders, understand the different ways that these are presented, and to understand connection between sleep disorders and the effect on the inflammation and immune system, and most important learn about the benefits of collaborative care. So, I have some questions: Who sleeps more than seven hours a night? Raise your hand. Who sleeps less than seven? Who sleeps less than six? Who snores? Who gets up at night to go to bathroom? Who treats children in their practice? Very good. This is what a severe sleep problem looks like. This would be a person… Then I’m gonna show a little diagram of what happens… and what they’re showing is the collapse of the oropharynx, where the tongue falls back and is blocking the airway. And the brains sends a signal there’s a problem, and he wakes up. In your practice, how many of you screen on a routine basis for airway sleep issues? To purchase the entire lecture series, click here.
Jan
04,
2016