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Dr. Brazinsky describes how a physician should advocate for a woman who has a sleep disorder.
Dr. Brazinsky:
Patient comes into your office and they don’t really know what they have going on, you really have to get a good history and if you can’t, if they can’t be definite with their history I give them a sleep diary and have them go home and write down, “On Tuesday I went to bed at such and such time and it took me such and such time to fall asleep and I woke up,” and after two weeks of doing that they can come in and you can get a really good picture of, “Are they having insomnia? Are they really sleeping well? Are they sleeping not at all?”
I mean people have very erratic sleep habits and the other thing is to get information from their partner. The women coming in with the tape recorders of their husbands snoring and stuff, I never hear a man doing that. I’ve never had a man come in with the tape recording of his wife and I don’t know if that’s because they sleep through their wife or because they’re snoring louder or, but you just don’t hear that, even though the women can be very heavy snorers. And we don’t see that as much in old days when sleep apnea was first becoming known as a diagnosis every woman came in with a tape recorder. Now they come in and say, “Oh, my husband snores and he stops breathing,” so I think it’s a lot more public awareness of the disease.
About Dr. Shari Brazinsky, M.D.:
Dr. Shari Anne Brazinsky is a pulmonary critical care physician at Alvarado Hospital in San Diego, California as a member of the Pulmonary Medicine and Infectious Disease Medical Group. She was named one of San Diego’s 2008 top pulmonary disease doctors for the third time by San Diego Magazine.
Visit Dr. Brazinsky at Alvarado Hospital