A friend of mine started "blowing air into water with an straw" (making bubbles) very seriously. I was very skeptical to say the least; but after a couple of months the effects have been very eye opening. Not only it has helped sleep apnea and snoring but also helped with reducing their weight. They had an online group and most participants reported the same. The wight loss was reverted when they stopped for some personal reasons. I wonder if making bubbles in the water has the same effect.
A very good reason. I refuse to use paper straws. They are disgusting (it feels like sucking on a piece of printer paper).
Don't get me wrong. I try to remove plastics in all areas of my life as well (because of microplastics), but can't they coat the surface in some biodegradable polymer like PHA/PBS?
Or if this is too expensive coat it with some beeswax at the very least...
My didgeridoo teacher had the class practice at home continuously blowing air through a straw - it still took me almost half a year to reliably be able to do circular breathing.
I have read a few references that humming or ‘ohming’ help sinus health and breathing so I guess it makes sense playing the didgeridoo would help also. Blowing bubbles through a straw won’t cause vibration, so probably in itself won’t help.
There's some science on training those muscles, even without upside down drinking. "Dry swallowing" while on an incline seems to do the trick just fine.
I suck in a lungful of air, hold it in as long as I can, then when I can't hold it any more, suck in even more air. Basically take in as much air and hold as long as you can, and the extra gulps of air I think open up and "reset" your throat.
Sometimes it takes a couple of goes but it has always worked for me to get rid of hiccups.
My Dr explained to me that proper sleep is important for the body to "reset" chemical balances and metabolism. It is still calories in vs out, but you are more likely to store the calories than burn them due to the "metabolic system" being out of whack due to poor sleep.
My voice teacher had me blow air into water with a straw. Felt good and had some therapeutic effect on my vocal chords.
Apparently the technique had been developed by a Finnish speech and voice therapist. Here is some background: https://www.laxvox.com/history/
I asked them: twice a day, 10 minutes each. No need to put too much pressure, that is, no need to make yourself uncomfortable during practice. Weight loss & less snoring should appear within a few months ;)
I just made a test with one of the AI:
It seems there is some evidence in there, sounds like mainly you are strengthening the muscles around your throat with that technique and this then can reduce sleap apnea a little bit.
Just read how this works and tried it. A bit tricky at first but actually quite easy once you get the hang of it. And it's kind of a fun exercise. Now I'm wondering if I should get a Didgeridoo too.
50mm/2” PVC pipe with a bit of beeswax on the end to protect your lips is a quick way to test out whether you want to spend the time to track down a proper didgeridoo.
circular breathing is useful for other instruments as well, though it's not typically a technique that's necessary until you get to fairly high levels.
Sadly the (non-english) whatsapp group is no longer available. There wasn't really more to it; you had to practice circular breathing daily and post an update. But the teacher wanted to create membership schemes and make extra money, so people left.
Someone really needs to properly do the science on this
I (presumably like the majority) assumed that sleep apnea was at least partially caused by weight gain, but if there is weight gain caused by sleep apnea it’s going to give doctors some new tools
There is plenty of proper science on this. Weight gain does not cause obstructive sleep apnea until you get into extremes (e.g. huge necked bodybuilders or people with so much fat on their chest that they physically struggle to move it to breathe). Sleep apnea makes it harder to lose weight and easier to gain weight. Having sleep apnea and being heavier can make sleep apnea worse. Losing weight quickly can make sleep apnea worse when you lose muscle mass along side fat (e.g. on ozempic).
There are plenty of tools for doctors to treat sleep apnea. The problem is that they refuse to use them. Many people on CPAP would benefit greatly from being on BiPAP instead, but doctors commonly refuse to prescribe it. Some cases of sleep apnea can be treated using positional therapy (typically side sleeping), but there's no prescription for that. Some cases can be solved by exercising throat muscles (with or without a didgeridoo), but there's no prescription for that either, and there are virtually zero speech/physical therapists who focus on that. There are some surgeries that can really benefit some patients, but most sleep labs and ENTs refuse to even to even perform a proper sleep endoscopy.
At least in the US my understanding is insurers don't generally support BiPAP because it's more expensive. Surgery costs more, has extended recovery time, is more risky, and is less effective at the broader population level; if it works, it may not work forever. For a lot of people, CPAP is good enough, and so it's currently the standard.
BiPAP is only more expensive for artificial reasons. It's the same hardware just with a different algorithm. CPAP machines are around €/$500, BiPAP can be more than twice as much. But if you take into account that they last 5-10 years, and that my local hospital charges my insurance €90/month for leasing a CPAP device, it quickly becomes apparent how much of a cash grab that is.
Patient care should be at the top of the list, especially for something as important as sleep. But saving a few bucks in the short term seems to be more important. But people with improperly treated sleep apnea still suffer many of the same effects of people who aren't treated at all.
For surgery, it turns out there are higher rates of it being the improper treatment and partial or full failure, and you still might need CPAP anyways. And that’s on top of the fairly standard and obvious preference for non invasive treatments in general.
I will say a fairly non invasive surgery that is much easier to consider is fixing a deviated septum; it probably won’t fix your apnea, but it being deviated is probably not helping.
I share your concerns about surgery. The way I understand it, the difficulty lies in choosing the right surgery (or surgeries) for the right patient. The supposed gold-standard diagnostic approach is a drug induced sleep endoscopy, where an ENT looks at your airway while you sleep. The problem is that being sedated is not the same as being asleep. It's possible to do this "right", but that is much more time consuming than just shooting people up with propofol and scoping them while they're knocked out.
One thing to keep in mind is that surgery might still be useful even if it doesn't get you off CPAP: being able to use lower CPAP pressures could increase comfort and adherence.
I've been putting off my own septoplasty because it all sounds extremely unpleasant, so yeah.
IME septoplasty was bad for like a week (constantly nosebleeding more than I’ve ever done in my life) but in the grand scheme of surgery its a fairly low pain, fast recovery, at least compared to other ones I’ve done like ACL construction.
The ones they generally don’t recommend in the US are those that involve airway or jaw modification; they have fairly low success rates, you’ll have trouble eating for months, and they can come with a whole host of nasty side effects like permanent uncontrolled nasal drip. Plus, in general US medicine tries not to recommend major surgeries if alternatives are good enough or better, not only to reduce cost and recovery, complications etc, but also because general anesthesia itself is risky.
Not sure why the other reply got downvoted to death. Commenter is right. The same motor seems to power resmed CPAP and resmed BiPAP. Haven't tried jailbreaking my own yet, but maybe I should give that a go.
The idea people aren't doing 'proper science' on this is a spectacular level of oblivious. There's nothing in here that I haven't at some point had a discussion about with my sleep doc in the last 20 years (well, not specifically a didgeridoo, but circular breathing and other types of breath exercises, including 'straw breathing'). Yes, some people do loose weight when they get their apnea under control, among other health benefits. That also is not new, and it's not some sort of miracle insight that noone has considered.
I had textbook symptoms of sleep apnea with a BMI of 19, before I was diagnosed. The sleep tech told me bluntly that plenty of slim people, even children, develop sleep apnea.
Obesity increases the chance of developing sleep apnea, yes. But sleep apnea also increases the chance of becoming obese. It is not just a simple unidirectional cause and effect.
this is incorrect lol. the water is just to help with humidity, to prevent a dry mouth and sinuses. all resumed cpap machines for example can be used without the water tank as long as you have the backplate.
the water in the tank is heated to increase the humidity of the air circulating.
cpap machines work by increasing the air pressure on breath-ins and help open your airways by keeping your genioglossus tensor veli palatini muscles engaged.
Kind of, yeah. When I first got onto CPAP I was worried that it would cause my muscles to atrophy over time because it makes the inhale so much easier. But the pressure is still there on the exhale, which is exactly like breathing out through a straw into water (with 5-20cm water on top of the straw, depending on the CPAP pressure).
Except when I wanted to get ChatGPT or Claude to criticize a religion or religious figure, namely Khamenei. It never backed down and if forced too much and I pointed out its contradiction, it would switch to 2~3-word sentences response mode (i.e. passive-aggressive).
It was a long time ago, Claude 3 or maybe ChatGPT's v3. It felt so dehumanizing that I never tried again.
It didn't seem like trained behavior though, it felt much like hardcoded behavior.
{Personal experience} many many years when beginning SWE, I used to think the same. I didn't want to admit but it meant I didn't have to learn DSA. There was plenty of evidence to back me up with the same thinking as this article. Life happened and I had to painfully spend time and slowly learn it. Comparing the person before & after, the difference in my software building skills were very tangible. Sadly I cannot point it out and say "I'm wiser and I know how not to make a mess in the codebase, because I learned such & such algorithm and data structures" yet I can fully imagine how the previous person would've been lost in the jungle.
{Less of personal experience but more of a anecdotal observation} I see the same pattern in hiring. Those who know DSA, build systems that cost less overal.
So maybe it's better not to throw DSA right out out the window, but also not stick to either ends of the spectrum?
Proton let's me bring my own subdomain for those random emails and does a pretty good job of tracking which email is given to whom, and also supports hiding your email even if you want to initiate the email contact, not just reply (plus scheme in mail address doesn't allow this). Otherwise you can also use their domain too, to stay fully anonymous.
I've been happy with Proton too. I use my own domain and Proton's catch all for this. I always register using addresses like service.name@matheusmoreira.com.
I always thought to do this visualization in 3d and maybe with VR. Not sure how useful or pleasing experience it would be. Kudos to the author of the project to get this done!
This kind of approach might be what (finally) unlocks visual programming?
I feel like most good programmers are like good chess players. They don't need to see the board (code). But for inputting the code transformation into the system this might be a good programmer's chessboard.
Though to make it work concretely for arbitrary codebases I feel like a coding agent behind the scenes is 100% required.
A 3d environment (VR-headset with Tom Cruise-style-swiping, or Doom-style with WASD navigation) would be cool, one could be "in orbit", observing the system, watching the nodes and their interactions, and pause and see what messages they're passing to each other. How about time-travel-debugging to allow rewinds too!
As a bonus, porting Doom to it should be "trivial".
> I feel like most good programmers are like good chess players.
A specific type or area of developers, I'd say. There are many types and not all of them require understanding sizeable code bases to do their work well.
Understanding your large codebase is a few prompts away. You can ask a model to trace through and provide reports on the project's design, architectural and implementation. From there, you can drill in with followups.
Done right, you may not know specific lines or chunks of code by heart, but much like a tuned-in company CEO, you have eyes and ears on the ground and retain global oversight and insight of the project itself. For specifics, you can learn what you need as you need it. If that means knowing how every single module works, that's just a conversation with your agent.
I think it's where one plugs the external world into in their brain. For my daily work, I plug the desktop to my current thought stream (or short term memory?). Anything not immediately relevant to what I'm thinking about is an unnecessary speed bump or stutter in my speech, which means minimal window decoration, no status bars, ... and anything not visible can be summoned by a quick single "label" somehow, not by navigating a structure. This is more similar to what the author suggested.
{And if I'm getting what you said correctly}
What you described, is similar to how I organize my drawers in my room. Everything is visible at once, but navigating them usually takes 2 or 3 steps. Without this visual map I'm completely lost.
I declare a `my_die() { echo "$" 1>&2; exit 1; }` on top of each file. Makes life easier by knowing why the script failed instead of having only exit code or having to turn `set -x` on and rerun.
Only if I could somehow mix `if` & `set -e`in a readable way... I wanted it to only capture errors of explicit `return 1` from bash functions, not from commands within those bash functions. But I guess I'm doing too much* of the job in bash now and it's getting messy.
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