Dr. Michael Grandner

It's sleep medicine dentistry.

Not sedation dentistry, but sleep dentistry where it's about people diagnosing and treating sleep apnea with these dental devices.

That's a very common one.

There's also...

musculo, myofascial therapy.

So like you can use the musculoskeletal system and essentially exercise these muscles so that they just carry more muscle tone.

That can work.

I mean, there's very famous work done with like people who play the didgeridoo where they have to do the cyclical breathing.

It ends up strengthening certain muscles that even when you're asleep, they're a little stronger and they can maintain a little more tone.

So sometimes that can help, especially for more mild apnea cases.

There's a device,

called Excite OSA, where it's, you put it on your tongue when you're awake and it sort of electrically stimulates your tongue muscles.

So then you go to bed, it keeps a little, it's like a TENS unit kind of, where it like, where it stimulates your tongue muscles so that when you go to bed, there's a little more muscle tone in there.

That seems to work okay.

There's a new device people have maybe seen commercials called Inspire, which just means breathe in.

But it's sort of like a pacemaker that they install.

So it's an implantable electrical device that they do surgery.

But it's a sort of a pacemaker for your tongue muscle.

And so what it does is when it detects that your tongue is falling back, it zaps it to open it up.

And that also for people for whom it's a candidate for that can also it's you don't have to.