Update: The last email from Philips I got about this was still saying it'd be a year or more before they can replace the affected devices (though it's ambiguous whether they meant "you will be waiting at least another year" or "a year from now we'll have finished replacing everything"--to be fair, probably the latter).

However! In the course of being set up for a completely unnecessary except bureaucratically required diagnostic sleep study this afternoon, I was told by the nurse at my local hospital who does these things that the latest insider intel they have from Philips is that the affected machines are really only a problem if their owners have used those snake-oil ozone-generator "cleaning" gadgets on them, the failure incidence is about 0.01%, and they should tell patients who haven't used the ozone things that they should keep using the recalled machines until a replacement arrives.

So that's nice, particularly since we're heading into winter power-outage season now, and the emergency battery I bought with the DreamStation doesn't work with the older machine I've been using while I wait.

Meanwhile, because of this study, I don't get to use any machine tonight, which should be... fun. Good thing I've already finished my final project for this semester.

It's interesting how the state of the art in these things has advanced, though. When I was originally diagnosed with OSA in 1998, the at-home sleep study I underwent involved a technician coming to my house, rigging up a suitcase-sized... thing... next to my bed, and gluing a bunch of electrodes to my head. The thing they sent me home with today is about the size of an iPod Shuffle (the square kind, not the original pregnancy-test model), and involves a chest band to measure lung action, a nasal cannule to gauge airflow, and a pulse ox. Partly this is because they're only testing for obstructive sleep apnea this time (the brainwave wires were to check for central sleep apnea, which is a different condition), but still.

Annoyingly, what this study can't do is titrate for therapy levels, but then again, the PAP machines pretty much do that themselves these days anyway. The nurse told me that most of the time they don't even bother doing a second sleep study to titrate these days--just get the patient an auto machine and let it figure it out.

TLDR: Philips is, perhaps unsurprisingly, telling doctors something less broadly alarming than it's been telling patients about the CPAP recall, but I am going to tell you to check with your own doctor before doing anything so I won't get sued.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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