TMJ Treatment/Teeth Grinding

Doctor Wendelschafer on Sleep Apnea
‍Personally, I had sleep apnea, and when sleep apnea started getting into the dental field, I went to a seminar and I said, "Well, that sounds like a lot of those symptoms are things that I have." And part of the actual course was a take-home sleep test. So I hooked it all up and hopped into bed, and it turns out I had sleep apnea. And so you can imagine that next day I was hyperfocused on anything and everything that we were able to offer to be able to help people to breathe while they sleep. There are several devices that I use to help people breathe while they sleep. Obstructive sleep apnea is the one that we can treat, and so many diseases and so many conditions are caused by not being able to breathe properly at night.

The heart and every other part of your body is supposed to relax while you're sleeping. Your heart rate should slow while you sleep. All of the organs in your body require oxygen while you sleep. If you have less oxygen coming in, the heart has to pump harder and faster all night to get whatever oxygen is coming into all of those organs. So when you wake up in the morning and you feel like a zombie because your heart ran a marathon, the organs, including your brain, a lot of the hormones that should be released, a lot of the endocrine and exocrine glands, they don't get the oxygen that they need while you're sleeping. And so a lot of diseases, illnesses, conditions are caused because people aren't breathing properly, and so I've gotten involved in that.