Can you cure insomnia?

Video Overview

Can you cure insomnia? Well, it depends on what is causing that. Most of the patients we see coming in do have a complaint of "I cannot go to sleep. I cannot stay asleep." We found that most of these patients have problems not with a transient kind of insomnia that we all get on a fairly really tough day. We cannot shut the mind off. We got a big day tomorrow and we have to think about what we are going to do - those that transiently affect everybody. Estimates are, you know, over 50 percent of the population. It is going to have something like that on a transient basis. There are people who weeks or months at a time cannot go to sleep or cannot stay asleep. After they have a couple of hours of sleep under their belt, they wake up and then cannot go back to sleep because their sleep drive is down. Now, how do you treat a person like that depends on what their problem is. And people with chronic insomnia, more and more were finding they have problems with their breathing at night. So, every time they start to drowse, go to sleep, their airway closes and a reflex happens and their body wakes them up. So it is very difficult to get an insomnia drug approved through the FDA, then. There are some good ones out there - short acting, do not have a lot of residual kind of effect, but you have to use them for the right reasons.