What medical treatments are available to minimize or eliminate my snoring?
As far as medications go for snoring, medically, there's no real proven medicine that will stop your snoring. The snoring is usually due to some kind of mechanical obstruction, so something that unblocks that, even though it's not necessarily a surgical treatment, will improve the snoring. There's another form of apnea that is not obstructive, but comes from the brain, where the signals to the lungs are interrupted and you actually stop breathing; not because there's an obstruction, but because you have no signal for the brain. For those patients, there are medical treatments and stimulants such as Ritalin which are used to increase the excitement level in the brain so that you'll always continue breathing. So, your brain tricks itself into thinking you're awake. Surgical remedies for patients with obstructive sleep apnea are based on the anatomical location of their obstruction. Things like septal deviations can be treated with a septoplasty. People with enlarged tonsils or adenoids can be treated with a tonsillectomy or adenoidectomy. There are some minimally basic techniques such as coblation, which can shrink tissues in the base of the tongue. More radical procedures involve actually moving the jawbones forward to increase the air space in the back of your throat in terms of breathing.
