Silence is golden for spouses -
and makers of snoring cures
Serving Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah and surrounding areas
Ralph Schoenstein
Snoring is one of the biggest threats to a happy marriage. In the interest of keeping down divorce rates (and making a few bucks), the antisnoring industry is giving consumers the silent treatment.
Every night in America, 40 million wives have to make a decision about moving that has nothing to do with renting a van. For each of these women the grim choices are: Should she leave the bedroom where her husband has started to snore? Or should she evict him to avoid another long night of guttural sounds? As my own wife, Judy, has said tenderly, "Either you stop snoring or one of us has to go."
Snoring is a greater threat to marriage than a teenage child. It has led to divorce as well as gunplay — a Texan named John Wesley Hardin once fired a shot through a wall at a snorer in the next room and killed him.
"Snoring is the biggest problem for marriages that we see," says Rosalind Cartwright, director of Sleep Disorder Services at Chicago's St. Luke's Medical Center. "The man's wife has left the bed because of his snoring and he wants her back."
In 1971, snoring was declared legal grounds for divorce. A woman no longer was obliged to stay tied to a man she had to keep rotating as if running an all-night barbecue.
The silencing of a snorer — without pistol or chloroform, that is — has been a miracle as eagerly sought as the Fountain of Youth. For centuries, there have been desperate attempts to save snore-filled marriages with straitjackets, bricks, harnesses, face masks and mystical rites.
At last, however, medical science has come through: Severe snoring now can be cured surgically by cutting away part of the soft palate and the uvula — the fleshy appendage at the back of the throat that vibrates noisily when the tongue falls against it during sleep. And snoring also can be cured by dental devices that either advance the jaw or hold the tongue still during sleep.
But what about those drugstore and catalog cures that would spare you the discomfort of surgery — and a $2,000 medical bill? I decided to investigate.
The first thing I tried was a product called Breathe Right nasal strips, manufactured by CNS Inc. of Minneapolis. Made in three sizes (sold in boxes of 10 for $5), the strips allow more air into the nose by flaring open the nostrils with a piece of adhesive and plastic.
On the night that I put on one of the strips, I not only enjoyed the macho look — as if I had been in a brawl — but I did seem to feel a little more air coming into my nose. Would that extra in-take reduce or stop my snoring? The answer came from Judy at dawn.
"You sounded about the same," she said. "Maybe you need a tourniquet."
Instead, I used an 800 number to order different device: the ball-on-the-back. Worn to keep the snorer from sleeping on his or her back, the position most conducive to snoring, this device is as old as the republic. During the American revolution, the wife of a snorer sometimes sewed a small cannonball to the back of his nightshirt for the same purpose: sleep rotation.
From Nicolet Biomedical Inc. of Palatine, Ill., I bought a dark-blue T-shirt with three pockets in the back for tennis balls and a We're on Your Side slogan on the front. I was going to sleep in a uniform - one that cost $25.
As I was about to slip into the shirt however, I realized belatedly that I never slept on my back. Three Dunlop tennis balls on my spine would make sense only if I were about to serve. Snoring on my stomach, a kind of otolaryngological oxymoron, was not just the only comfortable position for me; it was a trick I had polished through the years. But if I reversed the shirt and put the balls beneath me while lying on my stomach, I would be awake all night wondering why I was trying to sleep on tennis balls.
I dropped the balls and moved on to a more high-tech position-changer: the Sharper Image's Ultra Snore Control, a "silent" wrist alarm, sold for $30. When you snore with this device on your wrist, the sound triggers a vibrator that, in theory, makes you roll over.
The night I tried the Ultra Snore Control, its vibrations woke me at around 2 a.m. I changed my position. The vibrations awoke me again just before 5 a.m. I changed my position again — from the bed to the kitchen stove, where I cooked up an early breakfast, for I knew there would be no more sleep.
Another mail-order product with the potential to eliminate sleep as a cause of snoring is the Sears Comfort Zone Silent Sleeper. This $9 pillow is guaranteed to "let you and your sleeping partner sleep in uninterrupted silence." Made of foam, it is meant to elevate your neck as you lie on your back.
In spite of my being unable to sleep on my back with any pillow, I tried the Comfort Zone Silent Sleeper and discovered that the neck was not meant to be elevated unless accompanied by the head. I felt as though somebody was about to wash my hair.
In addition to the tennis balls, the vibrating alarm and the comfort pillow, I tried nasal sprays such as Y-Snore which labels itself "a simple, natural, painless solution." A solution it is — it's a liquid herbal concoction — but it does nothing for snoring, in the opinion of Gabriele Barthlen, former director of the Sleep Disorders Center of New York's Mount Sinai Hospital.
"Nonprescription nasal drops, like the salines, don't stop snoring," says Barthlen. "A bedtime nasal decongestant can be of some help, but it has to be a prescription one, like a steroid.
Afrin [nasal spray] is the only good commercial one, but you can't use it for more than three or four consecutive nights or it loses its potency and causes addiction."
Because no nation on Earth fleeces consumers as creatively as America, our drugstores and catalogs also offer snorer products such as Breathe-Fit, a horseshoe-shaped nasal insert for $13; Breathe EZ, for $20; and Nosovent, for $15. "All those nasal inserts are worthless," contends Barthlen. "In fact, they move you backward. Not only don't they stop snoring, but they probably make it worse because they partially block the flow of air. Anything that takes up space in the nose is a bad idea."
Nevertheless, the antisnoring industry is booming, says a spokesman for Eckerd, the drugstore chain that sells many such products, including Snor Ban (a plastic jaw retainer) and Snore No More tablets (60 for $50). Indeed, there are so many antisnoring schemes that the Good Housekeeping Institute tested some of them on 43 snorers for a month. The results were uninspiring.
Less than 35 percent of the sleepmates of these snorers noticed a significant improvement from the use of nose inserts, nasal drops and pillows. About half said tablets helped. (Snore No More tablets contain natural enzymes that break up mucous in the throat.) Only the strips scored well: 73 percent noticed improvement.
Because Breathe Right strips had scored highest, I decided to try one a second time. At bedtime one night, I took another strip and pasted it halfway down my nose. And then, with tape on my head and hope in my heart, I turned to Judy. "Honey," I said, "don't go to any trouble, but try to listen to me all night."
When I awoke in the morning, Judy was trying to sneak in a nap; but I knew she would want me to wake her so that she could tell me my score.
"Well?" I asked, giving her a loving shake. "Am I cured?"
"This must've been something that Dante wrote about," she replied sleepily
"Just tell me how I did."
"You were softer 'til about 3 o'clock," she said, surfacing from under the covers. "After that, it seemed just about the same. You know what I think I'll do?"
"Don't leave me! We have too many things besides snoring."
"I think I'll buy one of those electronic machines that makes the sound of surf or a mortar attack and enjoy that instead."
"No, let's try the bandage again. If it worked 'til 3, then maybe I just need two strips to make it through the whole night."
And so, the following bedtime I bandaged again and bade Judy a fond goodnight that had a certain hollow ring.
In the morning, I pounced on my poor darling.
"And last night?" I asked.
"You were softer 'til about 3," she said. "Like the other night."
Breathe Right strips were the answer for me only if I decided that four hours of sleep would be enough or if Judy would be willing to find new accommodations at 3 in the morning. I simply will have to keep on searching for a way to keep her from sleeping around.
COPYRIGHT 1997 News World Communications, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
