Hypnosis and Sleep Apnea

A person on one of the Yahoo groups I belong to asked a question regarding hypnosis and sleep apnea.

I thought you would be interested in my response which was as follows:

As both a medical person (a nurse anesthetist who deals specifically with airways) and a medical hypnotherapist my answer to your question would be that sleep apnea is a physical medical condition. It is indeed an, what we call, "airway obstruction" caused by soft tissue folding down on the airway. There is a saying I was taught in my anesthesia training: "All noisy breathing is obstructed breathing but not all obstructed breathing is noisy". Current thinking is that there might also be possibly a brain activity problem. Treatment includes a positive airway pressure machine (PAP - similar to a mechanical ventilator that is used in the ICU or OR) and now a new surgery that might help.

With all that being said, I would imagine that hypnosis would help in two ways:

1) losing weight of course so that there is less soft tissue folding down on the airway and hence less obstructed breathing. Also weight reduction would increase the the pulmonary volume and hence more oxygen to the brain and the rest of the body.
2)having the person with sleep apnea become more subconsciously aware of needing to take a breath during sleep and perhaps change to a side position while sleeping so obstruction does not happen so readily.