Site Launch: July 15, 2020 Last Update: November 24, 2020
Hello there! My name is Doug, I'm a 50ish year old male ... and I am on a mission to see if I can resolve or reduce my severe obstructive sleep apnea - as well as a variety of other health issues that have cropped up in the last 5 years - through the use of an medical device marketed by Vivos Therapeutics and sold and deployed by a network of trained dentists and prosthodontists around the world. The goal is to make my maxilla bone (the bone in your head that is effectively the roof of your mouth/floor of your nasal cavity) a few millimeters wider, bring it a few millimeters further forward, lower it by a few millimeters, and try do the same with the mandible (the lower jaw) at the same time so that they match and I have a good bite. This process might take 12-24 months to complete (after which I may still need some "finishing" treatments like traditional orthodontics to straighten my smile back up again).
It's a tall order.
And at the time I am writing this, this treatment has only been deployed to about 15,000 people worldwide over the past 10 years. As of the launch date of these pages, it has not been FDA certified to have been proven effective in curing obstructive sleep apnea, although the inventor cites a number of cases where they seem to have done exactly that. To say that this is a bit "out on the edge" of medical research ... is a bit of an understatement. I am simultaneously enthusiastic and utterly terrified - it is not a comfortable feeling, and I do not relish jumping in to what could rightly be called an "experimental" treatment. The best outcome would be for it to cure or significantly reduce one or more of multiple health conditions I seem to have developed over the past 5-10 years. An OK outcome would be that it does nothing other than waste a year or so of my time, and some $$. The absolute worst case would be that it could cause irreparable damage to my teeth and/or jaws, which could result in multiple tooth failures either during treatment or perhaps years down the road ... potentially necessitating invasive and expensive jaw surgery and potential implants, dentures, or whole-mouth reconstruction (along with not clearing up any of my other problems).
I would truly give anything I own to not be at this crossroads right now. But my health conditions both at the moment - and looking long-term into the next few decades - have brought me to a point where I need to see if I can correct some things that might be wrong in my skull. I got big into physical fitness and losing weight once I found out I had sleep apnea, but if I actually have a skeletal deficiency then there is literally no amount of exercising or eating right which will help me overcome that.
So this site is going to be broken into two major sections you can see below. The first column on the left, is that obviously I will be trying to tell my story - both in how I arrived at this point in 2020, and how the treatment process is evolving over time. But there may be others that find this page, who are just trying to find information about treatments like this, and I have spent the better part of the last nine months trying to track down every scrap of information I can about this particular treatment protocol, its inventor, how it claims to work, etc. before making a decision to try it. I will link to published scientific research papers where I can, statements from the company or its inventor, and/or patient testimonials - those materials are in the column on the right.
Please bookmark this page and come back to visit from time to time as my treatment progresses, as this is more of a "wiki" than a blog - so I'll be making tweaks and updates constantly to all of the pages below. I might also enable comments/discussion for some of the sub-pages in this site, if anyone wants to contribute to the discussion or ask questions (but you must sign up for an account with Notion.so - the platform I am using to collect all of this content - in order to do so).
Thanks for visiting, and I hope this information or my story are helpful to you!
Wishing you all good health,
-Doug
Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional. This is not medical advice. Do not take anything you find in any of these pages as advice for you - go speak to your doctors about any conditions you may have. And by all means, you absolutely should NOT attempt to try to self-treat conditions like these!
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