Insomnia treatment in this country is hindered by one simple fact - very few people really understand what insomnia is and how it is defined, including many physicians who treat adults and kids with insomnia. In this first (of many) episodes about insomnia, we will:
- start with the basics of insomnia definitions: What is insomnia?
- understand that insomnia is not and individual who "can't sleep"
- touch upon the academic definitions of insomnia and how they can often take away from the patient problems by arbitrarily relying on useless timeframe parameters
- learn (via a story that admittedly goes on way too long) that anything, even a Fantasy Football game, can precipitate a night of transient insomnia
- understand that a patient's perceived disability is at the core of the insomnia definition, and only the patient gets to define that disability
- begin to uncover that an individual's perception of what happen when they sleep is not always an accurate representation of what actually happens, creating problems both diagnostically and therapeutically for many clinicians and patients
Produced by: Maeve Winter
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Thanks for listening and sleep well!
