Those who can tolerate the general CPAP experience, have bed partners who tolerate it, and don’t experience detrimental effects should absolutely use it when there are no comparable solutions. However there are lots of perfectly legitimate reasons why not everyone can, and having alternatives (which do also come with side effects) to consider is amazing for the community overall. It’s legitimately great that it sounds like CPAP treatment has been effective for you (as it has for me, mostly), but your comments end up sounding quite dismissive of the challenges faced by other patients.
Careful skepticism of new treatments is always warranted, but even if it only helps 5% of patients with OSA in absolute terms that’s a huge population impact.
Almost everyone can tolerate CPAP. The problem is that the medical establishment sucks at helping people adjust and is awful at properly titrating them. Followup is abysmal. If they did a better job of that, compliance numbers would skyrocket.
Skepticism is very much warranted. CPAP is the gold standard because nothing has come along that comes even close. I'm much more optimistic about an upcoming generation of micro-implants that stimulate various throat muscles than I am about pharmaceutical treatments using stimulants.
Edit: to be clear, I am not dismissive of any OSA patient's concerns. But most of their issues are a consequence of shitty titration and poor support from their sleep docs.
Careful skepticism of new treatments is always warranted, but even if it only helps 5% of patients with OSA in absolute terms that’s a huge population impact.