Hi, I'm Dr. Madan Kandula with ADVENT. Today, we're going talk about how your body was built to breathe.
The first thing that we really need to discuss is why you have the equipment that you have. Why does your nose exist? Why is it better to breathe through your nose versus your mouth? Why do so many people have problems breathing properly? The root cause of a lot of those issues has to do with the fact that, for many people, their noses just don't work properly.
I've been doing this for a quarter century, and it's only been recently that I really sat down and thought about why we see so many people who have the issues that we can treat, so our main reason for being, the reason that ADVENT exists, is to help people breathe properly because your nose is designed for a reason. Your nose is really what has been given to you to condition the air that you breathe. Most patients that I see, pretty much every patient that I see, that has a snoring issue or sleep apnea issue, has an issue in their nose. What we've learned, and what I've learned, is this is really recent knowledge to me and to the medical community. What we found out here recently is that nose problem likely started when somebody was a little kiddo, and that nose problem started them, likely, down a pathway that led to an adult who has not the right equipment to breathe properly.
When a child is born, they're an obligated nasal breather. Shortly after birth, some kiddos are sort of forced to breathe through their mouth and they learn to adapt to that, and the problem is, if you don't breathe through your nose, that impacts you in the moment. As you're growing, it impacts you to become something that you weren't supposed to be. When you don't breathe through your nose, the forces that get created, both in terms of moving air through your nose and the forces that get created by the lack of your mouth being in a proper position, create a situation where somebody's face basically caves in from the sides, so you get a long, narrow face.
For anybody who has a snoring or sleep apnea issue, they have a nose and a throat problem; likely both of those things. If you are wondering at home right now or wherever you are, ‘Do I have an airway problem?’ Shut your mouth, take a deep breath in through your nose, and if that doesn't feel like it's a nice, easy thing to do, then you probably have an airway problem.
The broader sense, that when somebody's coming in, looking for an answer for their snoring, that's real. We want get to the bottom of that to truly give someone the best chance for success and the results that they ought to have. It's understanding that in order to breathe, you have to breathe through your nose and if your nose isn't built the way it's supposed to be built, that's going be a problem.
This isn't rocket science. This is very, very, very straightforward thinking. The nice thing is that straightforward thinking leads to straightforward answers that leads to straightforward solutions.