Recently, I've been posting less often, partly because insomnia has been eating up so much of my time. As we said in Beating the Dementia Monster, insomnia is associated with dementia partly because of the brain's need for deep sleep. My insomnia got suddenly worse in 2021, and at least one doctor associates it with my cerebellar dysfunction. This is the new brain disease I was diagnosed with in 2022.
My Fitbit tells me that I often get only a few minutes of deep sleep a night, with a sleep score as low as 35. "Poor" is below 60. Recently, my usual score has been in the 40s and 50s. I often get less than 5-1/2 hours, sometimes less than 4 hours of sleep. I try napping during the day to catch up, but I may have insomnia at noon. And I feel the effects of lack of sleep all day long.
I usually fall asleep pretty quickly at around 10 p.m. Then, sometime between 12 and 2, I'll be wide awake. I feel like I just drank a gallon of Starbuck's finest. After getting up and doing some things for 90 minutes or so, I go back to bed. In the past, I could usually get back to sleep then. But lately I haven't. So I just lie there.
I subscribe to the mailing lists for several medical journals, and a couple weeks ago one article flew across my computer screen. It was about a study of applying acupuncture to sleep disorders in dementia patients, finding acupuncture actually could help with their insomnia. I made a mental note to follow up, but now I can't find the email or the article it pointed to. We wrote about research on acupuncture and dementia once before. A number of studies have found that acupuncture can help with dementia, but the studies are few and of limited quality. Checking more recently, I found this larger study of acupuncture in Canada that included some positive results with respect to insomnia. Again, positive, but not necessarily stunning results.
After a particularly bad week of insomnia, I decided to give acupuncture a try. So I researched local acupuncturists, and saw one that seemed to be associated with the local medical community. But she wasn't taking any new patients. I found another one with a perfect score in Healthgrades.com and decided to give her a try.
The acupuncturist was a young, very pleasant Chinese woman. The man I took to be her husband (also very likable) seemed to be the business manager. They were immigrants from somewhere across the ocean, giving them an aura of authenticity. (Call me a racist...)
I had a 90 minute session which included reviewing my intake paperwork, a discussion of my issues, and an explanation of what to expect. I lay on the bed while she put a bunch of needles in my head, neck, arms, abdomen, and legs. Every once in a while, there was the slightest stinging, but it was mostly quite painless. After that, she turned off the lights and left the room to attend other patients.
About 45 minutes later, she returned and took out the needles. I was afraid she'd forget one, but she didn't. She said it would take a series of weekly treatments to see real results, so I scheduled another visit for the following week. (Subjects in the research we cited earlier received at least six sessions over one to three months.)
So I've only had one session, but how did I sleep that night? Well, the night before was pretty nasty, and I had a lot of sleep debt. As usual, I fell asleep pretty quickly. And, as usual, I was very awake soon after midnight. I got up and did my usual nighttime activities, but I noticed that going back to sleep was easier than usual. My Fitbit said my sleep score was "fair," which I haven't seen for a while. And I slept quite soundly between 6:30 and 8:30 a.m. This is an improvement, although it took 12 hours to get, probably, 7 hours of sleep.
We'll see what happens tonight. And we'll see what happens after a reasonable series of sessions. Stay tuned.
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