Silence is golden for spouses - and makers of snoring cures

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 27, 1997 | by Ralph Schoenstein

Snoring is one of the biggest threats to a happy marriage. In the interest of keeping down divorce rates (and making a few bucks), the antisnoring industry is giving consumers the silent treatment.

Every night in America, 40 million wives have to make a decision about moving that has nothing to do with renting a van. For each of these women the grim choices are: Should she leave the bedroom where her husband has started to snore? Or should she evict him to avoid another long night of guttural sounds? As my own wife, Judy, has said tenderly, "Either you stop snoring or one of us has to go."

Snoring is a greater threat to marriage than a teenage child. It has led to divorce as well as gunplay -- a Texan named John Wesley Hardin once fired a shot through a wall at a snorer in the next room and killed him.

"Snoring is the biggest problem for marriages that we see," says Rosalind Cartwright, director of Sleep Disorder Services at Chicago's St. Luke's Medical Center. "The man's wife has left the bed because of his snoring and he wants her back."

In 1971, snoring was declared legal grounds for divorce. A woman no longer was obliged to stay tied to a man she had to keep rotating as if running an all-night barbecue.

The silencing of a snorer -- without pistol or chloroform, that is -- has been a miracle as eagerly sought as the Fountain of Youth. For centuries, there have been desperate attempts to save snore-filled marriages with straitjackets, bricks, harnesses, face masks and mystical rites.

At last, however, medical science has come through: Severe snoring now can be cured surgically by cutting away part of the soft palate and the uvula -- the fleshy appendage at the back of the throat that vibrates noisily when the tongue falls against it during sleep. And snoring also can be cured by dental devices that either advance the jaw or hold the tongue still during sleep.

But what about those drugstore and catalog cures that would spare you the discomfort of surgery -- and a $2,000 medical bill? I decided to investigate.

The first thing I tried was a product called Breathe Right nasal strips, manufactured by CNS Inc. of Minneapolis. Made in three sizes (sold in boxes of 10 for $5), the strips allow more air into the nose by flaring open the nostrils with a piece of adhesive and plastic.

On the night that I put on one of the strips, I not only enjoyed the macho look -- as if I had been in a brawl -- but I did seem to feel a little more air coming into my nose. Would that extra in-take reduce or stop my snoring? The answer came from Judy at dawn.

"You sounded about the same," she said. "Maybe you need a tourniquet."

Instead, I used an 800 number to order different device: the ball-on-the-back. Worn to keep the snores from sleeping on his or her back, the position most conducive to snoring, this device is as old as the republic. During the American revolution, the wife of a snorer sometimes sewed a small cannonball to the back of his nightshirt for the same purpose: sleep rotation.

From Nicolet Biomedical Inc. of Palatine, Ill., I bought a dark-blue T-shirt with three pockets in the back for tennis balls and a We're on Your Side slogan on the front. I was going to sleep in a uniform - one that cost $25.

As I was about to slip into the shirt however, I realized belatedly that I never slept on my back. Three Dunlop tennis balls on my spine would make sense only if I were about to serve. Snoring on my stomach, a kind of otolaryngological oxymoron, was not just the only comfortable position for me; it was a trick I had polished through the years. But if I reversed the shirt and put the balls beneath me while lying on my stomach, I would be awake all night wondering why I was trying to sleep on tennis balls.

I dropped the balls and moved on to a more high-tech position-changer: the Sharper Image's Ultra Snore Control, a "silent" wrist alarm, sold for $30. When you snore with this device on your wrist, the sound triggers a vibrator that, in theory, makes you roll over.

The night I tried the Ultra Snore Control, its vibrations woke me at around 2 a.m. I changed my position. The vibrations awoke me again just before 5 a.m. I changed my position again -- from the bed to the kitchen stove, where I cooked up an early breakfast, for I knew there would be no more sleep.

Another mail-order product with the potential to eliminate sleep as a cause of snoring is the Sears Comfort Zone Silent Sleeper. This $9 pillow is guaranteed to "let you and your sleeping partner sleep in uninterrupted silence." Made of foam, it is meant to elevate your neck as you lie on your back.

In spite of my being unable to sleep on my back with any pillow, I tried the Comfort Zone Silent Sleeper and discovered that the neck was not meant to be elevated unless accompanied by the head. I felt as though somebody was about to wash my hair.

In addition to the tennis balls, the vibrating alarm and the comfort pillow, I tried nasal sprays such as Y-Snore which labels itself "a simple, natural, painless solution." A solution it is -- it's a liquid herbal concoction -- but it does nothing for snoring, in the opinion of Gabriele Barthlen, former director of the Sleep Disorders Center of New York's Mount Sinai Hospital.