Fellow mouth taper here! It’s a must for shared hotel rooms. I have no idea about the safety or effectiveness for sleep apnea, but it significantly (N=1) improves others’ sleep.
I am not a medical professional but was recently officially diagnosed with sleep apnea and am using a CPAP. I was taping my mouth, which did work. However, I was strongly advised against doing this when I mentioned this to my sleep specialist. It’s possible for your nose to get obstructed and you can risk suffocating.
> However, I was strongly advised against doing this when I mentioned this to my sleep specialist. It’s possible for your nose to get obstructed and you can risk suffocating
CPAP user here. I tape my mouth. The risk of suffocating due to a blocked nose seems low to me, for two reasons. First, because I can simply do a one-sided smile and breathe normally through my mouth -- I've tried many times for funsies and it's never failed. Second, because you should always fold the two bottom corners of the tape to facilitate its quick removal in the morning anyway.
The real risk of taping your mouth at night, in my opinion, is if there's any chance of vomiting. Without any other way to go, you would aspirate the vomit and that's bad. What I do to reduce that risk is not eating for three hours before using the CPAP.
So why go through all that effort when one could simply use a full face CPAP mask? That's because it is difficult to produce an airtight seal around your whole face, which is necessary for CPAP therapy to work. Creating a seal around your nose is much easier and the smaller size of a nasal nask allows you to sleep on your side, which for most people means you can get away with using lower pressures, which in turn are more comfortable.
The concern is not having enough time to remove the tape from your mouth.
Among other reasons this can happen because CPAP therapy can cause you to swallow air unwittingly while you sleep due to the pressure it places on your epiglottis. The subsequent burps can contain a mixture of swallowed air and the contents of your stomach.
You seem to be misinformed. You don’t wake up vomiting out of nowhere. That is not how it works unless you are using sedatives. You’d be wide awake once your body wants to vomit and you’ll have plenty of time to remove that tape five times. But you do you.
The problem is not whether you wake up, but whether you have enough time and presence of mind to remove the tape from your mouth before stuff starts coming out of your stomach and enters your lungs.
I don't suppose your sleep specialist elaborated? Suffocating in your sleep is really hard, this is why people with sleep apnea don't just die instantly, instead we start to feel awful over a very long period of time. Your body wakes you up when your breathing is compromised (usually in response to an increase in CO2).
Guess they're just covering their arse with that advice.
Also, when you're on nasal CPAP, and pressurised air is being blown into your nose, you'd have to have really weird things happening to suddenly get a nose that's completely obstructed in spite of the pressure....
It would seem the risk of death from the CPAP is far higher than that of mouth taping. A quick google and I can’t find any injuries or deaths from mouth taping but here we have confirmed hundreds of deaths from faulty CPAP machines