The Five Reasons To Treat: A Patient-Centered Collaborative Deconstruction of WHY WE TREAT SLEEP APNEA
David E McCarty, MD, FAASM

The disease entity known as “Sleep Apnea” isn’t simple, it’s complex, making the “why?” of treatment a challenging topic to discuss! Learn how to responsibly unpack this complexity for our patients, in language that any provider can use, and any patient can understand! Welcome to the Five Reasons To Treat

Learning Objectives:

1. Explore language to unpack the complexity of Sleep Apnea’s main severity metric: the AHI, the many definitions of hypopnea, and obstructive vs. central sleep apnea.
2. Recognize the nuanced language that goes into the discussion of individual risk associated with Sleep Apnea, and know how to collaboratively apply this language with your patients.
3. Comprehend the complexity of the underlying pathophysiology of Sleep Apnea, by breaking apart the “many moving parts” of obstructive sleep apnea and central sleep apnea, and seeing how they relate to one another.
4. Implement a patient-centered approach to understand and clarify a patient’s sleep-wake complaints by establishing their narrative.
5. Implement the patient-centered complexity deconstruction tool “The Five Reasons To Treat” in a collaborative way with the patients you care for.

Dr. McCarty attended medical school at Duke University and completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine in Boston, at Massachusetts General Hospital. He began his career practicing primary care; but after a handful of  years in practice, he followed his own white rabbit into a whole new world called Sleep Medicine.

He learned the art from the great Dr. Andrew Chesson (world-class physician and past president of the AASM) and spent two years with Andy at LSU Shreveport as a part-time, unpaid fellow.

While at LSU, he won some teaching awards and published a few papers; and it’s also where he developed the Five Finger Approach, which has remained the cornerstone of his teaching about patient-centered problem-solving to this day and is featured as the pinnacle for orienteering around the Isle.

In 2015, he moved to Boulder to join the new Colorado Sleep Institute as its first medical director. CSI was founded as an innovative clinical model, developed to bring a comprehensive philosophy to the practice of Sleep Medicine and to place clinical care, diagnostics and treatment options (including PAP therapy and oral appliance therapy) all under the same roof.

For him, this environment was better than any textbook ever written. It was precisely this access he had—access to long-term follow up within this comprehensive structure—that allowed him to develop the patient-centered teaching curriculum that would ultimately become Empowered Sleep Apnea.

In addition to patient care and academic endeavors, Dr. McCarty has had plenty of experience as a public speaker at regional and national meetings throughout his  career.

He retired from the practice of clinical medicine in 2021, to devote his energy to patient education.

Additionally, he is  self-taught cartoonist.

1 CE credit available to AAPMD members