Patients think sleeping pills help them….do they?
An article in the New York Times today points out that people who take sleeping pills tend to gain only 19 minutes more of sleep time versus a placebo. A side affect of using sleeping pills is memory loss. Some people just didn’t remember that they had difficulty trying to get to sleep. If you remember the problems we had with Ambien, people would sleep walk and do odd things while apparently sleeping peacefully. One woman in the article woke up with a broken wrist and didn’t remember how she did it. Some people reported taking sleeping pills before traveling on airplanes only to wake up in another city and forgetting what they were going there for. Many nurses have observed the “sleep hangover” effect in patients in the morning. They are less alert, sometimes falling asleep eating breakfast, etc. This phenomena prompted the FDA to put warnings on sleeping pills about driving and using heavy machinery.
Read the article and note that it speaks about the lost “awake” time these pills cause. It is a concern for us, as a society, to have people who take sleeping pills and then getting up early morning (or early evenings like us late shift nurses) only to climb into an automobile and drive to work “half asleep”. Would it concern you as a patient if your brain surgeon was going to operate on you first thing in the morning after taking Halcion, Lunesta, or Ambien? It does me because our society has turned into pharmaceutical junkies and the collective “awakeness” or “present time concsciousness” is lowered by the proliferation of anti-anxiety, anti-depressant, anti-psychotic and now sleeping pills in our general populatioin. There are actually healthy supplements for falling and staying asleep. I would recommend my personal sleeplessness remedy. To calm my “nerves” I take 2-3 ProDHA omega oil capsules, 1-200 mg of Thiamine/B-1 tabs, and 0.5mg to 1mg of Melatonin. I take them 30 minutes before retiring to bed and I can’t keep my eyes open. This may not work for everyone, but there are plenty of heath food stores with sleep remedies and they don’t cost $3.50 a pill!!
I also want to point out the psychological aspect of taking a pill for sleep. Some researchers found that placebo’s work just as well but on average less well than the sleep drug. So if I take a placebo, I’m only possibly going to lose 20 minutes of sleep time and have no sleep hangover versus a $3.50 pill ($12,775 a year)? It’s my opinion, even in the taking of psycho-active drugs, there is a strong belief by the patient that they work despite the research showing they were no better than placebo. Enough evidence exists to counteract the voluminous ads from the pharmaceutical industry that anti-depressants and anti-anxiety pills are “scientifically proven” to be effective. It doesn’t actually prove it unless you subjectively ask a patient “do you feel better after taking that pill?” In many instances the answer will be yes per the article above, but this is not scientific “proof” that they are effective. Exercise has been found to be the most effective anti-depressant by far and it’s FREE. Nurses, make up your own minds on this issue and decide what you are willing to support as a personal philosophy yourself. Do you advocate more drugs that decrease consciousness for people and yourselves or would you rather have a drug-free world to work, play and raise children in?