If our immune system works best when sleeping, would we get over illnesses faster if we took sleeping pills and slept for three days straight rather than taking it medications? Assuming you stayed hydrated, what would be the downside to “sleep therapy?” It would even slow the spread of illnesses if people just slept for days when they started feeling ill. What is the upside to medicating (medications ranging from cold medicines and fever reducers to antibiotics)?
In: Biology
I mena people who are ill typically sleep a lot anyways. There’s not much to gain this way.
We simply don’t have the technology to put people to sleep for 3 days, let alone to do it safely. In addition, remaining stationary for long periods of time is bad for your body; you run the risk of things like bed sores and blood clots.
Tl;dr we can’t and we shouldn’t
1. Most people have daily obligations that they must tend to and can’t simply go to sleep for 3 days.
2. Magic pills that magic you sleep for 3 days don’t exist.
3. Sleeping for long periods of time would be detrimental to your overall health. Hydration would require IV, you still have bodily functions that need to be performed, and you risk the development of bed sores. Basically you’d need full-time nursing staff to take care of you while you’re asleep. A bit of overkill for dealing with the common cold.
To start, every medication has its own risks and side effects. With many medications used for sedation, there is a very real risk of slowing breathing to a dangerous (potentially deadly) level, especially if you’re using them in combination with anything else that has similar effects (alcohol, pain meds like Norco or Oxy, or even antihistamines). Besides the risks with the medications, being immobile for long stretches of time causes a lot of other problems in every system of the body. The body doesn’t just shut down while you sleep. Bedsores (known as pressure injuries to medical staff) can develop in hours if people aren’t moving, which can take a long time to heal and may go down to bone or muscle if untreated too long. Muscles lose strength and bones lose calcium, so you get weaker physically even from 1-2 days of strict bedrest, while joints can become stiff and unmovable if not being used. If you’re not getting up to pee or poop, you’re likely to develop bladder infections or skin breakdown from urine or stool being left on skin. If you’re not sitting up, your lungs don’t have room to inflate very well, which can lead to fluid building up or areas collapsing, even to pneumonia.
Most over-the-counter cold medicines only treat the symptoms and mainly help with comfort, so you can function better. But coughs can be very tiring if they continue for a long time, and fevers can be dangerous if too high or too long. Antibiotics are only appropriate for certain kinds of illnesses (bacterial infections, not viruses or allergies), but they help by getting rid of the cause. If you don’t use the antibiotics when they’re prescribed, the bacteria can grow faster than your immune system can handle, causing systemwide infection or sepsis, even death.
Sleep gives the body time to recover and rebuild, and it is necessary for good health in everyone, but it is not a cure-all. By sleeping solidly for the several days it’d take to get over a cold, you’re putting yourself at risk for a lot of complications and a longer recovery process.
’cause companies don’t want you to sleep when you could be working
also ’cause sleep doesn’t treat symptoms and you can’t sleep for three days straight, so it’s nice to have something to help when you’re awake
So do you mean like inducing a coma?
Doctors often do encourage you to sleep naturally when you get sick, that’s what sick leave is for. So you can stay home and rest.
You shouldn’t just sleep for days though. You need to eat, hydrate, excrete etc. You need to be awake to check if you’re actually getting better or worse. If we just put you under for days, that would require a lot of additional care as you’re intravenously hydrated, fed, catheterized and so on. That’s not really worth it for most ailments that will heal themselves.
On top of that, your body simply can’t fix many things with just sleep. That’s why illness killed so many people before modern medicine. If left untreated, many things will simply kill you or leave you permanently debilitated.
People often abuse antibiotics these days but antibiotics will fix bacterial infections with relative ease that would kill people who just tried to ‘sleep it off’. Bacterial infection was a major cause of death before we discovered antibiotics.
Sleeping it off is great for things that just need time to fix. But putting people to sleep for the duration creates more problems than it fixes. And a lot of things modern medicine deals with can’t simply be slept off.
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