Nobody would be silly enough to tape their mouth closed at night, would they?
When your Back Page scribbler is short of an idea or two for this column, he can always rely on the bottomless well of idiocy known as social media to provide inspiration.
Today, again, we lower our bucket into those fetid waters and, voila! We’ve fished out the barking batshit bonkers practice known as mouth taping.
If you’ve not heard of this idea, be warned, it’s a doozy.
In a nutshell, folks who may be bothered with sleep apnoea or other breathing issues during the night are being advised by social media sites to tape their mouths closed to ensure respiration occurs via the nose only.
It beggars belief to think that any right-minded person would not consider this to be an insanely stupid thing to do, but then we also thought nobody would seriously consider drinking bleach to cure covid, so what would we know?
Which is why, perhaps, scientists from Canada’s London Health Sciences Centre in Ontario took it upon themselves to undertake a systematic review of the mouth-taping phenomenon to highlight any potential benefits or harms with this practice.
Publishing last month in the journal, PLOS One, our boffins reviewed 10 studies in total involving more than 200 people, ranging from February 1999 to February 2024.
While the researchers were able to identify two studies which showed statistically significant improvement in established markers of sleep apnoea, the other eight studies showed that mouth taping offered no benefits.
Moreover, a number of the studies discussed potential risks, including asphyxiation in the presence of nasal obstruction.
Interestingly, many of the studies also excluded anyone with nasal obstruction or pathology.
“Based on the data presented by these 10 different studies, it seems that there is a potentially serious risk of harm for individuals indiscriminately practising this trend,” the study authors said.
Which hardly seems a surprising conclusion to this correspondent, for whom taping his mouth closed at night would amount to nothing so much as a particularly slow and gruesome suicide attempt.
What’s more unsettling is the fact that proper scientists felt the need to do the research and point out the bleedingly obvious dangers of this practice.
That, and the fact that anyone foolish enough to even consider doing this is probably not going to listen to them anyway.
Help us breathe easier by sending story tips to holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
