To sleep, perchance to dream of the perfect pillow.
The pillow that gently cradles your head, that provides the perfect amount of support for your neck, that smells like soothing lavender, that feels cool to the touch in summer and warm in winter.
These days, pillows aren’t just something fluffy to place beneath your head at night. They are chiropractor-approved, sleep-doctor-designed, individually created sleep aids that correct your spinal alignment, or lull your overactive brain to sleep with aromatic scents, or open up your airway to allow more oxygen to enter your lungs.
It’s a wonder you can just walk into a store and buy a pillow without a prescription.
Doctor’s pillow talk
Dr. Najeeb Zuberi is a sleep evangelist. “I want to shout from the mountains, ‘You might be dying in your sleep.’”
Zuberi, a board-certified neurologist and sleep specialist, got interested in sleep apnea, which he says increases the incidence of strokes, heart attacks, high blood pressure and obesity, during a residency. “We did studies where we put a patient into an MRI. I would press down on the patient’s chin while they were in the MRI. We call that the chin-press maneuver.”
The chin press would cause the patients to stop breathing, simulating what happens to some people during sleep.
The doctor, who runs a four-bed sleep clinic in Florida, says that when people who snore sleep on their backs, their jaw relaxes and moves backward and their tongue moves backward, causing an obstruction that leads to snoring and sleep apnea.
Sleep apnea is generally corrected with a mechanical device called CPAP, which forces air into the airway. Patients wear a mask that is connected to the device while they sleep.
But Dr. Zuberi dreamed of a much simpler way to correct snoring. He thought he might be able to construct a pillow that would force snorers to sleep in a position that would open up their airways. In 1997, he started working on the idea.
“First I went to Michael’s and got some foam and cut the foam in different designs, that I thought would be conducive,” he said. “Then I found pillow makers who could make it better. We went through multiple design phases.”
The result is the Sona pillow.
“Because of the curvature of the pillow, your face has a downward slant,” says Zuberi says. “That causes your jaw to move forward, thus avoiding the obstruction.”
The doctor says his pillow corrects snoring and mild to moderate sleep apnea.
Zuberi began selling the FDA-approved device over the Internet at sonapillow.com. Sales were brisk. “We are a doctor’s office, and we were getting so many orders it was getting out of hand. There were boxes all over my office,” he says.
Now the Sona pillow is available in stores. Brookstone (in Denver’s Park Meadows and Cherry Creek malls) carries it, as does Mattress Firm.
Does it work? Zuberi says patients swear by it, and he once drove 50 miles to retrieve his personal Sona pillow when he left it at a motel.