Archived Columns
Retired English Majors or Rapid Eye Movements?
August 21, 2000
About twenty years ago, I tried very hard to make contact with a rock band called R.E.M. My intent was to persuade them to do a benefit concert in support of the cause of sleep awareness. I made this effort because my personal expenditures, mostly to subsidize travel on behalf of fostering Congressional implementation of the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research's recommendations, had become prohibitively large. I managed to speak with the band's agent in Athens, Georgia. I told him that I was involved in the discovery of rapid eye movements during sleep. Furthermore, I was solely responsible for loosing the acronym REM into the world, now so widely used that it had a place in Webster's Dictionary. The agent responded that the band had declared a moratorium on benefit concerts and to try again in a year or two.
In 1991, I was very excited to see that R.E.M. was named the number one group in America. I enthusiastically commissioned an acquaintance in Athens to renew the effort for R.E.M. to give a benefit concert. To my great disappointment, the word came back that I had no claim on the band because R.E.M. actually stood for "Retired English Majors."
Today the band has split up and the four great musicians have gone their separate ways. The irony is that in a taped interview, Mike Mills, the drummer, said that indeed R.E.M. stood for rapid eye movements. He recounted their searching for a name they all could accept, and that Michael Stipe had finally picked it out of the dictionary, saying, "How about REM?" "What does it mean?" they asked. "Rapid eye movements," Stipe was said to have replied. Great!
I cite this R.E.M. initiative as an example of what some of us will do to foster public awareness about sleep and save lives. I reproduced the language of the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Researchs 1992 recommendations to Congress in my first column. Certainly it was very strong language and certainly everything I write here and elsewhere deplores the very slow progress in public awareness about sleep deprivation and sleep disorders. Let's revisit some of the significant facts presented by the Commissions research. On the basis of risk statistics, there were 38,000 deaths each year due to the cardiovascular consequences of obstructive sleep apnea. Adding a conservative 12,000 for all accidents secondary to impaired alertness, there have possibly been more than 400,000 unnecessary and premature deaths in the eight years since Congress failed to act. If we go back to the beginning of sleep disorders medicine, this number is probably well over a million U.S. citizens. It is apparent that these huge problems are a result of a near-complete lack of education at all levels.
Does anyone out there have an idea about what percentage of the population possess critical knowledge like how to drive? The location of various vital organs? That the lungs and heart are in the chest, the gall bladder in the abdomen, the brain in the head? Let's make knowledge about sleep known to everyone. Let's approach 100%.
Stay tuned.
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