Insomniac is worlds apart from other books available on the subject of sleeplessness. What's so different? The book bridges several approaches to a topic that is usually considered from a single vantage point. What Gayle Greene (who teaches literature and women's studies at Scripps College, California) has produced is partly a scholarly work, partly a self-help volume, partly a consumer guide to medical services, partly a scathing op-ed, and partly an autobiography. Frankly, the book is a "cranky" (to use the author's own word) and quirky mix of gold and diamonds with pyrite and cubic zirconia. In the following paragraphs, I summarize some of the aspects of the book and sort them into these two categories. I'll begin with the positive, the gold and diamonds. The author's perspective that insomnia is an orphan "disease" is, without question, correct. At the research level, there is no part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that calls the disorder its own. Greene highlights the research situation by pointing out that in 2005 Sanofi-Aventis's $123 million marketing budget for the sedative Ambien was six times what NIH spent on grant-funded research on insomnia. At the clinical level, while insomnia is the majority sleep disorder in terms of population prevalence, most sleep disorder centers do not have staff clinicians who specialize in its treatment. The shortage of specialists is underscored by the fact that there are only 104 clinicians currently credentialed in behavioral sleep medicine (the branch of sleep medicine that has insomnia as a primary focus).
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