HAPPY EMPOWERMENT DAY!
OR: A Sunday Brunch Toast to Four Years After The BIG RED BUTTON
By David E McCarty MD FAASM (…but you can call me Dave)
6 September 2026
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“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles (1841)
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HAPPY EMPOWERMENT DAY! (clink! clink!)
[A.I. Graphic by Jatin Tekchandani]
Four years ago today, Ellen Stothard and I pushed The Big Mythical Red Button called “GO” on a longshot. On September 6, 2022, the first episode of a little experiment called The Empowered Sleep Apnea Project went live.
The episode was called NARRATIVE and it’s safe to say we did not know exactly what we were starting.
We knew only that something was wrong with the way we were telling the story of Sleep Apnea. Our field had become very good at counting things, like events, oxygen desaturations, number of days compliant. We had numbers for almost everything except the questions that seemed to matter most to the person sitting across from us.
But, wow! What a journey we’ve had! On our little ISLE OF SLEEP APNEA, over the last four years, we’ve seen a lot of water since then…we’ve seen a lot of sky . . .
YOUR LUXURIOUS DESTINATION…as seen in our Beautiful Blue Book, and in the mighty SLEEP REVIEW magazine (March 2025 issue, page 16)
Over four years, our wandering gradually organized itself around three deceptively simple questions, what we’re framing as The Three Stars of Empowerment, the three questions we all sail by:
What is Sleep Apnea?
What else could this be?
Why should we treat it?
FILL ‘ER UP?? (True-Blue EMPOWERMENT is high-octane, no-knock fuel for the journey! MAKE SURE YOU GET SOME TODAY!)
Those questions have taken us into some interesting country. They led us toward an operational definition of Sleep Apnea (N.B.: “unstable breathing during sleep that negatively impacts health, comes in two flavors—obstructive and central), which leads to the Many Moving Parts beneath it. They brought new purpose to the Five Finger Approach and gave rise to the Five Reasons to Treat. Over the last four years, the language and imagery of Empowered Sleep Apnea has found its way into podcasts, conference stages, online and print-circulation media cartoons, op-eds and a textbook.
All that is really awesome, life-Fans! But something different happened this last year.
The Three Questions went to work.
At Rebis, we have begun systematically weaving these questions (and more importantly: the language we use to answer them!) through an entire healthcare ecosystem—stem to stern, cook, cashier, and bottle washer.
Folks, the answers to these three questions are becoming choreography.
I’m a recovering English Major, remember? Words matter! They influence how we listen to a story, how we define a problem, how we investigate its moving parts, how we consider what else might be happening, how we explain risk and benefit, how we choose among treatments, and how we decide whether what we did actually helped.
That may be the accomplishment from this past year that makes me happiest, because “empowerment” was never supposed to be a slogan.
It was never supposed to mean persuading patients to comply with our recommendations or teaching somebody enough sleep medicine vocabulary to sit quietly while we told them what to do.
Empowerment means giving people a map, a vocabulary, and permission to become protagonists in their own stories.
ADMIT ONE: All aboard THE BLUE BALLOON!!! :):) :)
Four years ago, Ellen and I pushed The Big Red Button, and we brought PULMONAUTS with us, with a new musical language opening our sensibilities to new ideas . . .patients, clinicians, dentists, technologists, researchers, therapists, teachers, storytellers, and friends have picked up pieces of the map and begun drawing their own.
You know what, folks? That, I think, is how you know an idea is alive.
So, since it IS Sunday morning, please raise whatever you have handy—coffee, tea, orange juice, sparkling Ju-Ju juice, or something with an unnecessarily elaborate brunch garnish.
For me, this year, it’s orange juice . . .but that’s a story for a different day!
Where was I? Ah yes! A TOAST!
A toast, I say!
Here's to Ellen.
Here's to all you PULMONAUTS, wherever you are, whether you’re on stage with us or not...
Here’s to my amazing team at REBIS, making all of this collaborative EMPOWERMENT come true…Here's to asking better questions…
REBIS: putting our ecosystem where our MOUTHS are…
And here's to what happens when an idea finally grows legs, escapes its creators, and goes wandering off into the world, with a life of its own….just like Crows teaching crows.
So, Happy Empowerment Day, 2026, folks!
CLINK CLINK!!
HUZZAH!!
Kind mojo,
Dave
David E McCarty MD FAASM
Lake City, Colorado
September 6, 2026
PULMONAUTS!! (behind the scenes…practicing before our VERY FIRST SHOW…)
[PS: can’t WAIT to see what happens in YEAR FIVE]
FIVE…it’s a magic number… :)
David E McCarty MD FAASM is co-creator (with Ellen Stothard PhD) of the Empowered Sleep Apnea project (www.EmpoweredSleepApnea.com), and is Chief Medical Officer at Rebis Health (www.RebisHealth.org)
…the original sketchbook cartoon…all ideas start somewhere!