Rozerem, a sleeping pill, costs about $3.50 a pill; gets you to sleep 7 to 16 minutes faster than a placebo, or fake pill; and increases total sleep time 11 to 19 minutes, according to an analysis last year.
If those numbers send you out to buy another brand instead, consider this: Sleeping pills in general do not greatly improve sleep for the average person.
American consumers spend $4.5 billion a year for sleep medications. Their popularity may lie in a mystery that confounds researchers. Many people who take them think they work far better than laboratory measurements show they do…
Dr. Karl Doghramji, a sleep expert at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, agreed. “Sleeping pills do not increase sleep time dramatically, nor do they decrease wake time dramatically,” he said. “Despite those facts, we do find patients who, when they take them, have a high level of satisfaction.” Dr. Doghramji has disclosed in the past that he is a consultant to pharmaceutical companies.
Most sleeping pills work on the same brain receptors as drugs to treat anxiety. By reducing anxiety, the pills may make people worry less about not going to sleep. So they feel better.
Another theory about the discrepancy between measured sleep and perceived sleep involves a condition called anterograde amnesia. While under the influence of most sleep medications, people have trouble forming memories. When they wake up, they may simply forget they had trouble sleeping.
“If you forget how long you lay in bed tossing and turning, in some ways that’s just as good as sleeping,” said Dr. Gary S. Richardson, a sleep disorders specialist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit who is a consultant and speaker for pharmaceutical companies and has conducted industry-sponsored research.
Sleep, after all, causes a natural state similar to amnesia, one reason toddlers often forget their violent nightmares by the next morning. If you stay in bed, as most people taking sleeping pills do, amnesia is not a bad thing.
Even some people who sleepwalked while taking Ambien, which was implicated in cases of odd, sometimes dangerous behavior while sleeping, believed they were having a good night’s sleep. Rosemary Eckley, a graphic artist said she thought she was sleeping well on Ambien but woke to find her wrist broken, apparently in a fall while sleepwalking, she wrote in an e-mail exchange.
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