🔍 What problems exist in mainstream medicine’s understanding and treatment of insomnia?
We must honestly confront a reality: the medical community has not identified a clear cause of insomnia, yet it has already pathologized the condition, formally classifying it as a diagnosis, prescribing medication, providing treatment, and implementing so-called cognitive behavioral therapy. But the problem is—no one actually knows why insomnia occurs.
This presents a serious logical rupture. When the cause of a phenomenon remains unclear, yet the medical system has already categorized it as a “disease,” this is not merely a case of presumption, it is a dangerous action that bypasses causal verification and moves directly to intervention.
- Medicine should follow a reasoning process of “cause → diagnosis → treatment”;
- Yet in the case of insomnia, it is often handled as “symptom → disease labeling → pharmacological intervention,” lacking a complete causal model in between.
What does this imply? It implies that medicine’s approach to insomnia is, in fact, a priori assuming that “inability to sleep” is pathological, and forcibly applying a treatment logic, rather than truly investigating why insomnia occurs, under what conditions it occurs, and whether it results from signal misfiring rather than organ dysfunction.
Meanwhile, the population suffering from insomnia has not decreased but continues to grow. Mild, moderate, chronic, and occasional insomnia have almost become common conditions in modern life. This indicates one thing: the direction of medical intervention may be wrong.
This is a result-oriented form of logical validation:
- If the intervention is correct, long-term application should lead to a decrease in overall symptoms;
- If the intervention is incorrect, then no matter how many resources are invested, the results will not improve.
According to public health statistics across various countries, the rate of insomnia has not decreased over the past 50 years. On the contrary, it has increased year by year, even forming a large group of “sleeping pill dependents” and an “insomnia-anxious population.” This is a sign of structural failure.
This also implies:
- Current medical practices are not addressing insomnia itself, but merely alleviating the discomfort it causes;
- Symptom relief ≠ problem resolution, and a mistaken direction may even deepen dependency and misunderstanding.
This is not medical progress, but a structural misplacement in medicine: a shift from finding the cause to managing the phenomenon. As a result, society is misled into “adapting to insomnia” rather than “understanding insomnia.”
What’s even more ironic is that the supine position, which is widely promoted by the medical community, may actually be the true culprit behind insomnia. Supine sleeping is not only an accomplice to insomnia—it also carries severe side effects, including airway compression, disruption of the nervous system, and even increased risk of suffocation and sudden death! Isn’t this a reversal of evolutionary logic? We need sleep to sustain life, yet due to “insomnia,” we may face a higher risk of death—this makes no logical sense.
Despite lacking verification on whether the posture is “physiologically correct,” the medical field has broadly promoted supine sleeping. It is even packaged as the “optimal sleeping posture” under claims of safety, health, and monitoring convenience (for infants). This approach ignores several fundamental issues:
- Supine sleeping easily causes the tongue base to collapse backward, narrowing the airway;
- During sleep, the parasympathetic nervous system dominates and muscle tone decreases, making breathing interruptions more likely when lying on the back;
- For certain groups (such as infants, the elderly, or those with obesity), supine sleeping may increase the risk of suffocation.
This reveals that the medical field’s presumed safety model disregards the physiological foundations of evolution and instinctive behavior, and instead pushes people into a state that contradicts the body’s natural instincts—while continuously rationalizing this practice. This is not medicine, but a “standardized illusion of safety.”
Whether for infants or adults, supine sleeping is extremely unnatural. For infants, it represents artificial intervention and a violation of instinct. Supine care is difficult to manage and may, in fact, harm the infant’s health. The past studies that accused prone sleeping of causing sudden death, in the author’s view, suffer from serious methodological flaws. Furthermore, if such logic continues unchecked, it could ultimately lead to the absurd conclusion that “infants have suicidal tendencies”—a claim that is not only an academic issue but also involves moral and legal risks.
In modern medicine’s explanation of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), there was a period when “prone sleeping” was considered a risk factor. However, these studies often suffer from the following issues:
- Failure to eliminate covariates in the research design (e.g., ambient temperature, mattress materials, pressure from others);
- Uneven distribution and significant regional variation in the statistical data sources;
- Ethical constraints that make randomized control of samples difficult, leading to distorted extrapolation of results.
What’s more outrageous is that if the logic “prone sleeping = death risk” is pushed to the extreme, it implies that infants who sleep prone by nature are “willing to die.” Such reasoning not only violates basic logic and ethical principles, but also blatantly contradicts evolutionary theory! —According to evolution, infant behavior is purely instinctual; it is impossible for infants to possess any intent toward death.
If flawed scientific reasoning continues to be institutionally endorsed, it not only harms individuals but also creates systemic bias and policy-level errors.
The widespread adoption of supine sleeping among adults is actually the result of cultural and media construction, and has nothing to do with the evolutionary choices of the human species. In contrast, the path from instinctive prone sleeping in infants to continued prone sleeping in adulthood is entirely natural and requires no additional explanation—this is precisely the language of evolution.
Notions such as “lying on the back is the civilized way to sleep” or “prone sleeping is dangerous” mostly stem from the following non-scientific factors:
- Advertising impressions from traditional bed design;
- Visually guided value formation through photography, film, illustration, and literature;
- Monitoring demands of caregiving systems (such as infant cribs);
- A medical culture of passively receiving health education messages.
These social constructs have gradually distanced humans from their primal instincts, even framing instinct as abnormal. In contrast, the trajectory of “infants naturally sleeping prone → adults retaining the prone sleeping habit” needs no justification, because it is a silently operating mechanism left by evolution.
True science should begin with animal instinct, not attempt to correct it, suppress it, or distort it.
🧩 Conclusion:
Mainstream medicine’s approach to insomnia, from pathological assumptions, posture interventions, symptom classification, to behavioral correction—has, as a whole, severely deviated from the physiological and evolutionary context of animal instinct, and has failed to produce effective results.
If we do not fundamentally re-examine the mechanisms of sleep and instead continue to treat it through pathologization, medicalization, and standardization, humanity will remain trapped in the crisis of this “insomnia tsunami.”
Therefore, through logical reasoning, the author proposes:
The “Posture Hypothesis” and “Signal Decoding Model” as a logically self-contained, evolutionarily consistent, and practically simple alternative explanation to this misguided medical system.