Larry Culpepper, MD, says that sleep disturbances are often linked to various other diseases, they are not merely components of a larger condition, reports Healio.
“In the clinical setting, a misconception that’s still fairly frequent is that insomnia is just an almost to-be-expected part of medical and psychiatric conditions,” Culpepper told Healio Family Medicine. “That’s actually not the case. That was the major point that’s imbedded in the change from older diagnostic criteria and the new DSM-5 criteria for insomnia. In the past, we used to diagnose insomnia as either primary or secondary. Now, we’re recognizing that this is not helpful to patients. Insomnia is simply insomnia, and it stands on its own.”
