There are tons of gimmicks and gadgets which promise to help, but none of them do, not really.

This is a very broad statement, and it's very very misleading.

There is, today, "an effective solution" for many people. You mentioned it. Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, CPAP for short. It has helped literally millions of people to get better sleep. I'm one of them. I was a very heavy snorer before CPAP. I don't snore any more. Not at all.

The reason you don't see great emphasis on "magic potion to fix it" is because, for many people, CPAP does fix both snoring and obstructive sleep apnea. Yes, it's a gadget, but it's the exact opposite of gimmicks.

CPAP costs perhaps $1000 for a machine that lasts 5 years. Consumables (masks, hoses, etc) are perhaps $200 per year. That's retail price. Insurance coverage should reduce those numbers considerably.

Today's CPAP machines produce a daily report that shows, literally breath by breath, how you sleep. By analyzing your breathing the machine is able to adjust its operation to keep you from snoring and to keep your body from doing respiratory arousals (which is where you partially awaken to restart your breathing when snoring closes your airway).

Unfortunately, CPAP is inexpensive. Absurdly inexpensive. That's why doctors don't really give a shit about it. Yes, you can get an ENT to put you through a sleep test, and then prescribe a machine. And then, that's it. Problem solved. The ENT will see you perhaps once a year for monitoring. Your yearly expense is under $400 (as mentioned above), so the CPAP manufacturers aren't going to send doctors on free trips to conferences in Hawaii to discuss things. They aren't going to pay the doctors large honorariums to give quick BS presentations before everyone heads out for 36 holes of golf at the resort.

For some people CPAP works out of the box, but for others it needs to be fine tuned. There's really no money in this, so the medical establishment has set a criteria of AHI < 5.0 to say "problem solved".

So people need to put a little effort into fine tuning their therapy. Mostly by adjusting CPAP settings. But also by changing masks, changing sleeping positions, changing bedtime routine, etc. My AHI is 0.0 on most nights, because I was willing to do my own tweaks without help from the medical establishment.

And I've seen measurable, quantitative improvement. For example, before CPAP my hematocrit level (red blood cells) was above normal. My body was producing more cells to help transport as much oxygen as it could from my lungs. Since CPAP, my hematocrit has dropped steadily and is now in the normal range. That's just one simple measurement. Many people have dramatic improvement with much more serious health problems.

There is a wonderful piece of free open source software. It's called SleepyHead. It reads data from the SD card in your CPAP machine and produces beautiful breath-by-breath charts. Highly recommended.

Two places to go for CPAP support are cpaptalk[0] and apneaboard[1]. There are people willing to help interpret your SleepyHead results and help you tweak your therapy. They are better than probably 99% of doctors, who, once you have a CPAP machine, have no financial incentive to continue to care about you.

[0] http://cpaptalk.com/CPAP-Sleep-Apnea-Forum.html
[1] http://www.apneaboard.com/forums/Forum-Main-Apnea-Board-Foru...